Creature Discomforts

by Susan Conant

  “We’re going to find out,” I told Kimi. “And we’re also going to find Rowdy’s pack and pick up the bags of rice we left, and we’re going to see…Well, we’re going to see what’s to be seen, that’s what!” In case we did find Rowdy’s pack, I had him wear his yoke, but my right arm and both shoulders were so sore that I carried nothing myself. Before the dogs and I had even left the sidewalk that ran between the parking lot and the Wild Gardens of Acadia, a tourist shook an only half playful finger at me, then at Kimi, and said, “No fair making him do all the work!” Two seconds later, another tourist echoed the first. “What’d that one do to get stuck carrying everything?” About two seconds after that, a pair of adorable children just had to pat the dogs, and their parents naturally had to take pictures of the adorable children with the adorable dogs, and so forth and so on—Thank you, actually they’re malamutes, they’re not supposed to have blue eyes, and no, she doesn’t mind carrying the pack, she likes it, and yes, she’s a girl, her name is Kimi, the other one is a male, Rowdy, and …

  And if I didn’t bolt, we wouldn’t get on a trail until sunset. Whistling to the dogs to rev them up, I sped past the Wild Gardens and had just cleared the Nature Center building when I all but collided with Steve Delaney, who was standing near the entrance looking bored. The brief encounter nearly began with a dog fight, which would have been Kimi’s fault. Neither of Steve’s dogs did a thing to provoke her, unless you count the involuntary act of radiating female scent. One of the two was the pointer I’d seen the previous evening. The other was a shepherd—a German shepherd dog. Kimi gave me no time to collect my thoughts. At the sight of the shepherd, she raised her hackles, emitted a low growl, and yanked on her leash, and believe me, a malamute yank is not some light tug. It’s a massive wham designed to break an ice-encrusted sled from the tundra or to free a stubborn human arm from the shoulder socket. The dog doesn’t give a damn which. This kind of behavior is hideously embarrassing under any circum- stances, even when you manage to terminate it within seconds by pretending that you’re God dictating the Ten Commandments. Instead of wordily commanding that Thou shalt not …, you boom NO! at the top of your lungs, but you boom it with Old Testament wrath.

  “I hear you took a serious fall yesterday,” Steve said flatly. He looked older than he had in last night’s darkness. Hollows and lines showed under his blue-green eyes.

  “I told you last night. I just got a few scratches.”

  “You’re in no shape to go hiking alone.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not alone.” I nodded at Rowdy and Kimi.

  He almost smiled. “Your theme song.”

  “My what?”

  “‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.”’

  I didn’t even recognize the phrase, never mind catch the allusion. Still, with utter nastiness, I said, “Damn straight!”

  Instead of the violently erotic response to him I’d had at Gabrielle’s party, I now felt overwhelmed with grief compounded by a humbling and even humiliating sense of my own stupidity. To prevent him from seeing me cry, I stomped away, hauling the dogs with me. Before long, we were on a wooded footpath. As some intact part of my brain must have known, it took us to the end of The Tarn and the trailhead for Kurt Diederich’s Climb, which I was able brilliantly to identify as such because, as one of the tourists had pointed out yesterday, Kurt Diederich’s Climb was carved in one of the risers of the stone staircase that rose sharply upward. With better judgment than I’d had yesterday afternoon when I’d practically flown down the stone trail at the end of the dogs’ leads, I felt intimidated by the steepness of the stairs and by the word Climb. Putting one foot in front of another was within my capacity. A climb was beyond me. What if I fell again? Or lost control of the dogs? Or lost the dogs? Or got all three of us lost in the woods? “We will not get lost,” I told the dogs with sudden resolve. “We will not even think about loss. Loss has nothing to do with us. It does not exist.”

  It does, of course. So do climbs. As climbs go, however, Kurt Diederich’s isn’t one. Its beautiful stone steps rise upward, but they are steps, and Dorr Mountain is more a hill, as in “anthill,” than it is a mountain, as in “Everest.” For a hill, Dorr is steep, but the point of Acadia isn’t difficulty; it’s beauty. Kurt Diederich’s Climb has that in abundance. It wound upward, flattened into sections of stone-lined trail, passed beneath cliffs, and, after a half mile that felt like more, ended at the T-intersection and cedar post where the dogs had paused yesterday. Consulting the hiking guide I’d stowed in Kimi’s pack, I figured out that the trail marked in the book as the Emery Path was the one the wooden arrow called the Dorr Mountain East Face Trail. After watering the dogs and then myself, I set off to the left, toward the scenes of my fall and Axelrod’s death.

