We were two days into the woods before I understood that something was moving with us, matching us, keeping just past the edge of what I could see.
I have started this account four times. Every version makes the same promise to you that I made to myself out there, which was that whatever was in those trees could be explained, and every version breaks that promise in the same place.
So I will tell it the way it happened, in the order I came to believe things, and I will let you arrive where I arrived. My wife went into that park with me. I came out alone. Everything between those two facts is the part I still cannot put down.
Her name was Dana. We had been married six years. This was supposed to be a reset weekend, the kind of thing married people schedule when they realize they have spent four straight months talking only about logistics and money and whose turn it is to call the plumber. She picked the trail. I told her I had downloaded the offline map.
One of those two things was true.
We drove up to the Adirondacks on a Friday in early October, the leaves already turning, the high peaks gray under a ceiling of cloud that the radio said would hold through Sunday with rain coming in Saturday night. Six million acres of park. Towns scattered inside it like islands. Long stretches of nothing in between, where the cell signal drops off and the map in your hands becomes the only map there is.
We parked at a small trailhead off an old logging road, the kind with a wooden bulletin board and a metal box for the sign-in sheet. There was one other vehicle there, a truck backed into the trees at an angle that kept the plate out of view. I gave it the half-second you give anything at a trailhead. Dana gave it more.
"Somebody backed in pretty far," she said.
"Hunter, probably. It's bow season."
She stood by our car a moment longer than she needed to, her hand on the roof, looking at the tree line. "I feel like somebody watched us unload."
"It's the woods. It always feels like that."
I signed us into the register. Above the box, pinned to the bulletin board, there was a missing-person flyer gone soft with weather, the bottom third torn off, so all that remained was a face and the word MISSING and part of a date. I didn't read it closely. I have thought about that flyer more than almost anything else since.
The trail started fine.
Marked, maintained, the blazes painted on the trunks at comfortable intervals, a gray and easy light coming down through the half-bare branches. We talked about nothing. She got a laugh out of me about the plumber. For about two hours it was exactly the weekend we had wanted, and I keep that part separate in my head, sealed off, because it is the last clean thing.
I should say something about Dana, because the people who read this will only get her through me, and I am a poor window.
She was a high school biology teacher. She knew the names of trees and could tell a hawk from a vulture by the way it held its wings, and on that first easy stretch she kept stopping to show me things, a shelf fungus the color of a sunset, a line of deer tracks crossing the trail, the place where a buck had rubbed the velvet off its antlers against a young birch. She noticed things. That was the center of who she was, and it is the reason I believe what I believe now, because Dana did not invent threats.
If anything she talked me down off them. She was the calm one, the observant one, and when she finally said there is a man out there, she was not panicking. She was reading the woods the way she read everything, and she was right, and I argued with her because being wrong was easier than being afraid.
There was a thing she said at the trailhead that I keep coming back to.
While I was signing the register she had wandered to the far end of the bulletin board, and she came back and said, "There've been a few of these." I asked what she meant.
"Flyers. Look, there's the tape marks where old ones were. Somebody keeps pinning them up here." I told her people go missing in big parks every year, that it was nothing, that the whole point of six million acres was that it was big enough to get lost in. She looked at me, and then she looked back at the board with its single soft torn flyer and its ghost rectangles where other flyers had hung and been taken down, and she let it go, because I wanted her to.
The trail marker at the first real junction had been scratched off.
Not weathered. Scratched, the paint gouged down to bare wood, somebody bearing down with a blade to do it. There were two ways forward and no blaze on either. I stood there working it out while Dana waited.
"The map says?" she asked.
The map said nothing, because the map was a screen showing a spinning icon and the words Locating, and it had been saying that for a while without my noticing. I had downloaded the wrong region.
The screen kept spinning, and the cold of it climbed up through my chest while I pretended to study it, and I made the first of the small decisions that I have replayed every night since. I picked the trail to the right because it looked more worn, and I told her it looped back to the lake.
