Creature Discomforts Read online

  Heartened, I finally took the practical step of searching my day pack and the female’s red dogpack. My pack yielded a staggering number of brand-new, medium-size pale brown plastic bags with handle ties, an old and sadly cracked Nikon camera, a ring of keys, and the kind of survival blanket that looks like a giant sheet of aluminum foil. After swathing myself in it, I ripped the female’s pack from its Velcro fasteners and began to empty its contents onto the ledge. The dogs took a tremendous interest in the unpacking, mainly, as I rapidly saw, because some of the supplies were ready-to-eat snacks: a blueberry muffin tightly encased in plastic wrap, cheese and crackers wrapped in aluminum foil, and a Granny Smith apple. Driven by some unexamined impulse, I quickly stashed the food in my own pack and zipped it shut. In a burst of common sense, I realized that there was something terribly wrong with me. The precise word eluded me. What came to mind was head injury. I couldn’t remember whether a person who’d sustained one was allowed to eat. The dogs had no such worries about themselves. As I stashed the goodies, they posed rather formally, wagged their tails over their backs, lifted their heads, and favored me with twin expressions of irresistible charm. On its own, my left hand reached into the pocket of my anorak and emerged bearing small cubes of cheese dusted with lint.

  Some of the remaining items in the dogpack made sense: two big bottles of spring water, a fabric water bowl for dogs, four heavy-duty nylon dog booties, two leashes, a flashlight, a pocket knife, a first-aid kit in a plastic box, hand towels apparently used as padding to prevent hard objects from poking into the dog, a collection of very small bungee cords, a hiking guide to Acadia National Park folded open to a page about Dorr Mountain, a map of Mount Desert Island, and a cobalt blue fleece pullover covered with what appeared to be dog hair. After unwrapping myself from the survival blanket and removing the waterproof anorak, I donned the pullover, then put the anorak back on, and again wrapped myself in foil. Acadia National Park! Mount Desert Island! (Let me note in passing that in mentally pronouncing Desert, I correctly stressed the second syllable, making the word sound like dessert, as in chocolate mousse, as opposed to the Sahara. French: Ile des Monts Deserts, Isle of the Barren Mountains.) The coast of northern Maine! No wonder the weather was cool and foggy! But the flashlight, the knife, the first-aid kit, and the water? What fool had put survival gear in a dog’s pack? The essentials belonged with the person, not with the dog!

  The dogpack also contained something that utterly mystified me, namely, fourteen pounds of plain, uncooked generic-brand rice in plastic bags that had never been opened: two five-pound bags, two two-pound bags. All four packages of rice were separately sealed in extra-strong food-storage bags. I could understand why someone had wanted to guard against having the original packaging give way and fill the saddlebags with loose rice. But why set out with this ludicrous quantity of rice? Clearly, the two dogs had an Asian owner with a morbid fear of starvation. I decided that the owner, Holly Winter, had anglicized her name or taken her husband’s last name.

  Comforted by the certainty that I, at least, was not about to die of hunger, dehydration, or hypothermia, I drank some of the spring water and used the handy little fabric bowl to water the dogs. With the towels, the water, and the first-aid kit, I bathed my wounds and patched myself together. By now, New England being what it is, the temperature was abruptly shifting from too cold to too hot. As the fog evaporated, land appeared in the valley below. Sunlight beat on the side of a hill or mountain opposite this one. If I could see, I could be seen. The red of my day pack and the matching red of the dogs’ gear might have been selected to grab attention. Minute by minute, the ledge became increasingly exposed. Had I wanted to attract human help, I’d have had to do nothing but wait. Far from wanting to summon human rescuers, I felt an ardent desire to shun people in favor of Holly Winter’s self-possessed dogs. If necessary, I’d steal them. I felt sure that I needed them more than she did.

  After an abortive effort to fasten my day pack to the male dog’s vest, I decided to abandon the heavy, bulky bags of rice. Without them, the female’s saddlebags had room for my own pack and its contents. It seemed unfair to ask her to haul everything, but I reminded myself that she was now carrying less weight than when her pack had held the water we’d drunk and those fourteen foolish pounds of rice. Still, I promised myself that if she showed any discomfort, I’d transfer her burden to the male’s powerful shoulders. Leave nothing but your footprints, I thought, with no memory of where I’d learned the maxim. I swore to myself that I’d return here to retrieve the plastic bags of rice.