  The route took us up yet more flights of cleverly constructed steps that seemed designed and built by supernatural beings with the aid of natural forces: elves, perhaps, assisted by glaciers, or magically animate granite working with gravity to split itself into slabs and fall into artful patterns of wondrous convenience. A typical section of the narrow, stone-paved trail ran below a ten-foot wall of rock on the uphill side and, on the downhill, a long row of boulders arranged in curbstone fashion to protect against falls while providing seats for hikers to use while catching their breath, retying their boots, picnicking, or admiring the view. The postcard vista of the valley below and the rocky hills beyond it was, I regret to mention, hideously scarred by the evil-looking sprawl of what I assumed was a medium-size factory. Even in a mill town or industrial park, these graceless buildings would have stood out as architectural blights. Here, the ruinous ugliness felt obscene. On one of the maps in my hiking guide, this pockmark on the face of the island was labeled Jackson Lab.

  I diverted my eyes from it by scanning in search of Rowdy’s lost saddlebags, which had to be the bright red of the part of his pack that remained and the same bright red of Kimi’s pack. As we continued upward, the oaks, pines, huckleberry bushes, and other vegetation gradually took on the dry, stunted look of plants adapted to life on exposed rock. Now and then, lone hikers and vigorous couples passed us heading swiftly to and from the summit of Dorr or the Ladder Trail. We came upon families resting by the side of the trail or progressing along it while pep-talking lagging children. Despite the wholesome friendliness of everyone we encountered (What beautiful dogs! Oh, look! That one’s wearing a backpack! Isn’t that cute! Are they brother and sister? Aaron and Alison, look! Huskies!), my sense of fear rose with the altitude. In the increasingly barren, earth-toned landscape, the bright primary red of Rowdy’s discarded saddlebags should have leaped out and shrieked at me. The only reds, however, were the soft, natural hues of leaves. Worse, the closer we drew to the scene of my fall, the more sharply I remembered the pain of regaining consciousness. Nothing triggered the slightest memory of the events preceding my injury.

  Feeling weak, I not only let the dogs charge ahead of me, but felt grateful to hang on to their leashes and let their power haul me along. At the well-marked fork where the right-hand trail led upward to the top of Dorr, the left-hand path downward to the Ladder Trail, Rowdy and Kimi unhesitatingly moved left. Given a choice, a malamute will almost invariably take the familiar route. I was mystified. Still, it was now bafflingly clear that Rowdy and Kimi had at least started down toward the Ladder Trail. Furthermore, from everything I could piece together from the guidebook, its maps, and my pitifully defective memory, the Rock of Ages where I’d landed was somewhere below the path toward the Ladder Trail. What in God’s name had I been thinking? What in God’s name had happened here?

  Chapter Seventeen

  EAGER TO EXAMINE THE AREA where Norman Axelrod had met his death, and where I’d perhaps come close to meeting mine, I started along the gentle beginning of the upper portion of the Ladder Trail. To my annoyance, the dogs and I had covered only a short distance when we came upon a lone hiker taking a break just off the stretch of trail that, according to my estim
ate, ran directly above my Rock of Ages. The hiker, a man I guessed to be in his late twenties, had the admirable combination of dark skin, dark hair, and vivid blue eyes. It’s a combination admired by me, anyway, especially, as in the case of the hiker, when the guy has attractive, somewhat exotic features and is altogether the picture of muscular perfection. His short-sleeved white T-shirt and khaki shorts revealed lean, strong arms and legs. He had on woolen socks and heavy leather hiking boots. The shorts and boots had a comfortable, broken-in look, as did the unzipped black day pack that rested next to the hiker, who was sitting on the ground drinking from a plastic bottle. As maybe I need to spell out, this wasn’t some fleshy tourist who’d just finished expensively costuming himself at one of the out-door outfitters’ shops in Bar Harbor. This was the kind of fanatic who trains for through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, speeding along the Pacific Crest, or frisking on the glaciers of Denali by dashing around Acadia making everyone else feel fat, slow, and morally inferior.

  The hiker smiled and said a pleasant hello that included the dogs as well as me. When I’d returned his greeting, he eyed the dogs and said, “The steep part begins ahead. You don’t hit the first ladder until below some steps.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “We don’t do ladder trails, or at least the dogs don’t. I just wanted to see what the beginning of the trail was like.”

  To my relief, he did not admire my “huskies,” ask why they didn’t have blue eyes, or joke about making Kimi do all the work. Instead he asked, “You show them?”

