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He looked at me. "Really?" then added, as if for the record: "I love oatmeal."

What about some of that cheese?"

He shook his head. "Flung."

"Peanuts?"

Flung."

"Spam?"

"Really flung."

This was beginning to sound a trifle grave. "What about the baloney?"

"Oh, I ate that at Amicalola." he said, as if i1 had been weeks ago, then added in a tone of sudden magnanimous concession, "Hey, I'm happy with a cup of coffee and a couple of Litle Deb-byes."

I gave a small grimace. "I le􀅌 the Litle Debbies, too."

His face expanded. "You le􀅌 the Litle Debbies?"

I nodded apologe􀆟cally.

"All of them?"

I nodded.

He breathed out hard. This really was grave-a serious challenge, apart from anything else, to his promised equanimity. We decided we had beter take inventory. We cleared a space on a groundsheet and pooled our commissary. It was startlingly austere-some dried noodles, one bag of rice, raisins, coffee, salt, a good supply of candy bars, and toilet paper. That was about it.

We breakfasted on a Snickers bar and coffee, packed up our camp, hoisted our packs with a sideways stagger, and set off once again.

"I can't believe you le􀅌 the Litle Debbies," Katz said, and immediately began to fall behind.

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views and leave you muddled and without bearings. They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie and you know you are in a big space. Stand in a woods and you only sense it. They are a vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, gene􀆟cally challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, some ineffable thing that makes you sense an atmosphere of pregnant doom with every step and leaves you profoundly aware that you are out of your element and ought to keep your ears pricked. Though you tell yourself it's preposterous, you can't quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene (it's just a woods for goodness sake), but really you are jumpier than Don Knots with pistol drawn. Every sudden noise-- the crack of a falling limb, the crash of a bol􀆟ng deer- makes you spin in alarm and s􀆟fle a plea for mercy. Whatever mechanism within you is responsible for adrenaline, it has never been so sleek and polished, so keenly poised to pump out a warming squirt of adrenal fluid. Even asleep, you are a coiled spring.

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The ines􀆟mably priggish and 􀆟resome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid Indeed,

longer and more carefully reflec􀆟ve, with messages along the lines of "So here I am at Springer at last. I don't know what the coming weeks hold for me, but my faith In the Lord is strong and I know I have the love and support of my family. Mom and Pookie, this trip is for you," and so on.

I waited for Katz for three-quarters of an hour, then went looking for him. The light was fading and the air was taking on an evening chill. I walked and walked, down the hill and through the endless groves of trees, back over ground that I had gratefully put behind me forever, or so I had thought. Several 􀆟mes I called his name and listened, but there was nothing. I walked on and on, over fallen trees I had struggled over hours before, down slopes I could now only dimly recall. My grandmother could have got this far, I kept thinking. Finally, I rounded a bend and there he was stumbling towards me, wild-haired and one-gloved and nearer hysteria than I have ever seen a grown person.

It was hard to get the full story out of him in a coherent flow, because he was so furious, but I gathered he had thrown many items from his pack over a cliff in a temper. None of the things that had been dangling from the outside were there any longer.

"What did you get rid of?" I asked, trying not to betray too much alarm.

"Heavy fucking shit, that's what. The pepperoni, the rice, the brown sugar, the Spam, I don't know what all. Lots. Fuck." Katz was almost catalep􀆟c with displeasure. He acted as if he had been deeply betrayed by the trail. It wasn't, I guess, what he had expected.

I saw his glove lying in the path thirty yards back and went to retrieve it.

"OK," I said when I returned, "you haven't got too far to go."

"How far?"

"Maybe a mile."

"Shit," he said biterly.

"I'll take your pack." I li􀅌ed it onto my back. It wasn't exactly empty now, but it was decidedly moderate in weight. God knows what he had thrown out.

We trudged up the hill to the summit in the enveloping dusk. A few hundred yards beyond the summit was a campsite with a wooden shelter in a big grassy clearing against a backdrop of dark trees. There were a lot of people there, far more than I'd expected this early in the season. The shelter--a basic, three-sided affair with a sloping roof—looked crowded, and a dozen or so tents were scatered around the open ground. Nearly everywhere there was the hiss of litle campstoves, threads of rising food smoke, and the movements of lanky young people.

I found us a site on the edge of the clearing, almost in the woods, off by ourselves.

"I don't know how to put up my tent," Katz said in a petulant tone.

"Well, I'll put it up for you then." You big so􀅌 flabby baby. Suddenly I was very 􀆟red.

He sat on a log and watched me put up his tent. When I finished, he pushed in his pad and sleeping bag and crawled in a􀅌er. I busied myself with my tent, fussily made it into a litle home. When I completed my work and straightened up, I realized there was no sound or movement from within his.

"Have you gone to bed?" I said, aghast.

"Yump," he replied in a kind of affirma􀆟ve growl.

"That's it? You've re􀆟red? With no dinner?"

"Yump."

I looked to the woods, too. "Yeah, probably. We've s􀆟ll gota do it."

I hoisted my pack and took a backward stagger under the weight (It would be days before I could do this with anything approaching aplomb), jerked 􀆟ght the belt, and trudged off. At the edge of the woods, I glanced back to make sure Katz was following. Ahead of me spread a vast, stark world of winter-dead trees. I stepped portentously on to the path, a fragment of the original Appalachian Trail from the days when it passed here en route from Mount Oglethorpe to Springer.

The date was March 9, 1996. We were on our way.

The route led down into a wooded valley with a chuckling stream edged with britle ice, which the path followed for perhaps half a mile before taking us steeply up into denser woods. This was, it quickly became evident, the base of the first big hill, Frosty Mountain, and it was immediately taxing. The sun was shining and the sky was a hearty blue, but everything at ground level was brown--brown trees, brown earth, frozen brown leaves-and the cold was unyielding. I trudged perhaps a hundred feet up the hill, then stopped, bug-eyed, breathing hard, heart kabooming alarmingly. Katz was already falling behind and pan􀆟ng even harder. I pressed on.