  Until now, I had, perhaps unwisely, trusted my new companions to stick around. Afraid that they’d desert me once I began to move, I took their leashes. Far from objecting, the dogs shook themselves all over and bounced around with a gleeful eagerness to get going. Yes, but where? The open page of the guidebook had originally been headed Dorr Mountain: A Long, Difficult Hike over a Quiet Mountain. Someone had scratched out the words Long, Difficult and scrawled in their place Pleasant. I tried to read the paragraphs about the long, difficult or, alternatively, pleasant hike, but by the time I got to the end, the beginning was swimming in my head. The page opposite the description showed a map. Two landmarks on it were blessedly familiar: Cadillac Mountain and the town of Bar Harbor. Dorr Mountain appeared to the right of Cadillac. Many trails led to its summit. At the bottom of its east face was a tiny body of water called The Tarn. Visible directly below me now was a small pond, an elongated oval of water shaped just like the one on the map. Therefore, I was on Dorr’s east face. The traffic I’d heard earlier was now visible. Cars, vans, motor homes, and an occasional pickup passed along a strip of blacktop on the far side of The Tarn. On the map, the road was labeled Route 3. My malfunctioning brain managed to define tarn: a glacial pond. Even in my demented state, I found it peculiar and offensive that anyone would have routed a paved road and busy traffic along the shores of an interesting geographical feature. Still, The Tarn would serve as a goal. The map showed two parking areas nearby. With luck, the keys I’d found in my backpack would fit one of the vehicles in one of the lots.

  Despite my desire to avoid people, especially this Winter person, who’d certainly reclaim her dogs, I set out to make my way down what I now felt confident was Dorr Mountain, which, I should add, from my present perspective rather than the one I made do with then, rises to the less than Alpine height of 1,270 feet above sea level. Cadillac, the highest peak on Mount Desert Island, soars to 1,532 feet. By the standards of the Rockies, it’s an island of hills, of course, but these are granite hills, and many rise not merely from sea level, but directly from the breakers of the Atlantic. In other words, I have to make the disappointing confession that although I’m crazy about those books of the “How I Stupidly Went to Some Godawful Place and Almost Died” genre, Acadia National Park is the opposite of godawful. Also, I now realize that I hadn’t come all that close to dying.

  Still, bushwhacking across and down the face of the little mountain was out of the question; the descent was impossibly steep, and the remains of ancient rock slides lay everywhere. The guidebook map showed trails running up and down Dorr. I found one only by blundering after the dogs, who headed uphill, stopping occasionally to sniff undergrowth or mark territory. The female lifted her leg almost as high and often as the male did. To my annoyance, when we reached a stretch of damp earth, both dogs began to scarf down mud with apparent enjoyment. Lingering as the dogs feasted on their disgusting snack, I could hear hikers on what was evidently one of the trails up Dorr’s east face. The brightening sky was hatching a crop of tourists. Refreshed and energized from glutting themselves, the dogs took the lead. If I intended to stay with them, I could do nothing but cling to their taut leashes and follow.

  In almost no time, we came to a trail paved with beaten earth and smooth rock. With no hesitation, the dogs turned right and, only a minute or two later, hauled me past a fork in the trail and a cedar post that bore wooden trail markers. Feeling frighten
ed and confused, I knew I should read the trail signs and consult the guidebook, but I lacked the strength to stop the dogs. The trail rapidly became more a piece of monumental outdoor sculpture than a woodland path, a massive staircase that melded into the land as if Nature herself had constructed it, with each wide stone step neatly and solidly set between its higher and lower neighbors. Trees, both evergreen and deciduous, loomed overhead, and wild vegetation edged the stones as decoratively as a tasteful gardener’s carefully selected groundcover. The effect was at once cozy and otherworldly, as if gentle giants had lumbered out of the pages of a fantasy novel to carve an enchanted route through this sloping mass of shattered boulders.

  Now and then, the trail ran uphill, and I worried that my guides were leading me in the wrong direction, but we eventually reached an intersection, where the dogs decided all on their own to take a short break that they devoted to marking another cedar post. Fastened to it were wooden arrows. One confirmed my guess that this was the Dorr Mountain East Face Trail. According to two arrows marking the right-hand turn, it led to the Kurt Diederich Trail and, at a distance of only four-tenths of a mile, The Tarn.