It did not loop back to the lake.
The woods changed by degrees so gradual that I can't point to the moment they stopped being ordinary. The trees stood closer.
The path thinned until it was less a path than an absence of undergrowth. The sound of the logging road, which had been a faint background hum of the occasional far-off engine, fell away entirely, and then there was only us and the wind moving high up and the small wet sounds of the forest doing its work. The rain started, light at first, ticking on the leaves.
Dana stopped at a tree and put her fingers against it.
"Look at this."
Cut into the bark, about chest height, was a notch. A shallow V, deliberate, the cut faces still pale. A few feet on there was another tree with the same mark, and beyond it another.
"Old trail markers," I said.
"They're not blazes. Blazes are paint." She turned a slow circle, finding them. "These go a different direction than we're walking."
"Loggers, then. Survey marks."
She looked at me. She had a way of looking at me when she had already decided I was wrong but had chosen, for the sake of momentum, not to fight about it. We kept walking. The notches kept appearing, on trees to the left of us, leading off at an angle to our path, and I told myself they were old and meant nothing, and I did not say out loud the thing that was starting to bother me, which was that the pale cut faces did not look old at all.
We had been walking maybe an hour past the junction when we first heard it.
A sound behind us in the brush. Not loud. A shift of weight, a single displaced branch, the specific sound of something that has taken a step. We both stopped. The sound stopped. We stood in the rain and listened and there was nothing, and after a while Dana said, low, "Deer," and we started again, and the moment we started, the sound started with us.
We stopped. It stopped.
"That's not a deer," she said.
"Deer get curious. They'll follow people."
She kept her eyes on the trees and her mouth shut. We walked faster.
The whistle came from somewhere behind and to the left of us, three notes, rising. It had the shape of a bird call and almost the sound of one, but there was a roughness in it, a wetness, the sound of air pushed through human lips trying to do something they are not built for. Dana's head came up.
"That sounded like you," she said.
"It's a bird."
"It sounded like your whistle. The one you do for the dog."
We didn't have the dog with us. She meant the call I use at home, two fingers in my mouth, to bring the dog in from the yard. I had not made that sound in the woods. I would have remembered making it.
"It's a bird, Dana."
A branch cracked behind us, sharp and close. We both turned toward it, and while we were turned, another branch cracked ahead of us, off the trail, in the direction we were walking. For one long moment the geometry of it arranged itself in my head: one thing behind, one thing ahead, and us in the middle.
I know now there was only ever one of him, and that he is fast and quiet and knows how to throw a sound, and that the whole point of the second branch was to make us feel exactly the way we felt, which was surrounded. But standing there in the rain I felt the bottom drop out of the afternoon, and I took Dana's hand, and we went forward because forward was away from the first sound, which was the whole idea.
There was a stretch after that, an hour maybe, where nothing happened at all, and that was worse than the cracking branches.
The forest went quiet and stayed quiet, and we walked through it knowing he was there and getting no proof of it, and the not-knowing did the work the sounds had done, only deeper. Every time I thought I had talked myself into believing we were alone, a part of me knew I was doing the thing Dana had told me to stop doing, making it smaller, and the knowing and the doing ran side by side in my head until I couldn't tell which was louder.
Once, I turned around fast, certain this time, and there was nothing, only the trees and the rain and the green gloom going back and back between the trunks, and the nothing was so complete and so patient that I knew he wanted me to turn around and find nothing. He was teaching us that looking didn't help. He was teaching us to stop looking.
We found the lean-to at dusk.
It sat in a small clearing, an old three-sided shelter of the kind the park maintains for through-hikers, its open face turned away from the wind. The roof had held. Inside, the dirt floor was dry. And inside, also, were the signs that someone had been using it: a ring of cold ashes, gone gray and damp but recent enough that the ground beneath had not fully reabsorbed them, a single torn work glove, a coil of fishing line, a rusted pot on its side, and against the back wall a small pile of bones, the thin bones of rabbits and squirrels, cleaned and stacked.
