"No," Patience continued, shaking her head, "I can do it from here."
Anna continued to hold her hand over the mouthpiece, trying to digest her daughter's confidence. She realized she was experiencing something very much like skepticism, and tried to push the thought from her mind. She of all people shouldn't be skeptical, she of all people mustn't doubt her daughter. She herself was a dowser.
The press secretary continued to plead with Anna Avery, and from the governor's office in the capital he thought he was wearing her down. He thought by her silence that she was about to give in, and any minute he would be offering to send a police cruiser to Landaff to pick the girl up. He was truly shocked when Anna finally interrupted him, saying, "Why don't you send someone up here with some maps of the mountain? Good, up-to-date maps of the terrain up there?"
The press secretary was unfamiliar with map dowsing, and
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couldn't figure out why in the name of God the woman wanted "good, up-to-date maps." He tried to recall what the woman had been like in high school, whether there was anything about her that had struck him at the time as patently insane, but he could not remember anything specific.
He could certainly not remember the woman having any interest in voodoo, witchcraft, or the supernatural. He started to remind her how little time there was, but she cut him off, and explained to him patiently how Patience might be of service.
The press secretary listened. Perhaps it was because he feared time was running out; perhaps it was because Anna Avery was always extremely eloquent when it came to dowsing; and perhaps it was because he believed that once the cruiser arrived in Landaff, common sense would prevail and the mother would bundle her daughter up and pile her into the car with the state police; but the press secretary listened to Anna Avery, and when he got off the phone with her, he sent a pair of troopers to Landaff with the latest topographic maps of Mount Ira Allen.
While the officers and Anna and young Laura Avery watched, eleven-year-old Patience unfolded the maps on the kitchen table, and knelt over them on a chair. She held in her hand a thin metal chain, the sort that is used often to hold keys. Dangling from one end of the chain was a shard of blue glassthick, opaque, and filed to a smooth finish. It was shaped roughly like a long and flat triangle, although no two sides were the same length.
She grasped the chain between her thumb and forefinger, draping the end without the weight over her wrist and the back of her hand, and dangled the small glass dagger over the maps spread out before her. She rested her elbow on an edge of the table for stability, so her arm became a fulcrum, and then mouthed to herself a variety of questions, some of which her audience could read from her lips. Did the plane crash here? Or here? Was it higher? Higher? Higher?
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The glass pendulum swung fore and aft in her hand, sometimes rolling clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise, sometimes following the wavy red ripples that comprised Mount Ira Allen. She passed numbers reading 2100, 2600, 3300, and skirted ponds with names like Goshen and Vengeance and Peacham. The little girl dowser periodically raised and lowered her arm, occasionally moving her elbow around the edge of the table.
And over her shoulder, the state troopers would glance up periodically at the clock on the shelf by the door.
Abruptly she looked up at the two men, and pushed her index finger into the map. "They're right here," she said, resting her pendulum beside the spot. "They're right beside their airplane."
"They couldn't be there," one of the troopers said reflexively, looking at the map. "That's the west side of the mountain." Given the plane's speed of descent, the Civil Air Patrol had focused their search on the eastern side of the mountain. It didn't seem possible that the governor's son could have brought the plane over the top of Mount Ira Allen.
"I'm telling you, they're right here," she said, her voice growing petulant. She turned her head to read the words and numbers by her finger: The elevation was 3800 feet, not far from the summit, and the pair were just off of something called Deer Leap, a hiking trail open only in the summer.
Anna Avery stood by her daughter, and told the troopers that Patience was correct. They had to have faith, they had to look for the pair beside Deer Leap. At this point, what could they lose? Reluctantly, the troopers radioed the information to the state police barracks in Montpelier, and to the Civil Air Patrol. A search party was dispatched to the area, but principally to appease the families of the two victims. No official in the state capital held out any serious hope that the plane would be where the little girl from Landaff claimed that it was. If she had picked a spot on the eastern side of the mountain, maybe ...
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The governor's son and his friend were found just before sunset, when the first heavy flakes of March snow were beginning to fall upon Deer Leap. Although the governor's son had a broken ankle and his friend had what would prove to be second and third-degree burns over much of his upper body, both men had survived the crash. They were cold, they were miserable, they were hungry. But they were very much alive.
And they were exactly where Patience Avery had said they would be.