  The dogs selected that trail. Happy with the route, they charged at a dangerous pace down flight after flight of stone steps, which proved damp and treacherous. Ignoring my near-falls, quiet gasps, and frantic entreaties, the beasts bounced and dashed downward. At moments, I may have flown through the air. To the surprise of a pair of tourists, a man and a woman, these maddeningly agile dogs dashed down the final flights of steps and exploded into a picturesque clearing where giant, flat stones formed a naturalistic mosaic. A little stream passed beneath the stone trail to empty into a pond: The Tarn. Close behind the dogs, I frantically fought to stay upright while maintaining my grip on the leads. The first thing I noticed about the woman tourist was that she was not Asian and therefore not the dreaded Holly Winter hellbent on stealing her dogs back. In fact, she was a Caucasian woman in her mid thirties who had prepared for what was apparently going to be a hike by protecting her feet with open-toed, high-heeled sandals. She wore yellow shorts and a T-shirt that read Cool as a Moose, Bar Harbor, Maine. She carried a small straw purse decorated with artificial flowers. Her friend wore the same T-shirt over the men’s version of her yellow shorts. His sandals had flat soles. He carried nothing but a video camera. I was back in civilization.

  It was the man who greeted me jovially by asking, “Who’s taking who for a walk here, huh?”

  I didn’t mind the rib-poking. On the contrary, I felt grateful to the unsuitably dressed couple for giving me the chance to catch my balance and my breath. The dogs had abruptly abandoned their hell-for-leather forward dash to devote themselves to performing a song-and-dance routine for the tourists. The a cappella music consisted of prolonged peals of a repeated syllable: Woo-woo-woo! Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo! The male spun twice around in a circle. His polished, show-off manner suggested that he was executing a well-practiced trick. Perhaps hampered by her pack, the female settled for wagging her whole body to the rhythm of her tail. Then, as if on cue, the dogs planted themselves in neat sits in front of the hypnotized couple and, in unison, raised their right paws. I couldn’t tell whether they were offering to shake hands or were simply waving. By now, the man had the video camera going.

  “Look, Harold!” the woman exclaimed. “That one’s wearing a backpack! Isn’t that cute?” To me, however, she said, “It looks awfully heavy.”

  “Making the dog do all the work, huh?” agreed Harold, eyeing the absence of a pack on my own back.

  I merely said yes.

  “Looks like you took a tumble,” he said. “You all right?”

  “A little scratched,” I replied. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Some old guy got killed here today,” the man reported. “Fell on the rocks.”

  Smiling with undisguised excitement, the woman added, “Right near here!” If she’d been passing along the news that the Second Coming had just occurred at the summit of Dorr, she couldn’t have sounded happier. “On something called the Ladder Trail,” she went on. “Would you happen to know where that is?”

  “I don’t know my way around here.” By here, I meant the world.

  The woman scornfully pointed to a legend carved into the stone of the staircase I’d just descended. Kurt Diederich’s Climb, I read. A short time earlier, I’d seen the name on a trail sign. Shortly before that, I’d read it on the map in the guidebook. Even so, the words looked brand new.

  “The Nature Center’s right down that way.” The man pointed to one of several well-worn trails. “And the spring. Not worth visiting.” He glanced at his partner. “Well, I guess we’ll be on our way.” Equipped only with the video camera and the contents of the woman’s purse, the pair took a few steps toward the start of Kurt Diederich’s Climb. The man looked back. “Nice huskies,” he said.

  All on their own, the words seemed to activate a tape recorder stored in my throat. “Thank you,” I said automatically. “Actually, they’re Alaskan malamutes. Bigger than Siberian huskies. All malamutes have brown eyes.”

  “Well, beautiful dogs, whatever they are,” the man said in parting.

  The correction had leaped from my lips without the aid of my mangled brain. I looked at the dogs, who had transferred their attention from the tourists to me. “Alaskan malamutes,” I said. “Of course. Alaskan malamutes.” The syllables fit the shape of my vocal cords. I’d uttered them thousands of times. Strangers had admired my huskies. “Thank you,” I’d replied. “Actually, they’re Alaskan malamutes.”