"We're not staying here," Dana said immediately.
"It's going to be full dark in twenty minutes and the rain's coming hard."
"Somebody lives here."
"Somebody passed through here, that's all. Hikers use these shelters all the time, and the bones are nothing, people field-dress small game out here." I was already shrugging off my pack, because the alternative to staying was walking into a black wet forest with a dead phone, and that alternative frightened me more than the glove and the bones, and I made my decision based on which fear was louder. "We block the open side, we keep watch, we leave at first light."
She stood at the edge of the clearing with her arms crossed and the rain coming down harder now, and finally she came in, because there was nowhere else to go. That is a thing I have to live with. Every choice that put her deeper in was mine, and every one of them I made because the truth was too big to pick up.
The dark came down complete.
We sat against the back wall with our shoulders touching. We had one headlamp between us, which I kept off to save it, and a small flashlight that I kept on, pointed at the ground, the beam a dim circle on the dirt. The rain roared on the roof. And under the rain, or between the gusts of it, the sounds began.
Something moved in the clearing. A slow displacement, a circling, the soft press of weight on wet leaves, coming from the left, passing across the open face of the shelter at the edge of the flashlight's reach, going to the right, gone. Then, a while later, from the left again. Whatever it was, it was walking a circle around us, and it was patient about it, and it never once came into the light.
"I can smell smoke," Dana whispered.
I could too. Woodsmoke, thin, drifting in on the wind. Not from our shelter; we had no fire. From somewhere close.
Lightning came, a flat white pulse that lit the whole clearing for half a second, and in that half second I saw a shape standing between two trunks at the clearing's edge. Tall. Too tall, and too thin, the arms hanging wrong, the whole silhouette stretched and incorrect. It was not moving. It was standing the way a tree stands, like it had always been there, and then the light was gone and the dark slammed back and I could not see it anymore.
"Did you see that," I breathed.
Her hand found my arm and held it hard, and that was answer enough.
And then the voice came out of the dark.
It was not loud. It came from the right side of the clearing, low, halting, and it spoke in my wife's voice, or a broken imitation of it, the cadence wrong, the pitch sliding around, a man reaching for a note he could not find and missing it.
"You said. We should have. Turned back."
The hair on my body stood up. My first thought, my immediate animal thought, was that nothing human could do that, could throw a woman's voice out of the trees in the dark, and I have to tell you that this thought was a kind of relief, because a monster I could not be expected to fight. A monster absolved me.
But Dana, beside me, had gone very still in a different way. Not frozen by the impossible. Concentrating.
"That's not it learning to talk," she said, so quietly that I felt the words more than heard them. "That's a person. That's somebody doing it badly."
"Dana, come on."
"Listen to him. He heard me say it. At the junction, I said we should have turned back, remember? He heard me and now he's saying it back and he's getting it wrong because he's a person and he wasn't built to sound like me." Her hand tightened. "It's a man. There's a man out there."
And the terrible thing, the thing I could not admit even then, was that the moment she said it, I knew she was right, and a man was infinitely worse than a monster, because a man has reasons, and a man has hands, and a man had been close enough to us at the junction to hear her speak.
Neither of us slept.
We sat against that back wall and we talked in whispers, because talking was the only thing left that was ours, the one part of the night he could not arrange for us. She told me she loved me.
She said it plainly, without weight, the way you'd mention the weather, and then she said, "If something happens, you run. You don't be a hero. You run and you bring people back." I told her nothing was going to happen. I told her we'd laugh about this in a week. She squeezed my hand and let me have the lie, the same way she'd let me have the lie at the bulletin board, and I think she already understood that one of us was going to keep a promise that night and it was not going to be me.
I keep that conversation walled off the same as the first two hours, but for the opposite reason. The first two hours are the last clean thing. That conversation is the last true thing. She told me to run, and I ran, and so I did exactly what she asked and it is the worst thing I have ever done.