It was hell. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape-hopelessly. The pack weighed way too much. Way too much. I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so Ill prepared. Every step was a struggle.

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiri􀆟ng discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what's to come. Between the curtain of trees at every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Each 􀆟me you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more s􀆟ll, un􀆟l it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long. Eventually you reach a height where you can see the tops of the topmost trees, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and your faltering spirit s􀆟rs-- nearly there now!--but this Is a pi􀆟less decep􀆟on. The elusive summit con􀆟nually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each 􀆟me the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unatainable, as before. S􀆟ll, you stagger on. What else can you do?

When, a􀅌er ages and ages, you finally reach the telltale world of truly high ground, where the chilled air smells of pine sap and the I don't know exactly when I lost track of Katz, but it was in the first couple of hours. At f first I would wait for him to catch up, bitching every step of the way and pausing a􀅌er each three or four shui 􀆟ng paces to wipe his brow and look sourly at his immediate future. It was painful to behold in every way. Eventually I waited to see him pull into view, just to conf rm that he was s􀆟ll coming, that he wasn't lying on the path palpita􀆟ng or hadn't thrown down his pack in disgust and gone looking for Wes Wisson. I would wait and wait. and eventually his shape would appear among the trees, breathing heavily, moving with incredible slowness, and talking in a loud, biter voice to himself. Halfway up the third big hill, the 3,400-foot-high

"Well, they repossessed my car, you see."

"Ah."

We talked a litle more about this and that--his mother, my mother, Des Moines. I told him what litle I knew about the trail and the wilderness life that awaited us. We setled that he would fly to New Hampshire the next Wednesday, we would spend two days making prepara􀆟ons, and then we'd hit the trail. For the first 􀆟me in months, I felt posi􀆟vely posi􀆟ve about this enterprise. Katz seemed remarkably upbeat, too, for someone who didn't have to do this at all.

My last words to him were, "So, how are you with bears?"

"Hey, they haven't got me yet!"

That's the spirit, I thought. Good old Katz. Good old anyone with a pulse and a willingness to go walking with me. A􀅌er he hung up, it occurred to me I hadn't asked him why he wanted to come. Katz was the one person I knew on earth who might be on the run from guys with names like Julio and Mr. Big. Anyway, I didn't care. I wasn't going to have to walk alone.

I found my wife at the kitchen sink and told her the good news. She was more reserved in her enthusiasm than I had hoped.

"You're going into the woods for weeks and weeks with a person you have barely seen for twenty-five years. Have you really thought this through?" (As if I have ever thought anything through.) "I thought you two ended up ge􀆫ng on each other's nerves in Europe. ·

"No." This was not quite correct. "We started off on each other's nerves. We ended up despising each other. But that was a long 􀆟me ago."

She gave me a look of some dubiety. "You have nothing in common."

"We have everything in common. We're forty-four years old. We'll talk about hemorrhoids and lower back pain and how we can't remember where we put anything, and the next night I 'II say, 'Hey, did I tell you about my back problems?' and he'll say, 'No, I don't think so,' and we'll do it all over again. It'll be great."

"It'll be hell."

"Yeah, I know" I said.

And so, I found myself, six days later, standing at our local airport watching a 􀆟n commuter plane containing Katz touch down and taxi to a halt on the tarmac twenty yards from the terminal. The hum of the propellers intensified for a moment then gradually stutered to a halt. and the plane's door-cum-stairway fell open. I tried to remember the last 􀆟me I had seen him. A􀅌er our summer in Europe, Katz had gone back to Des Moines and had become, in effect, Iowa's drug culture. He had par􀆟ed for years, un􀆟l there was no one le􀅌 to party with, then he had par􀆟ed with himself, alone in small apartments, in T-shirt and boxer shorts, with a botle and a Baggie of pot and a TV with rabbit ears. I remembered now that the last 􀆟me I had seen him was about five years earlier in a Denny's restaurant where I was taking my mother for breakfast. He was si􀆫ng in a booth with a haggard fellow who looked like his name would be Virgil Starkweather, tucking into pancakes and taking occasional illicit nips from a botle in a paper bag. It was eight in the morning and Katz looked very happy. He was always happy when he was drunk, and he was always drunk.

so easy. So I drop him off at the trailhead. Three days later he phones from Woody Gap again. He wants to go to the airport. 'Well, what about your wife?' I says. And he says, 'This 􀆟me I'm not going home.' "

"How far is it to Woody Gap?" I asked.

"Twenty-one miles from Springer. Doesn't seem much, does It? I mean, he'd come all the way from Ohio."

"So why did he quit so soon?"

"He said it wasn't what he expected it to be. They all say that. Just last week I had three ladies from California-- middle-aged gals, real nice, kind of giggly but, you know, nice--I dropped them off and they were in real high spirits. About four hours later they called and said they wanted to go home. They'd come all the way from California, you understand, spent God knows how much on airfares and equipment--I mean, they had the nicest stuff you ever saw, all brand new and top of the range--and they'd walked maybe a mile and a half before qui􀆫ng. Said it wasn't what they expected."

"What do they expect?"

"Who knows? Escalators maybe. It's hills and rocks and woods and a trail. You don't got to do a whole lot of scien􀆟fic research to work that out. But you'd be amazed how many people quit. Then again, I had a guy, oh about six weeks ago, who should a quit and didn't. He was coming off the trail. He'd walked from Maine on his own. It took him eight months, longer than it takes most people, and I don't think he'd seen anybody for the last several weeks. When he came off he was just a trembling wreck. I had his wife with me. She'd come to meet him, and he just fell into her arms and started weeping. Couldn't talk at all. He was like that all the way to the airport. I've never seen anybody so relieved to have anything done with, and I kept thinking, 'Well, you know, sir, hiking the Appalachian Trail is a voluntary endeavor,' but of course I didn't say anything."

