worrying lack of sense. If there was ever one person who would decide while lost on the
AT to leave the trail and try for a short cut, it was Katz. I began to feel extremely uneasy.
I left a note on my pack and went off down the trail. A half mile farther on, the trail
descended very steeply, almost perpendicularly, more than 600 feet to a high, nameless
valley. He had to have realized by this point, surely, that he had gone wrong. I had told
him Cloud Pond was a level stroll.
Calling his name at intervals, I picked my way slowly along the path down the cliff face,
fearing the worst at the bottom--for this was a precipice one could easily fall down,
especially with a big ungainly pack and a preoccupied mind--but there was no sign of him.
I followed the trail two miles through the valley and up on to the summit of a high
pinnacle called Fourth Mountain. The view from the top was expansive in every direction;
the wilderness had never looked so big. I called his name long and hard, and got nothing
in return.
It was getting on to late afternoon by this time. He had been at least four hours without
water. I had no idea how long a person could survive without water in this heat, but I
knew from experience that you couldn't go for more than half an hour without
experiencing considerable discomfort. It occurred to me with a sinking feeling that he
might have seen another pond--there were half a dozen to choose from scattered across
the valley 2,000 feet below--and decided in his perplexity that perhaps that was it, and
tried to reach it cross-country. Even if he wasn't confused, he might simply have been
driven by thirst to try to reach one of those ponds. They looked wonderfully cool and
refreshing. The nearest was only about two miles away, but there was no trail to it and it
was down a perilous slope through the woods. Once you were in the woods and bereft of
bearings, you could easily miss it by a mile. Conversely, you could be within fifty yards of
it and not know, as we had seen at Pleasant Pond a few days before. And once you were
lost in these immense woods, you would die. It was as simple as that. No one could save
you. No helicopter could spot you through the cover of trees. No rescue teams could find
you. None, I suspected, would even try. There would be bears down there, too--bears
that had possibly never seen a human. All the possibilities made my head hurt.
I hiked back to the Cloud Pond turnoff, hoping more than anything I had hoped for in a
long time that he would be sitting on the pack, and that there would be some amusing,
unconsidered explanation--that we had kept just missing each other, like in a stage farce:
him waiting bewildered at my pack, then going off to look for me; me arriving a moment
later, waiting in puzzlement and going off--but I knew he wouldn't be there, and he
wasn't. It was nearly dusk when I got back. I wrote a fresh note and left it under a rock in
the middle of the AT, just in case, hoisted my pack, and went down to the pond, where
there was a shelter.
The irony was that this was the nicest campsite I experienced anywhere along the AT,
and it was the one place I camped without Katz. Cloud Pond was a couple of hundred
acres of exquisitely peaceful water surrounded by dark coniferous forest, the treetops
pointy black silhouettes against a pale blue evening sky. The shelter, which I had to
myself, was on a level area thirty or forty yards back from the pond and slightly above it.
It was practically new and spotless. There was a privy nearby. It was nearly perfect. I
dumped my stuff on the wooden sleeping platform and went down to the water's edge to