  I was not, after all, stealing these oddly friendly and staggeringly beautiful dogs. On the contrary, they were miraculously my own.

  I felt ferociously proud. My dogs.

  Chapter Three

  IF THE DOGS WERE MINE, so were the dogpacks, which, I now realized, matched the bright red of my own backpack. Pretty corny, that. A bit too much like the dressed-as-twins tourist couple I’d just met. In panic—was I, like the high-heeled hiker, the female half of a human twin set?—I examined the third finger of my left hand. It was bare. Good! If I had a husband, at least we did not have a traditional marriage. Or maybe we didn’t have a traditional American marriage. All that rice in the dogpack? The Asian owner. Myself! Holly Winter, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a right-handed Asian woman with a polysyllabic vocabulary and utterly magnificent dogs. He, Mr. Winter, was American. Or English? But we’d been joined in holy matrimony in the Far Eastern rite of my native culture. Back home at 256 Concord Avenue, our address, a ceremonial symbol of our union lay reverently preserved in the bejeweled cask handed down from generation to generation in what I somehow suspected was my devoutly religious family.

  The Asian marriage fantasy only temporarily distracted me from thinking about the nameless man who’d fallen to his death. The ghoulish tourists had been heading up. I’d just come down. Therefore, I must have been nearby when the man died, right? This sense of jeopardy? And responsibility? Since the miraculous arrival of the dogs, my fear had begun to lift a bit, yet there remained a biting feeling of danger. For the first time, I desperately wanted to get away from here. My anxiety now had a practical element. Although I was feeling physically and mentally better by the moment, the prospect of being questioned by park rangers about the fatal accident scared me silly. I’d be unable to answer simple questions about where I’d been and what I’d done today. The dogs might be taken from me! We had to leave right now.

  The male tourist had pointed to a trail that led to a spring that wasn’t worth seeing and to something called the Nature Center. I’d seen the name on the map. The place had a parking lot. And park rangers? I had no idea, of course, where I’d parked my car. I felt sure that I had one. After all, I had a ring of keys, and the dogs and I had arrived here in something. I somehow imagined my car as a vehicle befitting my splendid dogs: a luxurious four-by-four with leather upholstery and a great sound system. A Land Rover. A Mercedes. No, a Bentley! That was it! A Bentl
ey! Dogs like these traveled in magnificence. I’d know my Bentley anywhere. It would, of course, have Massachusetts plates.

  More to the point, the dogs would know their Bentley anywhere. Better yet, they’d remember where it was. Looking to the dogs for direction, I let their leads go loose. In uninformative fashion, they sniffed the ground, anointed a couple of trees, and then looked at me. For direction! I felt ashamed of myself for letting them down. Having no idea what else to do, I took a few random steps and said brightly, “Let’s go! Come on, guys! Let’s go!” After pitying the poor creatures who evidently relied on me to take the lead, I found it disconcerting to have them suddenly strike out down a trail with swaggering self-confidence. To my relief, the path they chose was not the one to the Nature Center. Rather, it was a flat continuation of Kurt Diederich’s Climb that went past The Tarn and soon led to a small parking area next to a substantial blacktopped road. Route 3? Certainly.

  The small lot was evidently not where I’d parked my Bentley. Tired-looking parents and a large number of screaming children were piling into an admirable red van with mountain bikes on a carrier at the back and a sea kayak on top. It had a Michigan plate. A new cream-colored VW bug was from Massachusetts. It would barely have held one of these dogs, never mind both of them and a driver, too. Besides, it wasn’t a Bentley. Neither was anything else in sight. To my chagrin, the dogs unhesitatingly made for the oldest and most battered-looking car in the lot. The blue, dirt-covered Ford Bronco had, damn it, a Mass. plate and a lock on the driver’s side door that fit one of the keys on my ring. The floor mats in front were decorated with large, stylized paw prints. Echoing the motif, dog hair was interwoven with fabric through the car. The windows bore translucent designs of what I guess should be called “saliva art” or perhaps “tongue painting.” The rear passenger seat was folded down. Tucked between it and the driver’s seat was a woman’s leather shoulder bag. It contained a wallet, a cosmetics bag, a purse-size photo album, tissues, pens, a steno pad, and other pocketbook junk. In the back were an old blanket, a couple of stainless steel dog bowls, and two big bottles of Maine spring water.