"So can you tell when you drop people off whether they're gonna make it?"

"Prety generally."

"And do you think we'll make it?" said Katz.

He looked at us each in turn. "Oh, you'll make it all right," he replied, but his expression said otherwise.

Amicalola Falls Lodge was an aerie high on a mountainside, reached up a long, winding road through the woods. The man at the airport in Manchester had certainly seen the right weather forecast. It was piercingly, shockingly cold when we stepped from the car. A treacherous, icy wind seemed to dart around from every angle and then zip up sleeves and pant legs. "Jeezuss!" Katz cried in astonishment, as if somebody had just thrown a bucket of ice water over him, and scooted inside. I paid up and followed.

The lodge was modern and very warm, with an open lobby dominated by a stone f replace, and the sort of anonymously comfortable rooms you would find in a Holiday Inn. We parted for our rooms and agreed to rendezvous at seven. I got a Coke from a machine in the corridor, had a lavishly steamy shower involving many towels, inserted myself between crisp sheets (how long would it be 􀆟ll I enjoyed this kind of comfort again?) watched discouraging reports by happy, mindless people on the Weather Channel, and slept hardly at all.

I was up before daybreak and sat by the window watching as a pale dawn grudgingly exposed the surrounding landscape--a stark and seemingly boundless expanse of thick,

scampered. In 1993 a single outbreak of hantavirus killed thirty-two people in the southwestern United States, and the following year the disease claimed its first vic􀆟m on the AT when a hiker contracted it a􀅌er sleeping in a "rodent-infested shelter." (All AT shelters are rodent infested.) Among viruses, only rabies, ebola, and HIV are more certainly lethal. Again, there is no treatment.

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder. At least nine hikers (the actual number depends on which source you consult and how you define a hiker) have been murdered along the trail since 1974. Two young women would die while I was out there.

For various prac􀆟cal reasons, principally to do with the long, punishing winters of northern New England, there are only so many available months to hike the trail each year. If you start at the northern end, at Mount Katahdin in Maine, you must wait for the snows to clear in late May or June. If, on the other hand, you start in Georgia and head north, you must 􀆟me it to finish before mid-October, when the snows blow back in. Most people hike from south to north with spring, ideally keeping one step ahead of the worst of the hot weather and the more irksome and Infec􀆟ous of Insects. My Inten􀆟on was to start in the south in early March. I put aside six weeks for the first leg.

The precise length of the Appalachian Trail is a mater or interes􀆟ng uncertainty. The U.S. Na􀆟onal Park Service, which constantly dis􀆟nguishes Itself In a variety of ways, manages in a single leaf let to give the length of the trail as 2,155 miles and 2,200 miles. The official Appalachian Trail Guides, a set of eleven books each dealing with a par􀆟cular state or sec􀆟on, variously give the length as 2,144 miles, 2,147 miles, 2,159 miles, and "more than 2,150 miles." The Appalachian Trail Conference, the governing body, in 1993 put the trail length at exactly 2,146.7 miles, then changed for a couple of years to a hesitantly vague "more than 2,150 miles," but has recently returned to confident precision with a length of 2, 160.2 miles. In 1993, three people rolled a measuring wheel along its en􀆟re length and came up with a distance of 2,164.9 miles. At about the same 􀆟me, a careful measure based on a full set of U.S. Geological Survey maps put the distance at 2,718.3 miles.

What is certain is that it is a long way, and from either end It is not easy. The peaks of the Appalachian Trail are not par􀆟cularly formidable as mountains go--the highest, Clingmans Dome in Tennessee, tops out at a litle under 6,700 feet--but they are big enough and they go on and on. There are more than 350 peaks over 5,000 feet along the AT, and perhaps a thousand more in the vicinity. Altogether. It takes about five months, and five million steps, to walk the trail from end to end.

And of course on the AT you must lug on your back everything you need. It may seem obvious, but it came as a small shock to me to realize that this wasn't going to be even remotely like an amble through the English Cotswolds or Lake District, where you head off for the day with a haversack containing a packed lunch and a hiking map and at day's end re􀆟re from the hills to a convivial inn for a hot bath, a hearty meal, and a so􀅌 bed. Here you sleep outdoors and cook your own food. Few people manage to carry less than forty pounds, and when you're hauling that kind of weight, believe me, never for a moment does It escape your no􀆟ce. It is one thing to walk 2,000 miles, quite another to walk 2,000 miles with a wardrobe on your back.

though that was the original plan. It was conceived a century ago as a kind of woodland bank, a permanent repository of American 􀆟mber, when people grew alarmed at the rate at which American forests were falling. Its mandate was to manage and protect these resources for the na􀆟on. These were not intended to be parks. Private companies would be granted leases to extract minerals and harvest 􀆟mber, but player in the American 􀆟mber industry that was cu􀆫ng down trees faster than it replaced them. Moreover, it was doing this with the most sumptuous inefficiency. Eighty percent of its leasing arrangements lost money, o􀅌en vast amounts. In one typical deal, the Forest Service sold hundred-year-old lodgepole pines in the Targhee Na􀆟onal Forest in Idaho for about $2 each a􀅌er spending $4 per tree surveying the land, drawing up contracts, and, of course, building roads. Between 1989 and 1997, it lost an average of $242 million a year—almost $2 billion all told, according to the Wilderness Society. This is all so discouraging that I think we'll leave it here and return to our two lonely heroes trudging through the lost world of the Chatahoochee.

