Creature Discomforts

Ponzi. Charles Ponzi, was it?”
    Very softly and alluringly, Gabrielle whispered to him, “Buck, please! Let it go!”
    “Stand by and watch you get fleeced?” he shot back. “Not on your life! Fairley? You! Hit the trail!”
    Weirdly enough, Malcolm Fairley obeyed. In fact, he led the way. My father stomped at his heels. The rest of us trailed after Buck. To my surprise, Opal and Wally were directly ahead of me; I’d expected them to go stomping off instead of risking further insult.
    “Who on earth is this Ponzi person?” Opal asked Wally. “Have I met him?”
    “I hope not,” Wally answered. “I hope I haven’t, either.”
    “Who is he?”
    “Was he,” Wally corrected her.
    “Stop being mysterious! You are getting on my nerves!”
    “A Ponzi scheme,” Wally grimly told her, “is a scheme to bilk investors out of their money. The man is suggesting that we’ve been taken for a ride. That’s why he was talking about pyramid schemes.”
    “Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Opal said. “If the Pine Tree Foundation is sound enough for the Rockefellers, it’s sound enough for us.”
     

Chapter Twenty-seven
     
    THE STEPS OF THE HOMANS PATH abruptly ended. Ahead lay the sad and ugly remains of slaughtered trees. If bushwhackers, trail phantoms, or animals had beaten a path around or through the extensive barricade of thick trunks, Malcolm Fairley and my father took another, tougher route. In describing this steep, miserable trek, Buck had been blasé; no distance at all, he’d promised. Sweating from the exertion, I belatedly realized that, as usual, he’d spoken from the viewpoint of big, strong dogs. In that sense, he’d been right. Rowdy and Kimi longed to bound through the obstacle course. I clung to their leads and cursed. “Easy!” I ordered the dogs. “Easy!” Ahead of me, Wally struggled to keep up with Opal, who scrambled energetically over and under the felled trees. At first, I tried to match the pace of those ahead. I could hear Wally gasping for breath. He and Opal began quarreling about whether to turn back. He wanted to; she refused.
    I resigned myself to being a straggler. The dogs were far too strong and eager for me, and the combination of restraining them while bushwhacking uphill over rough terrain was more than I should have tried to manage. If we ever reached the damned trail, I’d let Rowdy and Kimi haul me along; here, they’d send me crashing into a log or decapitate me as I crawled under one. Before setting out, I should have turned one or both dogs over to Buck, or even to Steve, damn him, but I was now too far behind to make the request without screaming for help, something I absolutely would not do. Not in front of Anita Fairley! Buck had accused me of rolling belly-up, hadn’t he? He’d been wrong. I didn’t intend to prove him right.
    Occasionally, when voices rose in anger, the sounds of bickering and grumbling drifted down to me. “The proof is in the pudding! I have done very, very well!” Gabrielle exclaimed. Closer to me, Opal said, “We did get complete reports, you know, Wally. Tiffany is diligent about sending complete reports.” Later, from far ahead, I heard a man’s voice, perhaps Quint’s, saying, “...satisfied enough to reinvest...”
    After what felt like hours, the group ahead finally veered left, and before terribly long, I heard my father announce something about having found the trail. I hoped that once having reached smooth ground, Buck or Fairley or someone else would declare a rest stop that would give me the chance to catch up. Evidently, no one did. When Rowdy, Kimi, and I finally stepped onto a blessedly smooth, open trail, Wally and Opal were visible far ahead of us. Since I now knew more or less where we were, I made no effort to hurry. My mental map of the area clearly displayed this trail as a line running horizontally across the east face of Dorr, parallel to the trail that skirted the bottom of the little mountain, thus also parallel to Route 3. Many of Acadia’s old trails, I remembered, had a variety of names used in a bewilderingly interchangeable fashion on maps, in guides, and on signposts. The trail that wound by The Tam began as the Kane Path, I thought, or The Tam Trail, but was sometimes marked as the Canon Brook Trail, also known as Canyon Brook, which ran past the beginning of the Ladder Trail. We were now on the Emery Path or Emery Trail, also called the Dorr Mountain Trail or Dorr Mountain East Face Trail,