In shape, in size, in sheer accessibility, there may be no more perfect mountain in this world than Mount Republic. It is not tall, although it is one of the higher mountains in Vermont, but its slopes rise to the sky on all sides with a symmetry that is astonishing. Its mold was a giant teacup, pressed firmly into the molten mud that was once this planet, and then removed when the mud had cooled and the mountain was made. Its shape has allowed trees to grow along its sides in lush tiered rows that in the fall look like the bright red and yellow stripes of a rainbow. In the winter, when the mountain is white, it becomes albino white, a white more ghostly and sublime than the chain of towers to the east that have commandeered that word for their name. Its summit is almost flat. Its peak is one grown man taller than four thousand feet. It is the highest of the cluster of mountains that comprise the Powder Peak Ski Resort.
On a magnificent summer day like today, I still get a little boy's pleasure from riding the chair lift, even if the purpose of the ridelike todayis all business. We need to get to the top of the mountain.
Riding the chair lift now is very different from riding it in the winter. In the winter, the chair lift seems clunky, slow, anddespite its eerie quietalmost primitive. But it is the pace that is most frustrating, especially to a skier, whose body has been conditioned that morning or afternoon to moving
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rapidly down hills. Not at a snail's pace up them. Besides, time is money at a ski resort, and the more time one spends on the chair lift, the less time one spends actually skiing.
In the summer, however, the chair lifts leisurely pace is a delight, a Ferris wheel that seems to go up forever. The slopes that comprise Mount Republic spread out below the lift in luxuriant green blankets, and in the stillness that overtakes the resort this time of year, one can hear the sound of the Chittenden and Deering Rivers as they rush through the valleys at the base of the mountain. At the top of the liftat the top of virtually every lift in the Power Peak networkare views of the Green Mountains to the north and south that cause even the most jaded tourist and neon-clad skier to sigh. In early May and October, the top of Mount Mansfielda mountain sharper, higher, and colder than Republicis often capped by a white halo, a reminder in the spring of what is behind us, and a reminder in autumn of what is ahead.
There isn't a cloud in the sky Friday afternoon, but there's just enough wind to buffer the worst heat from the sun. The group of us riding the chair lift today, surveyors and engineers and the senior executives from Powder Peak, ride the Mount Republic lift largely in silence, savoring the sun after winter.
Beside me on the lift is Goddard Healy, president of Schuss Limited, the corporation that owns Powder Peak in the east, and two ski resorts in the west: one in northern California and one in British Columbia. Healy flew in from the Schuss offices in San Francisco yesterday to see firsthand the Powder Peak expa
nsion plans he has studied on paper for weeks.
"Know anyone who's ever seen a catamount around here?" he asks me out of the blue as we approach the summit, and prepare to jump off the lift.
"No. I doubt anyone's seen a catamount in Vermont in fifty years. At least with a camera," I tell him. And then, correcting myself, I add, "I doubt anyone has been able to prove they've seen a catamount in fifty years. A couple people claim to see one every year."
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Healy must be twenty years older than me, but I can see by the size of his arms and his chest that he could probably wrestle one of those wildcats to the ground if he had to. He was a member of the Canadian Olympic Ski team thirty-five, maybe forty years ago, and finished as high as fifth one year. He has always struck me as the sort of manager capable of inspiring great loyalty from the people who work for him, and tremendous disgust from his opponents. People such as Reedy McClure. Reedy contends that Healy would cut down half the National Forest in Vermont if he could, drive whatever animals remain into zoos, and build ski resorts and golf courses and vacation homes.
Reedy is wrong. Goddard Healy hates golf.
I don't particularly like Healy, but I don't mind working for the people who work for him. There are sufficient roadblocks and restrictions in Vermont's development laws to prevent a developer like Healy from turning the state into Ski World.
"Actually, it was more like a hundred years," Healy says. "Not fifty. No one has been able to photograph a catamount in these parts since the end of the last century. There was an article about them in a local magazine I saw at the hotel last night. Prettiest cat I've ever seen. How much do you suppose they weigh?"
The fellow running the lift at the top of the mountain slows it to a crawl so Goddard and I can hop out of our seats and rush to the side, ducking the chairs right behind us.
"I'm not going to answer that question, Goddard," I say, when we're safely off to the side. "That article probably told you exactly how much a catamount is supposed to weigh."
He smiles. "About seventy-five to a hundred pounds. But it's a mean hundred pounds, Scottie."
Behind us the rest of the group jumps off the lift in pairs, until there are eight of us assembled at the top of the mountain. It's an odd group. Goddard and I and Ian Rawls, the managing director of Powder Peak, are wearing neckties and blazers, while the rest of the group are clad in blue jeans and
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sport shirts. These are the engineers and builders who will drop pylons from helicopters for the new high-speed gondola this fall, and then sweep clear wide swaths of evergreens next spring.