The forest we walked through now was really just a strapping adolescent. In 1890, a railroad man from Cincinna􀆟 named Henry C. Bagley came to this part of Georgia, saw the stately white pines and poplars, and was so moved by their towering majesty and abundance that he decided to chop them all down. They were worth a lot of money. Besides, freigh􀆟ng the 􀆟mber to northern mills would keep his railroad cars puffing. In consequence, over the next thirty years, nearly all the hills of northern Georgia were turned into sunny groves of stumps. By 1920, foresters in the South were taking away 15.4 billion board feet of 􀆟mber a year. It wasn't un􀆟l the 1930s, when the Chatahoochee Forest was officially formed, that nature was invited back in.

There is a strange frozen violence in a forest out of season. Every glade and dale seemed to have just completed some massive cataclysm. Downed trees lay across the path every fi􀅌y or sixty yards, o􀅌en with great bomb craters of dirt around their splayed roots. Dozens more lay ro􀆫ng on the slopes, and every third or fourth tree, it seemed, was leaning steeply on a neighbor. It was as if the trees couldn't wait to fall over, as if their sole purpose in the universal scheme of things was to grow big enough to topple with a really good, splintering crash. I was forever coming up to trees so precariously and weigh􀆟ly 􀆟pped over the path that I would waver, then scoot under, fearing the crush of really unfortunate 􀆟ming and imagining Katz coming along a few minutes later, regarding my wriggling legs and saying, "Shit, Bryson, what're you doing under there?" But no trees fell. Everywhere the woods were s􀆟ll and preternaturally quiet. Except for the occasional gurgle of running water and the 􀆟ny shuffle of wind-s􀆟rred leaves along the forest floor, there was almost never a sound.

The woods were silent because spring had not yet come. In a normal year we would be walking into the zes􀆞ul bounty of a southern mountain spring, through a radiant, produc􀆟ve, newborn world alive with the zip of insects and the fussy twiter of birds—a world burs􀆟ng with fresh wholesome air and that rich, velvety, lung-filing smell of chlorophyll you get when you push through low, leafy branches. Above all, there would be wild flowers in dazzling profusion, blossoming from every twig, pushing valiantly through the fer􀆟le liter on the forest floor, carpe􀆟ng every sunny slope and stream bank—trillium and trailing arbutus, Dutchmen's breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit, mandrake, violets, snowy bluets, butercups and bloodroot, dwarf iris, columbine and wood sorrel, and other

The woods were full of peril-- ratlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quan􀆟􀆟es of impure corn liquor and genera􀆟ons of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless r re ants and ravening blackfly; poison Ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scatering of moose lethally deranged by a parasi􀆟c worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them Into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and Into glacial lakes.

Literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard of a man who had stepped from his tent for a midnight pee and was swooped upon by a short-sighted hoot owl--the last the saw of his scalp It was dangling from talons pre􀆫ly silhoueted against a harvest moon--and of a young woman who was woken by a 􀆟ckle across her belly and peered into her sleeping bag to find a copperhead bunking down in the warmth between her legs. I heard four separate stories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and bears sharing tents for a few confused and lively moments; stories of people abruptly vaporized ("tweren't nothing le􀅌 of him but a scorch mark") by body-sized bolts of lightning when caught In sudden storms on high ridgelines; of tents crushed beneath falling trees, or eased off precipices on ballbearings of beaded rain and sent paragliding on to distant valley floors, or swept away by the watery wall of a flash fIood; of hikers beyond coun􀆟ng whose last experience was of trembling earth and the befuddled thought "Now what the------?"

It required only a litle light reading in adventure books end almost no imagina􀆟on to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a 􀆟ghtening circle or hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me. like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and a slaverous, chomping appe􀆟te for pink, plump, city-so􀅌ened flesh.

Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods--giardiasis, eastern equine encephali􀆟s, Rocky Mountain spoted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine encephali􀆟s, caused by the prick of a mosquito, atacks the brain and central nervous system. If you're lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around your neck. but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less arres􀆟ng Is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a 􀆟ny deer 􀆟ck. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erup􀆟ng in a posi􀆟ve fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fa􀆟gue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shoo􀆟ng pains in the extremi􀆟es, cardiac Irregulari􀆟es, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body func􀆟ons, and--hardly surprising, really-- chronic depression.

Then there is the litle-known family of organisms called hantaviruses, which swarm in the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and are hoovered into the human respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to s􀆟ck a breathing or if ice near them-- by lying down, say, on a sleeping pla􀆞orm over which Infected mice have recently

scampered. In 1993 a single outbreak of hantavirus killed thirty-two people in the southwestern United States, and the following year the disease claimed its first vic􀆟m on the AT when a hiker contracted it a􀅌er sleeping in a "rodent-infested shelter." (All AT shelters are rodent infested.) Among viruses, only rabies, ebola, and HIV are more certainly lethal. Again, there is no treatment.

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder. At least nine hikers (the actual number depends on which source you consult and how you def ne a hiker) have been murdered along the t rail since 1974. Two young women would die while I was out there.

For various prac􀆟cal reasons, principally to do with the long, punishing winters of northern New England, there are only so many available months to hike the trail each year. If you start at the northern end, at Mount Katahdin in Maine, you must wait for the snows to clear in late May or June. If, on the other hand, you start in Georgia and head north, you must 􀆟me it to finish before mid-October, when the snows blow back in. Most people hike from south to north with spring, ideally keeping one step ahead of the worst of the hot weather and the more irksome and Infec􀆟ous of insects. My Inten􀆟on was to start in the south in early March. I put aside six weeks for the first leg.