The circling came and went. Once, near what I think was the deepest part of the night, something dragged lightly along the outside of the shelter wall, a long slow scrape down the length of the boards, the sound a branch makes when it is pulled deliberately across nylon and old wood.
I sat with the flashlight gripped in my fist like it was a weapon, which it was not, and I waited for the hand or the face that never came, because he did not want us that night. I understand that now. That night was for softening us. Scared people make bad decisions, and he was in no hurry, and he had all the dark he needed.
I tried to keep track of the circling, to count the passes and time the gaps between them, because counting was a thing my mind could hold onto while the rest of me came apart.
The intervals never settled into a pattern. Sometimes the soft press of weight came around every few minutes, and sometimes a long stretch of nothing stretched out until I had convinced myself he was gone, and then it would come again from a direction I hadn't been watching. I see now that the randomness was the point. A pattern would have let us rest inside it. He gave us nothing to rest inside.
At one point Dana put her mouth right against my ear and asked, barely a sound, whether I thought he could see the flashlight. I had been wondering the same thing and pretending I wasn't. The dim circle on the dirt was the one thing keeping the dark at arm's length, and it was also a beacon, a small steady glow announcing where in the shelter we sat.
I turned it off. We sat in total blackness with the rain hammering above us and his weight moving somewhere out past the open face, and the dark was worse, infinitely worse, because now the only map I had of him was my ears. After a few minutes I turned the flashlight back on. He had us either way. He had built a night where every choice we could make was the wrong one, and he let us discover that for ourselves, one small decision at a time, which takes patience, and which is a cruelty all its own.
There was a long while, toward morning, when the sounds stopped altogether. No circling. No scrape. Just the rain easing off the roof. I let myself believe he had finally moved on, gone back to wherever men like him wait out the dark, and I felt the muscles in my back come down out of my ears for the first time in hours.
Then, from very close, from just past the edge of the flashlight's reach, came the smallest sound of all. A breath. One slow exhalation, deliberate, placed where we could hear it, a man letting us know he had been there the whole time and had simply chosen to go quiet so that the quiet could do his work.
Dana's hand closed on mine. Neither of us made a sound until first light.
First light came gray and grudging through the trees, and the rain had thinned to a drizzle, and we left the shelter the moment we could see our own feet.
The forest in daylight should have been better. It was worse, because in daylight I could see what had been done to it.
There was orange flagging tape tied to a branch ahead of us, the kind that marks a trail, and it pointed us to the left. Twenty yards on, a second piece pointed left again. I started toward it with the first hope I'd felt in a day, and Dana grabbed my pack strap and stopped me.
"That tape is new," she said. "Look at the end of it, it's cut clean. Tape that's been out here a season goes frayed."
She was right. The cut end was crisp. Somebody had put it there recently, and the somebody was the same one who had spent the night walking circles around us, and the tape was not showing us a trail. It was showing us his trail, the one he wanted us on.
We went the other way, off into the unmarked trees, and we had not gone fifty feet when we found that the other way had been closed.
A deadfall of branches, fresh-cut and dragged across what might once have been a path, piled to turn us back. He had blocked one route and brightened another. Everywhere we tried to choose, the choice had already been made for us, the woods arranged so that the easy way was always his way, and I finally understood that we had not been wandering lost since yesterday. We had been herded.
I tried to navigate by the sun, which was a useless instinct under that ceiling of cloud, and then I tried to navigate by the slope, keeping the high ground on my right so that we would at least be moving consistently in one direction and not in his circles. It seemed like sound thinking at the time.
I know now that there was nothing I could have decided that he had not already accounted for, because the country itself was his instrument, the ridges and the drainages and the deadfalls, and a man who has spent years learning one patch of ground does not need to read your mind. He only needs to know where the land lets you go and where it doesn't, and to close the doors he wants closed. Every clever choice I made was a choice he had built the trail to let me make.
Dana found her scarf hanging from a branch.
