to take another shortcut. He began
bushwhacking, stopping occasionally
to adjust course. He reached the val-
ley. No road.
No, I’m not lost, he told himself.
His eye caught a stand of tall trees. He
remembered admiring the line of
majestic oaks and pines earlier.
Reach them and the car wouldn’t be
that far off. He’d have to cover some
ground, but part of it looked like an
area loggers had clear-cut. How bad
could it be?
As it turned out, the loggers had left
behind a gnarly thicket of limbs and
branches; laurel, prickly greenbrier
and other vines had sprouted up into
a web of a billion needles in the pock-
ets between the debris. Crawling
through barbed wire in Korea, McDon-
nell thought, would be better than this.
He was moving slower and slower,
Joanna’s 3 p.m. deadline having long
since vanished. Eventually, the sun
slipped below the mountain ridge
behind him and the forest turned pitch-
black. He hadn’t brought a flashlight.
There was only one thing to say:
“McDonnell, you’ve really done it this
time. You are one dumb son of a b****.”
bill mcdonnell jr. was entering the
football stadium at James Madison
University when he got a text from his
niece. She said she’d lost contact with
her grandfather around 2 p.m., and
no one had heard from him in hours.
“I’m sure he ignored you and took the
shortcut,” McDonnell Jr. told her.
An avid hiker himself, McDonnell Jr.
knew his father could cover 16 kilo-
metres with all his winter gear on. But
he had become more forgetful in his
90s. They agreed to call 911.McDonnell Jr. headed to Winchester,
where he found his mother in a panic,
rifling through paperwork. She said
she wanted to have the necessary doc-
uments in case her husband was dead.
Captain Wesley Dellinger of the
Shenandoah County Sheriff ’s Office
took action when he got the call about
a missing elderly man: not quite six
feet tall, 200 pounds, lost in the forest.
Having made a few wrong turns in
these woods himself, he felt for the
guy. “You think you’ve got it figured
out,” he told one of his deputies, “then
all of a sudden you don’t.”
He ordered a command post to be
set up near the Laurel Run trailhead,THE SUN SLIPPED BEHIND A RIDGE AND THE
FOREST TURNED PITCH BLACK. McDONNELL
HADN’T BROUGHT A FLASHLIGHT.reader’s digestrd.ca 55