The precise length of the Appalachian Trail is a mater of interes􀆟ng uncertainty. The U.S. Na􀆟onal Park Service. which constantly dis􀆟nguishes Itself In a variety of ways, manages in a single leaf et to give the length of the trail as 2,155 miles and 2,200 miles. The official Appalachian Trail Guides. a set of eleven books each dealing with a par􀆟cular state or sec􀆟on, variously give the length as 2,144 miles, 2,147 miles, 2,159 miles, and "more than 2,150 miles." The Appalachian Trail Conference, the governing body, in 1993 put the t rail length at exactly 2,146.7 miles, then changed for a couple of years to a hesitantly vague "more than 2,150 miles," but has recently returned to confident precision with a length of 2,160.2 miles. In 1993, three people rolled a measuring wheel along its en􀆟re length and came up with a distance of 2,164.9 miles. At about the same 􀆟me, a careful measure based on a full set of U.S. Geological Survey maps put the distance at 2,118.3 miles.

What is certain is that it is a long way, and from either end it is not easy. The peaks of the Appalachian Trail are not par􀆟cularly formidable as mountains go--the highest, Clingmans Dome in Tennessee, tops out at a litle under 6,700 feet--but they are big enough and they go on and on. There are more than 350 peaks over 5,000 feet along the AT, and perhaps a thousand more in the vicinity. Altogether, it takes about five months and five million steps, to walk the trail from end to end.

And of course on the AT you must lug on your back everything you need. It may seem obvious, but it came as a small shock to me to realize that this wasn't going to be even remotely like an amble through the English Cotswolds or Lake District, where you head off for the day with a haversack containing a packed lunch and a hiking map and at day's end re􀆟re from the hills to a convivial Inn for a hot bath, a hearty meal, and a so􀅌 bed. Here you sleep outdoors and cook your own food. Few people manage to carry less than forty pounds, and when you're hauling that kind of weight, believe me, never for a moment does it escape your no􀆟ce. It is one thing to walk 2,000 miles, quite another to walk 2,000 miles with a wardrobe on your back.

I stood for a minute, speechless and flummoxed, too 􀆟red to be Indignant. Too 􀆟red to be hungry either, come to that. I crawled into my tent, brought in a water botle and book, laid out my knife and flashlight for purposes of nocturnal Illumina􀆟on and defense, and finally shimmied into the bag, more grateful than I have ever been to be horizontal. I was asleep in moments. I don't believe I have ever slept so well.

When I awoke, it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized a􀅌er a moment was my all my nigh􀆫me snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as If into a scrapbook of respiratory memories. My water botle was frozen solid. This seemed gra􀆟fyingly macho, and I examined it with interest, as If it were a rare mineral. I was surprisingly snug in my bag and in no hurry at all to put myself through the foolishness of climbing hills, so I just lay there as if under grave orders not to move. A􀅌er a while I became aware that Katz was moving around outside, grun􀆟ng so􀅌ly as if from aches and doing something that sounded improbably Industrious.

A􀅌er a minute or two, he came and crouched by my tent, his form a dark shadow on the fabric. He didn't ask if I was awake or anything, but just said in a quiet voice: "Was I, would you say, a complete asshole last night?"

"Yes you were, Stephen."

He was quiet a moment. "I'm making coffee." I gathered this was his way of an apology.

"That's very nice."

"Damn cold out here."

"And in here."

"My water botle froze."

"Mine, too."

I unzipped myself from my nylon womb and emerged on creaking joints. It seemed very strange--very novel--to be standing outdoors in long Johns. Katz was crouched over the campstove, boiling a pan of water. We seemed to be the only campers awake. It was cold, but perhaps just a trifle warmer than the day before, and a low dawn sun burning through the trees looked cau􀆟ously promising.

"How do you feel?" he said.

I flexed my legs experimentally. "Not too bad, actually."

"Me either."

He poured water into the filter cone. "I'm going to be good today." he promised.

"Good." I watched over his shoulder. "Is there a reason," I asked, "why you are filtering the coffee with toilet paper?"

"I, oh ... I threw out the filter papers."

I gave a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "They couldn't have weighed two ounces."

"I know, but they were great for throwing. Flutered all over." He dribbled on more water. "The toilet paper seems to be working OK, though."

We watched it drip through and were strangely proud. Our first refreshment in the wilderness. He handed me a cup of coffee. It was swimming in grounds and litle I leeks of pink 􀆟ssue, but it was piping hot, which was the main thing.

He gave me an apologe􀆟c look. "I threw out the brown sugar too. so there won't be any sugar for the oatmeal."

Ah. "Actually, there won't be any oatmeal for the oatmeal. I le􀅌 it in New Hampshire. "

rolling hills covered in ranks of bare trees and the meagerest dus􀆟ng of snow. It didn't look terribly forbidding --these weren't the Himalayas--but it didn't look like anything you would par􀆟cularly want to walk out into.

On my way to breakfast, the sun popped out, filing the world with encouraging brightness, and I stepped outside to check out the air. The cold was startling, like a slap to the face, and the wind was s􀆟ll biter. Dry litle pellets of snow, like 􀆟ny spheres of polystyrene, chased around in swirls. A big wall thermometer by the entrance read 11°F.

"Coldest ever for this date in Georgia," a hotel employee said with a big pleased smile as she hurried in from the parking lot, then stopped and said: "You hiking?"

"Yeah."

"Well, beter you'n me. Good luck to ya. Brrrrrrr!" And she dodged inside.

To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, a􀅌er all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams. wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.

I found Katz in the dining room and he was looking laudably perky, too. This was because he had made a friend--a waitress named Rayete, who was atending to his dining requirements in a dis􀆟nctly coque􀆫sh way. Rayete was six feet tall and had a face that would frighten a baby, but she seemed good-natured and was diligent with the coffee. She could not have signaled her availability to Katz more clearly if she had thrown her skirt over her head and lain across his Hungry Man Breakfast Plater. Katz in consequence was pumping testosterone.

