A Walk in the Woods

"And do you know what the fuck of it is?" he said in a sudden pull-yourself-together
voice. "I could kill for a TV dinner right now. I really could." We laughed.
"Hungry Man Turkey Dinner with plastic giblets and 40-weight gravy. Hmmmm-
mmmm. I'd leave your scrawny ass up here for just a sniff of that." Then he brushed at a
corner of eye, said, "Hoo, fuck," and went to have a pee over the cliff edge.
I watched him go, looking old and tired, and wondered for a minute what on earth we
were doing up here. We weren't boys any more.
I looked at the map. We were practically out of water, but it was less than a mile to
Cloud Pond, where we could refill. We split the last half inch, and I told Katz I would go
on ahead to the pond, filter the water, and have it waiting for him when he arrived.
It was an easy twenty-minute walk along a grassy ridgeline. Cloud Pond was down a
steep side trail, about a quarter of a mile off the AT. I left my pack propped against a big
rock at the trailside and went with our water bottles and the filter down to the pond edge
and filled up.
It took me perhaps twenty minutes to walk down, fill the three bottles, and walk back,
so when I returned to the AT it had been about forty minutes since I had seen Katz. Even
if he had tarried on the mountaintop, and even allowing for his modest walking speed, he
should have reached here by now. Besides, it was an easy walk and I knew he was
thirsty, so it was odd that he wasn't more prompt. I waited fifteen minutes and then
twenty and twenty-five, and finally I left my pack and went back to look for him. It was
well over an hour since I had seen him when I reached the mountaintop, and he wasn't
there. I stood confounded on the spot where we had last been together. His stuff was
gone. He had obviously moved on, but if he wasn't on Barren Mountain and wasn't at
Cloud Pond and was nowhere in between, then where was he? The only possible
explanations were that he had gone back the other way, which was out of the question--
Katz would never have left me without explanation--never--or that he had somehow fallen
off the ridgeline. It was an absurd notion--there wasn't anything remotely challenging or
dangerous about the ridgeline-- but you never know. John Connolly had told us weeks
before of a friend of his who had fainted in heat and tumbled a few feet off a safe, level
trail; he had lain unnoticed for hours in blazing sunshine and slowly baked to death. All
the way back to the Cloud Pond turnoff I carefully surveyed the trail-edge brush for signs
of disturbance and peered at intervals over the lip of the ridge, fearful of seeing Katz
spread-eagled on a rock. I called his name several times, and got nothing in return but
my own fading voice.
By the time I reached the turnoff it had been nearly two hours since I had seen him.
This was becoming worryingly inexplicable. The only remaining possibility was that he had
walked past the turnoff while I was down at the pond filtering water, but this seemed
manifestly improbable. There was a prominent arrowed sign by the trail saying "Cloud
Pond" and my pack had been clearly visible beside the trail. Even if he had somehow
failed to notice these things, he knew that Cloud Pond was only a mile from Barren
Mountain. When you have hiked the AT as much as we had, you get so you can judge a
mile with considerable accuracy. He couldn't have gone too far beyond without realizing
his mistake and coming back. This just didn't make sense.
All I knew was that Katz was alone in a wilderness with no water, no map, no clear
idea of what terrain lay ahead, presumably no idea of what had become of me, and a