  Normal enough question, to which there must be a hundred normal answers, such as Yes, No, Sometimes, Once in a while, All the time, Not anymore, and I retired them after they took Best of Breed at Westminster in successive years. The only idea that came to mind was the grossly abnormal truth, namely, that if I did I had no memory of it. Before I had a chance to say anything, normal or abnormal, however, the hiker made it clear that he’d been stating the obvious rather than asking a question. He rose gracefully and tucked his right hand into the pocket of his shorts. As any show dog knows, that’s where the liver lives. Rowdy and Kimi shifted into show mode: Tails wagging over their backs, ears up, eyes sparkling, they posed for an invisible judge. With no recollection of how I knew anything about anything, including the dialect of the dog fancy, I felt pleased to watch them free-stack so beautifully. Without asking my permission, the hiker produced bits of what was obviously dog-appealing food from his pocket. Catching the dogs’ eyes, he lightly raised and lowered his hand.

  “Not every dog baits for trail mix,” he commented with approval.

  I said, without thinking, “These dogs bait for dirt.”

  After tossing each dog a few pieces of what I could now see was a mixture of nuts and raisins, he stowed his water bottle in the black day pack, zipped it, and slipped it onto his shoulders.

  “Have a good hike,” he said innocuously.

  Before I could return the banality, he’d taken long, easy strides in a direction that surprised me. His gentle warning about the Ladder Trail had made me assume that he’d just ascended it and was taking a water break before heading to the summit of Dorr. Instead of making for the trail, however, he moved rapidly in the direction the dogs and I were headed, and then suddenly bounded to the right, uphill and off the trail.

  “Bushwhacking,” I told the dogs. “He should’ve worn long pants.”

  As I did not tell the dogs, the hiker’s sudden disappearance unsettled me. For the first time, I was sharply aware of reenacting what must have been the events of the previous day. Somewhere nearby, maybe just below the ledges, was my Rock of Ages. Wasn’t it? Or was it farther to the right? As if the secure footpath might transform itself into a steep, unheralded, unavoidable ladder that would send us on a terrifying downward plunge, I shortened the dogs’ leads and took careful, one-at-a-time baby steps. Even at my foolishly slow rate, I soon reached the spot where the lone hiker had unexpectedly vanished upward. There, the trail turned left and headed abruptly downward. What appeared was not the nightmarish, fun-house ladder I’d feared, but another of the many narrow stone staircases that ran up and down the little mountain. This stretch of stepped trail was, however, exceptionally long and steep. Even more than the similar trails we’d already traversed, it created the artful impression of natural or even supernatural construction. Rather than switchbacking left and right along what, on reflection, would reveal itself as an artificial, if credibly naturalistic, route, this section of the Ladder Trail followed the steep downward incline of the base of a cliff. The dramatic rise of the rock wall to the right somehow made the stones of the steps look narrower, sharper, and more treacherous than those of the other stone trails. Cutting sharply between the cliff and an area of smooth ledges and stunted vegetation, the stairs had none of the quaint, inviting charm so notable on the nearby trails. Although the morning was sunny and dry, a humidly sinister aura seemed to hover over the staircase, as if some nasty woodland sprite took perverse delight in coating the rock treads and risers with the unexpected danger of slippery dampness.

  It was presumably on these steps that Norman Axelrod had taken his deadly fall.

  Standing safely above the top tread, I tried to envision the mechanics of the fatality. A man makes his way down to the topmost step. He is out of shape; he moves slowly. In today’s sun, the stones looked damp; in yesterday’s fog, they must have appeared even more slippery than they did now. Therefore, he moves with great care. He places one tentative foot on the first step. Then the other. And then…?

  And then all of a sudden, slipperiness gives way to the heart-jolting sensation of feet sliding out from under, arms flailing, body twisting in a futile, reflexive struggle to regain hopelessly lost balance, and in a split second, indeed in a kaleidoscopically shattered second, stability flies upward and vanishes into the fog, and the body plunges downward, bouncing off rock after cruel rock until a vicious twist of gravity seizes the vulnerable head and, with fatal force, hurls cranium onto granite in a coup de grace.

  Oh, really? My imagination balks. In the absence of the late Norman Axelrod, I envision myself in his place, and when I send myself, strictly in fantasy, of course, running rickety-split down the long, narrow flight of swiftly descending stone stairs, the vivid scenario that presents itself is a double picture of terrifying illusion and harmless reality. If, in fact, I sprinted down this ever-so-picturesque staircase, I might trip and tumble. But far from cannon-balling off the rocks or plummeting off a precipice, I’d soon grab or bump into the smooth ledges and vegetation that act, I now see, as a subtle safety wall while sustaining the tantalizing illusion of danger. It is easy to imagine how someone could fall on the stairs. It is almost impossible to imagine a fatal plunge down them.