"Ooh, I like a man who appreciates pancakes," Rayete cooed.

"Well, honey, I sure appreciate these pancakes," Katz responded, face agleam with syrup and early-morning happiness. It wasn't exactly Hepburn and Tracy, but it was strangely touching nonetheless.

She went off to deal with a distant customer, and Katz watched her go with something like paternal pride. "She's prety ugly, isn't she?" he said with a big, incongruous beam.

I sought for tact. "Well, only compared with other women."

Katz nodded though􀆞ully, then fixed me with a sudden fearful look. "You know what I look for in a female these days? A heartbeat and a full set of limbs."

"I understand."

"And that's just my star􀆟ng point, you realize. I'm prepared to compromise on the limbs. You think she's available?"

"I believe you might have to take a number."

He nodded soberly. "Probably be an idea if we ate up and got out of here."

I was very happy with that. I drained a cup of coffee and we went off to get our things. But when we met up outside ten minutes later, togged up and ready to go, Katz was looking miserable. "Let's stay here another night." he said.

"What? Are you kidding?" I was completely taken aback by this. "Why?"

"Because it's warm in there and it's cold out here."

"We've gota do it."

He looked to the woods. "We'll freeze out there."

of its breath, the singing brush of its haunch along your tent side. Imagine the hot flood of adrenaline, that unwelcome 􀆟ngling in the back of your arms, at the sudden rough bump of its snout against the foot of your tent, the alarming wild wobble of your frail shell as it roots through the backpack that you le􀅌 casually propped by the entrance--with, you suddenly recall, a Snickers in the pouch. Bears adore Snickers, you've heard.

And then the dull thought--oh, God--that perhaps you brought the Snickers in here with you, that it's somewhere in here, down by your feet or underneath you or--oh, shit, here It is. Another bump of grun􀆟ng head against the tent, this 􀆟me near your shoulders. More crazy wobble. Then silence, a very long silence, and--wait, shhhhh . . . yes! --the unuterable relief of realizing that the bear has withdrawn to the other side of the camp or shambled back into the woods. I tell you right now, I couldn't stand it.

So imagine then what it must have been like for poor litle David Anderson, aged twelve, when at 3:30 A.M., on the third foray, his tent was abruptly rent with a swipe of claw and the bear, driven to distrac􀆟on by the rich, unfixable, everywhere aroma of hamburger, bit hard into a flinching limb and dragged him shou􀆟ng and flailing through the camp and into the woods. In the few moments it took the boy's fellow campers to unzip themselves from their accoutrements--and imagine, if you will, trying to swim out of suddenly voluminous sleeping bags, take up flashlights and makeshi􀅌 cudgels, undo tent zips with helplessly fumbling fingers, and give chase--in those few moments, poor litle David Anderson was dead.

Now imagine reading a nonfic􀆟on book packed with stories such as this--true tales soberly related--just before se􀆫ng off alone on a camping trip of your own into the North American wilderness. The book to which I refer is Bear Atacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, by a Canadian academic named Stephen Herrero. If it is not the last word on the subject, then I really, really, really do not wish to hear the last word. Through long winter nights in New Hampshire, while snow piled up outdoors and my wife slumbered peacefully beside me, I lay saucer-eyed in bed reading clinically precise accounts of people gnawed pulpy in their sleeping bags, plucked whimpering from trees, even noiselessly stalked (I didn't know this happened!) as they sauntered unawares down leafy paths or cooled their feet in mountain streams. People whose one fatal mistake was to smooth their hair with a dab of aroma􀆟c gel, or eat juicy meat, or tuck a Snickers In their shirt pocket for later, or have sex, or even, possibly, menstruate, or in some small, inadvertent way pique the olfactory proper􀆟es of the hungry bear. Or, come to that, whose fatal failing was simply to be very, very unfortunate--to round a bend and find a moody male blocking the path, head rocking appraisingly, or wander unwi􀆫ngly into the territory of a bear too slowed by age or idleness to chase down fleeter prey.

Now it is important to establish right away that the possibility of a serious bear atack on the Appalachian Trail is remote. To begin with, the really terrifying American bear, the grizzly--Ursus horribilis, as it is so vividly and correctly labeled--doesn't range east of the Mississippi, which is good news because grizzlies are large, powerful, and ferociously bad tempered. When Lewis and Clark went into the wilderness, they found that nothing unnerved the na􀆟ve Indians more than the grizzly, and not surprisingly since you could riddle a grizzly with arrows--posi􀆟vely porcupine it-- and it would s􀆟ll keep coming. Even Lewis and Clark with their big guns were astounded and unsetled by the ability of the grizzly to absorb volleys of lead with barely a wobble.

The woods were full of peril--ratlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quan􀆟􀆟es of impure corn liquor and genera􀆟ons of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scatering of moose lethally deranged by a parasi􀆟c worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes.

Literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard of a man who had stepped from his tent for a midnight pee and was swooped upon by a short-sighted hoot owl--the last he saw of his scalp it was dangling from talons pre􀆫ly silhoueted against a harvest moon--and of a young woman who was woken by a 􀆟ckle across her belly and peered into her sleeping bag to find a copperhead bunking down in the warmth between her legs. I heard four separate stories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and bears sharing tents for a few confused and lively moments; stories of people abruptly vaporized ("tweren't nothing le􀅌 of him but a scorch mark") by body-sized bolts of lightning when caught in sudden storms on high ridgelines; of tents crushed beneath falling trees, or eased off precipices on ballbearings of beaded rain and sent paragliding on to distant valley floors, or swept away by the watery wall of a flash flood; of hikers beyond coun􀆟ng whose last experience was of trembling earth and the befuddled thought "Now what the------?"