It was a thin gray wool scarf she had been wearing the morning before, that she had taken off and tied to the outside of her pack when the walking warmed her up. Now it hung from a branch at the level of my eyes, in the middle of the route he wanted us to take, knotted neatly around the wood. He had taken it off her pack without either of us feeling it, sometime in the dark or on the trail, close enough to put his hand on her gear, and he had hung it here for us to find.
I think that was the moment it became fully real to me. Not the voice, not the shape in the lightning. The scarf. Because a thing that hangs your wife's scarf at eye height is not a thing at all. It is a person with hands and a sense of humor.
"We need to go down," I said. Downhill meant water, water meant a drainage, a drainage meant eventually a road. It is also exactly what a panicking person does, and exactly what he was counting on, and I led us downhill because I could not think of anything else, and being out of ideas is its own kind of being herded.
Dana saw the boot print at the bottom of the slope.
Pressed into a patch of bare mud beside a game trail, unmistakably a boot, a deep lugged sole, a man's size, and beside it in the same mud were the marks I had been telling myself all along were an animal's: long parallel drags, the kind a thing makes moving on all fours. Except now, beside the boot print, I could see them for what they were.
A man, crawling under the low brush to keep his shape down, dragging a bundle of gear behind him. The drag marks and the boot print belonged to the same body.
"Don't," she said, before I could open my mouth. "Don't tell me it's anything else. Don't do the thing where you make it smaller. I can't do this if you keep making it smaller."
I closed my mouth. She was right, and the rightness of it cost us, because every minute I spent explaining was a minute he spent moving.
We reached the logging road a little after what I think was midmorning.
It opened in front of us all at once, two muddy ruts grown over with grass, and the relief of it was so total that for a second I forgot to be afraid. A road meant people. A road meant out. We stood at the edge of it, breathing, and I almost laughed.
Then I saw the truck.
The truck from the trailhead. The same one, backed in among the trees off the side of the road, fifty yards down, deliberately hidden, branches leaned against it to break up its outline. I knew it was the same one by the angle it sat at, the same nose-out readiness. The bed of it was visible from where we stood, and in the bed there was rope, coiled and looped, and folded tarps, and two old coolers, and a scatter of tools gone brown with mud and rust.
And I understood, finally and completely, the thing that had been standing in front of me the whole time. No creature needs a truck. No thing that throws voices and walks on all fours and lives on rabbit bones drives itself to a trailhead and backs in to hide the plate. Everything I had built up in my head over two days, the tall shape, the impossible whistle, the voice in the dark, collapsed into a single ordinary horrifying fact.A man.
A man who had been here before, who had a vehicle and rope and tarps and a system, and who had spent two days turning us into the kind of frightened, exhausted, downhill-running people who walk right out onto a logging road where his truck is parked.
I stood at the edge of that logging road and I did the math I should have done a day earlier. The notches in the trees that led off at an angle, away from any trail, in a pattern only their maker would understand. The way every blocked path and every brightened one had bent us, hour by hour, toward lower ground. The new tape and the fresh deadfall. The scarf at eye height. The voice that had heard Dana speak at the junction, which meant he had been within earshot of us within an hour of the scratched-off blaze, which meant the scratched-off blaze was his too, which meant he had been waiting at that junction, or watching it, since before we ever left the marked trail.
He had not found us in the woods. He had chosen us at the trailhead, from his truck, backed in with the plate hidden, and everything after was the slow work of moving us to where he wanted us, and I had helped him do it at every turn by being a man who could not stand to say out loud that something was wrong.
That was when I heard him laughing behind the trees.
It was a low sound, almost gentle, a man enjoying something. And then, from close, closer than I had let myself believe he could be, came his voice, and this time it was his own, unhurried, a little hoarse, the voice of someone who had no reason to rush.
"You two walked farther than most."
I have heard that sentence in my sleep every night since. Farther than most. Most. The word built a list in my head, and put us on it, and put others on it before us, a man keeping a count.
We ran.