"The primary trail will run about two-and-a-quarter miles from this spot," Ian Rawls tells Goddard, wiping a strand of blond hair from his forehead, and then pointing down toward the base lodge. "Right now, it will be intermediate to advanced. A few moguls."
One of the engineers, Gertrude and Jeanette Scutter's nephew, unrolls a geographic footprint of this side of the mountain, indicating with a series of dots and dashes where the proposed trails will be. The dots and dashes cut through some of the thickest forests that remain on the mountain. Healy glances briefly at the map, and then walks toward the top of one of Powder Peak's most popular trails, a wide and gentle descent that goes on for three miles. I wander beside him, and watch as he stares pensively into the valley.
"You got yourself a pretty mountain here, Scottie. It's not like the towers in the west that'll sometimes take my breath away. But it's a pretty place to be. Calming."
"These days, it's even quieter than usual."
"How so?"
I put my finger to my lips. "Listen carefully."
Together we stand at the top of the mountain, ignoring the occasional snippets of conversation that drift our way from the small group still standing back by the top of the chair lift.
"Hear anything?" I ask.
"Nope. Just the wind."
"Right. See where the trail cuts to the left," I begin, pointing at the first curve. "Straight past that turn, about a hundred yards below it, there's a pretty good-sized tributary to the Chittenden River. Normally, this time of year, you can hear it on the top of the mountain."
"Why can't we hear it right now?"
"Might be as simple as a beaver dam. Might be the fact that
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all the rivers and streams around here are well below where they should be this time of year. At the base of the mountain, the Chittenden's running about twenty percent below normal, and the water flow's way down."
"The drought?"
"The drought now. The lack of snow this winter."
Healy thinks for a moment. "What are you suggesting, Scottie? A drought is a short-term problem. The sort of thing that comes, brings a little inconvenience, and then goes. I certainly don't see it interfering with long-range expansion plans."
"Maybe not. But the water in the Chittenden is the water you need to make snow here. It's possible the water flow could fall far enough this summer that you won't receive the permits to tap it for quite some time."
"The Chittenden River is not going to dry up."
"Doesn't have to. There are trout in the Chittenden, which means we can't touch it if the water flow falls below a certain speed. You should also know that there's a little pond back there. About a half-mile off the trail. Come every spring, a fair number of bears come out of hibernation and spend their summer there."
"And you're about to tell me that the pond is part of the proposed water system."
"I had planned to, yes."
Healy sighs, and rubs his eyes in frustration. "Shit."
"I must confess, Goddard, I'm thrilled with this new environmental sensitivity of yours. But clearly there's something behind it. This just isn't you."
He reaches into the breast pocket of his blazer, and removes his wallet. He flips it open to a small plastic sleeve in which there is a photograph of a young woman half his age, with raven's black hair and misty green eyes.
"Her name is Tanya. I met her in British Columbia."
I bite my tongue and try not to laugh. "Environmental Defense Fund?"
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"Greenpeace."
"Well. Guess that explains it..."
"Nope. Best piece of ass I've ever had. That explains it."
Archer Moody stands up at church Sunday morning, a thin man in his thirties with great bags under his eyes. Sitting in the pew beside him is his wife, Sally, and their little boys, one about six and one about seven. All eyes in the congregation turn toward him, wondering what this normally reticent, shy farmer is going to share with us. It can't possibly be good news: Nothing good ever happens to the Moodys.
"It's gotta be cancer," Gertrude Scutter whispers to Laura, turning around in her pew to face us. "Moodys all get it, you know."
Archer coughs once, nervously, before speaking, and then asks the congregation to pray for rain. "First cutting is still weeks away," he explains, referring to the hay in his southern fields. "And at this pace, we might not get a second. And I'm worried about the corn. We all are. So please ask the Lord for a couple days of good, gentle rain."
Amidst the chorus of amens from the farmers scattered throughout the church, I can overhear Jeanette Scutter tell her sister, Gertrude, "Idiot. Man's an idiot. You ever hear of a bad, gentle rain?"
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5
I do not come from a family of men the way that Laura comes from a family of women. I grew up with a mother, and was surrounded at holidays by what I assumed was a fairly normal complement of grandmothers and aunts and cousins who happened to be female.
But I have no sisters, and so when my mother died soon after I left home for college in Massachusetts, I was left with an immediate family of men. A father and a brother. My father has not remarried, and now, at seventy-one, I doubt that he will. My brother, four years my junior, is a high school principal. He is married to an English teacher at the rival high school, a conflict of little consequence since neither schoo
l fields a football team of any merit. He and his wife have three children, two boys and a girl, and they live in the same suburb of New York City in which my brother and I grew up. They
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