It required only a litle light reading in adventure books and almost no imagina􀆟on to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a 􀆟ghtening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and a slaverous, chomping appe􀆟te for pink, plump, city-so􀅌ened flesh.

Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods--giardiasis, eastern equine encephali􀆟s, Rocky Mountain spoted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine encephali􀆟s, caused by the prick of a mosquito, atacks the brain and central nervous system. If you're lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less arres􀆟ng is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a 􀆟ny deer 􀆟ck. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erup􀆟ng in a posi􀆟ve fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fa􀆟gue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shoo􀆟ng pains in the extremi􀆟es, cardiac irregulari􀆟es, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body func􀆟ons, and--hardly surprising, really--chronic depression.

Then there is the litle-known family of organisms called hantaviruses, which swarm in the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and are hoovered into the human respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to s􀆟ck a breathing or if ice near them--by lying down, say, on a sleeping pla􀆞orm over which infected mice have recently

When, a􀅌er much solemn considera􀆟on, I setled on a backpack--a very expensive Gregory, top-of-the-range, no-point-in-s􀆟n􀆟ng-here sort of thing--he said, "Now what kind of straps do you want with that?"

"I beg your pardon?" I said, and recognized at once that I was on the brink of a dangerous condi􀆟on known as retail burnout. No more now would I blithely say, "Beter give me half a dozen of those, Dave. Oh, and I'll take eight of these--what the heck, make it a dozen. You only live once, eh?" The mound of provisions that a minute ago had looked so pleasingly abundant and exci􀆟ng--all new! all mine! --suddenly seemed burdensome and extravagant.

"Straps," Dave explained. "You know, to 􀆟e on your sleeping bag and lash things down."

"It doesn't come with straps?" I said in a new, level tone.

"Oh, no." He surveyed a wall of products and touched a finger to his nose. "You'll need a raincover too, of course."

I blinked. "A raincover? Why?"

"To keep out the rain."

"The backpack's not rainproof?"

He grimaced as if making an excep􀆟onally delicate dis􀆟nc􀆟on. "Well, not a hundred percent...."

This was extraordinary to me. "Really? Did it not occur to the manufacturer that people might want to take their packs outdoors from 􀆟me to 􀆟me? Perhaps even go camping with them. How much is this pack anyway?"

"Two hundred and fi􀅌y dollars."

"Two hundred and fi􀅌y dollars! Are you shi------," I paused and put on a new voice. "Are you saying, Dave, that I pay $250 for a pack and it doesn't have straps and it isn't waterproof?"

He nodded.

"Does it have a botom in it?"

Mengle smiled uneasily. It was not in his nature to grow cri􀆟cal or weary in the rich, promising world of camping equipment. "The straps come in a choice of six colors," he offered helpfully. I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas--a three-season tent, self-infla􀆟ng sleeping pad, nested pots and pans, collapsible ea􀆟ng utensils, plas􀆟c dish and cup, complicated pump-ac􀆟on water purifier, stuff sacks in a rainbow of colors, seam sealer, patching kit, sleeping bag, bungee cords, water botles, waterproof poncho, waterproof matches, pack cover, a rather ni􀅌y compass/thermometer keyring, a litle collapsible stove that looked frankly like trouble, gas botle and spare gas botle, a hands-free flashlight that you wore on your head like a miner's lamp (this I liked very much), a big knife for killing bears and hillbillies, insulated long Johns and undershirts, four bandannas, and lots of other stuff, for some of which I had to go back again and ask what it was for exactly. I drew the line at buying a designer groundcloth for $59.95, knowing I could acquire a lawn tarp at Kmart for $5. I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, an􀆟-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plas􀆟c shovel for burying one's poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule. The orange spade in par􀆟cular seemed to shout: "Greenhorn! Sissy! Make way for Mr. Butercup!"

Then, just to get it all over and done with at once, I went next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore and bought books--The Thru-Hiker's Handbook, Walking the Appalachian Trail, several books on wildlife and the natural sciences, a geological history of the Appalachian Trail by the exquisitely named V. Collins Chew, and the complete, aforemen􀆟oned set of official Appalachian Trail Guides, consis􀆟ng of eleven small paperback books and fi􀅌y-nine maps in different sizes, styles, and scales covering the whole trail from Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin and ambi􀆟ously priced at $233.45 the set. On the way out I no􀆟ced a volume called Bear Atacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, opened it up at random, found the sentence "This is a clear example of the general type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try to kill and eat him," and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.

I took all this home and carried it down to the basement in several trips. There was such a lot, nearly all of it technologically unfamiliar to me, which made it both exci􀆟ng and daun􀆟ng, but mostly daun􀆟ng. I put the hands-free flashlight on my head, for the heck of it, and pulled the tent from its plas􀆟c packaging and erected it on the floor. I unfurled the self-infla􀆟ng sleeping pad and pushed it inside and followed that with my fluffy new sleeping bag. Then I crawled in and lay there for quite a long 􀆟me trying out for size the expensive, confined, strangely new-smelling, en􀆟rely novel space that was soon to be my home away from home. I tried to imagine myself lying not in a basement beside the reassuring, cozily domes􀆟cated roar of the furnace, but rather outside, in a high mountain pass, listening to wind and tree noise, the lonely howl of doglike creatures, the hoarse whisper of a Georgia mountain accent saying: "Hey, Virgil, there's one over here. Y'all remember the rope?" But I couldn't really.

I hadn't been in a space like this since I stopped making dens with blankets and card tables at about the age of nine. It was really quite snug and, once you got used to the smell, which I naively presumed would dissipate with 􀆟me. and the fact that the fabric gave everything Inside a sickly greenish pallor, like the glow off a radar screen, it was not so bad. A litle claustrophobic perhaps, a litle odd smelling, but cozy and sturdy even so.