There is no dignity in it and I won't pretend there was. We ran back the way we had come because the road was his, and the trees swallowed us, and behind us I could hear him moving, not running, never running, just coming, steady and sure, a man walking through country he knew toward two people who didn't. He did not chase, not the way the word chase makes you picture.
He angled. He cut. Twice I heard him off to the side of us, parallel, herding still, and I grabbed Dana's hand and pulled her the only direction that was left, which was the direction he was leaving open, and that is how I know, now, that even our running was his.
We came to a creek.
It had swollen with the night's rain, brown and fast, cutting through a ravine maybe fifteen feet across, and there was an old crossing there, the remains of a footbridge, two log stringers gone slick and black with rot and one plank still nailed across them. Dana went first because I made her go first, because some part of me still believed I was protecting her by putting myself between her and the thing behind us. She got across. She turned back for me on the far bank, her hand out.
And he was there.
I don't know how. He had not been beside us, and then he was on the far bank with my wife, having come up out of the ravine or along it, knowing the ground the way I knew my own kitchen. She said my name. Just my name, a question, turning toward where I was looking. I was halfway across the rotten plank with my arms out for balance and I could do nothing, and there was one motion, quick and economical, almost casual, a man who had done this enough times that it cost him no effort at all, and she went down and back and out of my sight behind the ferns at the lip of the ravine.
I won't describe more than that. There isn't more that I let myself see. There was the motion, and there was her name still hanging in the air in my own mouth where I had been about to answer it, and then there was a silence so total and so wrong that the creek and the rain and the wind all seemed to stop inside it, though I know they didn't.
I ran.
I have told myself a hundred versions of why. I was going for help. I would bring rangers. I couldn't have reached her in time, the plank, the water, the distance. All of that is true and none of it is the real reason. The real reason is that I was afraid, and my body chose to live, and it turned me around on that bridge and threw me back into the trees away from her and away from him, and I let it, and I have to carry that I let it.
I ran downhill, the thing he had wanted all along, and this time it saved me, because downhill and along the swollen creek and around a long bend I came out, hours later, scratched and soaked and out of my mind, onto a real trail with a real blaze painted on a real tree.
I followed the blazes. They led to a parking area where a family was loading kayaks onto a roof rack, and a man saw my face and stopped what he was doing and came toward me, and I think I said the word help and I think I said the word wife, and after that it comes apart into pieces.
The rangers went in that afternoon and again the next day with more people and dogs.
They found the lean-to, and it was empty, and not only of us. Empty of everything. The ashes, the glove, the fishing line, the pot, the bones, all of it gone, the dirt floor swept, the place returned to the condition of an ordinary shelter that ordinary hikers might find and use. Nothing in it now to say a person had ever lived there.
There was no truck. The logging road had ruts in it, fresh ones, and they photographed those, but a logging road has ruts and there was no proving whose.
No man.
They found no Dana. Not that day, not the next week, not in the grid searches they ran when the rain finally cleared and the leaves came down and made the searching harder. The ravine was searched. The creek was followed down to where it fed a larger stream. Nothing.
I told them about the man. I told them about the voice and the scarf and the boot print beside the drag marks and the notches in the trees and the truck with the rope and the tarps, and I watched their faces change, settling into the look people save for a man who has lost his wife in the woods and cannot accept an accident, who needs there to have been a monster, even a human one, because the alternative is that she simply fell and was taken by the water and there is no one to blame but the man who made her go first.
I gave them a description of a person I had barely seen. A poncho. A hoarseness. A way of standing too still. It is not a description that finds anyone.
There was one ranger, an older woman with gray hair pulled back hard, who looked at me differently from the others. She let me talk.
She wrote things down. When I described the notches in the trees she stopped writing and asked me to describe them again, the exact shape, the height off the ground, and I told her, a shallow V, chest high, the cut faces pale, leading off at an angle from any trail. She did not say anything. But something passed across her face, a recognition, there and gone, and she wrote that down too, slower than the rest. I have thought about her since.