  The morning’s tune returns. I love to tell the story, it sings. Of unseen things above. With a definite above to look toward, I run my eyes up the face of the cliff. Seventy feet? Yes, from the top of this cliff down to the sharp rocks of the staircase is a drop of a good seventy feet, and unlike a knee-skinning topple down the trail, a plunge off that cliff could only mean a dive to death.

  So Norman Axelrod died here, on these stone steps. Why here? Because he fell from above. And I’d been nearby. Unseen things above: things I had seen? People? Events? Norman Axelrod, inexplicably standing atop that cliff. Alone? And then…? And then plummeting from it? Witnessed. Witnessed by me.

  I was suddenly in a great hurry to see everything unseen, to scramble up the cliff and then down or over to my Rock of Ages, to find where Axelrod had stood the second before his plunge, where I’d fallen from, where I’d landed. Driven by the conviction that I was, at last, actively pursuing this wretched, forgotten mission, I hastened up the trail and found the spot where the handsome hiker had set off uphill in what I’d assumed was confident bushwhacking. A second’s pause at the spot revealed what now seemed the obvious signs of an old trail: a narrow and overgrown but beaten path up through the scrubby huckleberry bushes, and flat stones
set in the ground stair-tread fashion in the wonderfully as-if-by-nature style of every other trail on this little mountain. Hampered more by my concern for the safety of my dogs than by the dogs themselves, I glanced eagerly around for a place to hitch them while I made a quick dash up the abandoned path. As if operating all on their own, my eyes sought out a tiny moss-carpeted clearing just off the main trail with two oak saplings that could serve as temporary hitching posts. Clambering the short distance uphill to the area, I said to the dogs, “I’m only leaving you here for two minutes, okay? Two minutes maximum. I don’t know what’s up the old trail, and I don’t want any surprises, so you’re going to wait here for practically no time. Got it? What no one needs is another fall on anything. I’m going to reconnoiter and be right back and—Jesus. Déjà vu.”

  But vu was wrong. Vu is seen. What was the French word for hitched? Not as in marriage, of course. Well, déjà whatever it was, when we got close to the two little oaks, the damage to both was obvious. Each displayed a recent, raw band where the young bark had been worn away. Leaves and branches had been torn. Worse, both little trees were bent as if by a violent hurricane. Beyond one of the oaks, a patch of brilliant red peeked out from behind a small boulder: Rowdy’s saddlebags. He’d dumped his pack the last time I’d tied him here, either before or after he’d freed himself by almost uprooting the tree. Kimi had loosed herself without losing her backpack. Deja hitched. I’d tied the dogs here before. Yesterday. Before my fall.

  I’d left the dogs. And look what had happened! Leaving Rowdy’s saddlebags where they were, I ripped Kimi’s from their Velcro fasteners and dumped them in the clearing. Then I headed for the abandoned trail, the dogs eagerly bounding with me. Like the lone hiker, the three of us climbed the slope. What opened up here above the main trail was a large area of wide, broad rocky ledge stretching ahead of us and to our left, in the direction of the cliff. The trails up Dorr that we’d traversed so far were, of course, stone-paved trails and staircases, and paths worn hard and flat by the feet of millions of hikers. Here, on the great stretches of ledge, cairns marked the trail: In place of a visible footpath or blazes of bright paint, piles of stones directed the hiker across the granite surface and, I assumed, toward the summit of Dorr. Moving slowly, speaking calm words to Rowdy and Kimi, I headed away from the cairn-marked trail and to our left, toward what had to be the top of the cliff. I soon stopped. I’d seen enough. Yes, Norman Axelrod could have climbed up here. Easily? No. But only because he’d been unfit. The entire climb up Dorr must have been difficult for him. Malcolm Fairley, his companion, had said so. This last stretch would have been no more difficult than the steep staircases. To reach the edge of the cliff, he’d have had to do no more than amble. So, he could have reached this spot and gone beyond it. He’d obviously done so. No wonder Fairley hadn’t found Axelrod! This abandoned portion of the Ladder Trail appeared on none of the maps I’d studied. Even my detailed hiking guide said nothing about it. If I hadn’t seen the lone hiker leave the main trail, I’d never have guessed it existed. So why had Norman Axelrod taken this abandoned trail, veered left, and made his way to the top of the cliff?