Creature Discomforts

they officially abandon a trail. You should hear Malcolm on that subject! And it really is outrageous. They just chop down tons of trees at the top and bottom, and that’s that. No more trail. You have to look carefully for a little track leading to it. The trail phantoms keep it open. Unauthorized people, you know, who sneak around keeping abandoned trails open. I’ve wondered whether Zeke might be one of them.”
    “Who?”
    “This nice young man who suddenly turned up here and volunteered for Malcolm’s trail crew. There’s something... I don’t know how to put it. Something unsaid about him, if you know what I mean. Malcolm doesn’t think so, but he—Zeke, not Malcolm—was fishing for an invitation to the clambake, and it made me wonder. Here’s the trail!”
    For once, Molly belonged in Gabrielle’s arms. The narrow track soon gave way to an area of felled trees that we had to scramble over. The logs were the remains of tall trees. Dozens and dozens had been cut and left to rot. It seemed almost impossible that the Park Service had been guilty of such savagery against the natural resources it was supposed to protect. When I said as much to Gabrielle, she made the obvious reply: Malcolm Fairley felt the same way. That was the whole idea of the reclamation project.
    “Wait till you see the actual path!” She scrambled over a big log with surprising agility. “The excuse for abandoning it was there was no money for maintenance, but it’s held up remarkably well with almost no upkeep.”
    From behind us, Effie’s voice sounded. “Gabbi! Gabbi! Wait up!”
    “Oh, no! I thought we’d lost them,” Gabrielle grumbled. “We do not need Effie complicating this situation. I suppose we’d better wait. They’ll catch up with us in no time, anyway.”
    Quint and Effie reached us in less than a minute. They glowed with pink-cheeked youth. Neither was out of breath. I expected Gabrielle to greet them with a request that they turn around and go away. It was, however, as contrary to Gabrielle’s nature to make anyone ever feel unwelcome as it was to Rowdy’s or Kimi’s. Both dogs issued their usual woo-woo-woos, and Gabrielle hailed her nephew and his wife with an ordinary “Hi there, you two!” and then informed them that they were to let her go first. “And Effie, it would probably be best if you were to leave the talking to me. And to Holly. We just need to straighten out a little misunderstanding. A certain bumper sticker would be outside the scope of the discussion.”
    It took us what seemed to me like forever to navigate the big logs and reach the beginning of the Homans Path itself, another stepped trail similar to Kurt Diederich’s Climb and in almost equally good condition. By now, I was feeling too sore and weak to take in the clever beauty of the steeply rising stone stairs. Quint and Effie charged ahead of me, thus inspiring Rowdy and Kimi to forge up the damned steps far too fast for me. I hung on to their leashes and concentrated on keeping my footing. Last in line, I was also the last to hear the shouting that bounced downward over the rocky stairs.
    My father’s unmistakable bellow reached me. Delighted to hear his voice, the dogs put on speed. I scrambled and gasped until the dogs came to such an abrupt halt that I crashed into them. No one noticed. At a wide, flat landing where the stepped trail paused before resuming its upward course, Buck and Malcolm Fairley faced each other. They stood about a yard apart. In back of them, near a pile of newly cut brush and small tree limbs, Wally and Opal, Steve Delaney, and a cranky-looking Anita Fairley silently observed the confrontation. Amazingly, Buck didn’t even seem to see Rowdy and Kimi, never mind Gabrielle or me. He and Malcolm Fairley stared at each other with locked eyes. In dogs, that’s the signal of an imminent fight.
    My father had stopped roaring. Now, his voice was frigidly calm. “If something sounds too good to be true,” he said to my amazement, “then it probably is.”
    I had no idea what he was talking about.
    As if he’d read my thought, he broke eye contact with Malcolm Fairley and turned to me. “You never could draw,” he reminded me. “That picture you showed me? That’s not a kite. It’s a pyramid. That’s what you meant it to be.”
    I was still lost.
    “A pyramid!” he suddenly roared. “A pyramid scheme!“
     

Chapter Twenty-four
     
    AS WAS HER HABIT , Effie spoke up. “I had a friend who