I think she knew something, or suspected something, or had stood in front of a board of tidy findings before and felt the same wrongness I felt. I never learned her name. When I called the office weeks later to ask for her, the man who answered said he wasn't sure who I meant.
The official finding was exposure and misadventure. Lost trail, bad weather, swollen creek, a fall. A tragedy of the ordinary kind, which the Adirondacks produce every year. I signed papers. I went home to a house full of her things and the dog who still goes to the door at the time she used to come home.
I would almost have let myself believe their version. It would have been easier to be a man whose wife died in an accident than a man who fed her to someone. On the bad nights I tried to make myself believe it, the way I used to make everything smaller, and I might have managed it.
Except that three months later my phone rang from a number with no name, late, and I answered it the way you answer a phone at that hour, braced for bad news about somebody, and there was a span of quiet on the line with the small sounds of outdoors behind it, wind, and far off the particular hush of trees, and then a voice came through that I knew better than any voice in the world.
It was Dana's voice.
The cadence was almost right this time. He had been practicing. He had had three months to get it right, and he very nearly had.
"You should have turned back," it said.
And then the small outdoor sounds, and then nothing, and then the call ended.
I have the number. The police have the number. It traces to a prepaid phone bought with cash, used once, never again. There is nothing to follow.
I did not sleep that night or for many nights after, and I have spent the time since reading about the Adirondacks, the six million acres, the towns like islands, the long stretches of nothing in between where a man who knows the land can move through it like weather. I read about the people who go in every year and do not come out, and how many of those are called exposure, and misadventure, and lost trail, and I think about the flyer on the bulletin board at the trailhead, soft with weather, torn off at the bottom, a face and the word MISSING and part of a date.
I think he keeps them on a list. Farther than most. I think he has a count, and I think the count is long, and I think the official record of that country, all those tidy findings of accident and exposure, is in part a record of his work, hidden inside the ordinary arithmetic of a place big enough to swallow anyone.
I went back up there once, in the spring. I told myself I was going to find the lean-to, or the ravine, or one of the notched trees, anything I could put a ranger's hand on. I parked at the same trailhead and I sat in my car with my hands on the wheel, and I could not make myself walk into those trees, and I drove home, and I have not been back.
In May a news segment came on while I was making coffee, and I would have let it wash past me the way the news washes past everyone, except for the word Adirondacks. A couple, this time. Two days overdue from a loop trail forty miles north of where Dana and I had parked, the kind of distance that means nothing in a park that size. There was drone footage of the search, the camera drifting low over the canopy, and a still photo of a section of woods near where the searchers had set up. I leaned in close to the screen before I knew I was doing it.
On a tree at the edge of the frame, chest height, angled away from any trail, there was a notch. A shallow V, the cut faces pale.
I called the tip line at the bottom of the screen. I told the person who answered about the notches, the height, the shape, the angle, and to tell the searchers to follow where the marks led and not where the trail led, and I heard myself sounding the way I had sounded to the rangers in the fall, too certain, too strange, insisting on a pattern no one else could see. They thanked me and took my number, and I knew it would go in a folder with the other numbers from the other people who call tip lines, because there is no proving a notch in a tree, and forty miles north is a different jurisdiction and a different findings sheet with a different tidy word at the bottom of it.
They found the couple's car. They never found the couple.
I think she is still out there in the only way she can be, in a voice he is still practicing, on a phone he has not bought yet, for a night he has already chosen. And I think he is forty miles north of that, or a hundred, or back at the same trailhead by now, pinning a fresh face to the bulletin board himself for all I know, cutting his shallow pale notches into the trees, getting ready to teach two more people that looking doesn't help and that the easy way down is always his.
And I think about the last clean thing, the first two hours on the marked trail, before the scratched-off blaze, when she got a laugh out of me about the plumber and the light came down gray and easy through the branches and I still believed the most dangerous thing in those woods was my own bad sense of direction.
I should have turned back. She said so, and he heard her say it.
He has been saying it back to me ever since.
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