This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew that I was quite wrong.

On the a􀅌ernoon of July 5, 1983, three adult supervisors and a group of youngsters set up camp at a popular spot beside Lake Canimina in the fragrant pine forests of western Quebec, about eighty miles north of Otawa, in a park called La Verendrye Provincial Reserve. They cooked dinner and, a􀅌erwards, in the correct fashion, secured their food in a bag and carried it a hundred or so feet into the woods, where they suspended it above the ground between two trees, out of the reach of bears.

About midnight, a black bear came prowling around the margins of the camp, spied the bag, and brought it down by climbing one of the trees and breaking a branch. He plundered the food and departed, but an hour later he was back, this 􀆟me entering the camp itself. drawn by the lingering smell of cooked meat in the campers' clothes and hair, in their sleeping bags and tent fabric. It was to be a long night for the Canimina party. Three 􀆟mes between midnight and 3:30 A.M. the bear came to the camp.

Imagine, if you will, lying in the dark alone in a litle tent. nothing but a few microns of trembling nylon between you and the chill night air, listening to a 400-pound bear moving around your campsite. Imagine its quiet grunts and mysterious snuffing. the clater of upended cookware and sounds of moist gnawings, the pad of its feet and the heaviness

cheerful, nodding wonders almost beyond coun􀆟ng. There are 1,500 types of wildflower in the southern Appalachians, 40 rare types in the northern Georgia woods alone. They are a sight to li􀅌 the hardest heart. But they were not to be seen in the woods this grim March. We trudged through a cold, silent world of bare trees, beneath pewter skies, on ground like iron.

We fell into a simple rou􀆟ne. Each morning we rose at first light, shivering and rubbing arms, made coffee, broke down camp, ate a couple of fis􀆞uls of raisins, and set off into the silent woods. We would walk from about half past seven to four. We seldom walked together--our paces didn't match--but every couple of hours I would sit on a log (always surveying the surrounding undergrowth for the rustle of bear or boar) and wait for Katz to catch up, to make sure everything was OK. Some􀆟mes other hikers would come along and tell me where Katz was and how he was progressing, which was nearly always slowly but gamely. The trail was much harder for him than for me, and to his credit he tried not to bitch. It never escaped me for a moment that he didn't have to be there.

I had thought we would have a jump on the crowds, but there was a fair scatering of other hikers--three students from Rutgers University in New Jersey; an astoundingly fit older couple with 􀆟ny packs hiking to their daughter's wedding in far-off Virginia; a gawky kid from Florida named Jonathan--perhaps two dozen of us altogether in the same general neck of the woods, all heading north. Because everyone walks at different rates and rests at different 􀆟mes, three or four 􀆟mes a day you bump into some or all of your fellow hikers, especially on mountaintops with panoramic views or beside streams with good water, and above all at the wooden shelters that stand at distant intervals, ostensibly but not always actually, a day's hike apart in clearings just off the trail. In consequence you get to know your fellow hikers at least a litle, quite well if you meet them nightly at the shelters. You become part of an informal clump, a loose and sympathe􀆟c affilia􀆟on of people from different age groups and walks of life but all experiencing the same weather, same discomforts, same landscapes, same eccentric impulse to hike to Maine.

Even at busy 􀆟mes, however, the woods are great providers of solitude, and I encountered long periods of perfect aloneness, when I didn't see another soul for hours; many 􀆟mes when I would wait for Katz for a long spell and no other hiker would come along. When that happened, I would leave my pack and go back and find him, to see that he was all right, which always pleased him. Some􀆟mes he would be proudly bearing my s􀆟ck, which I had le􀅌 by a tree when I had stopped to 􀆟e my laces or adjust my pack. We seemed to be looking out for each other. It was very nice. I can put it no other way.

Around four we would find a spot to camp and pitch our tents. One of us would go off to fetch and filter water while the other prepared a sludge of steamy noodles. Some􀆟mes we would talk, but mostly we existed in a kind of companionable silence. By six o'clock, dark and cold and weariness would drive us to our tents. Katz went to sleep instantly, as far as I could tell. I would read for an hour or so with my curiously inefficient litle miner's lamp, its beam throwing quirky, concentric circles of light onto the page, like the light of a bicycle lamp, un􀆟l my shoulders and arms grew chilly out of the bag and heavy from 􀆟l􀆟ng the book at awkward angles to catch the nervous light. So I would put myself in darkness and lie there listening to the peculiarly clear, ar􀆟culated noises of the forest at night, the sighs and fidgets of wind and leaves, the weary groan of boughs, the endless

I looked to the woods, too. "Yeah, probably. We've s􀆟ll gota do it."

I hoisted my pack and took a backward stagger under the weight (It would be days before I could do this with anything approaching aplomb), jerked 􀆟ght the belt, and trudged off. At the edge of the woods, I glanced back to make sure Katz was following. Ahead of me spread a vast, stark world of winter-dead trees. I stepped portentously on to the path, a fragment of the original Appalachian Trail from the days when it passed here en route from Mount Oglethorpe to Springer.

The date was March 9, 1996. We were on our way.

The route led down into a wooded valley with a chuckling stream edged with britle ice, which the path followed for perhaps half a mile before taking us steeply up into denser woods. This was, it quickly became evident, the base of the first big hill, Frosty Mountain, and it was immediately taxing. The sun was shining and the sky was a hearty blue, but everything at ground level was brown--brown trees, brown earth, frozen brown leaves-and the cold was unyielding. I trudged perhaps a hundred feet up the hill, then stopped, bug-eyed, breathing hard, heart kabooming alarmingly. Katz was already falling behind and pan􀆟ng even harder. I pressed on.

It was hell. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape-hopelessly. The pack weighed way too much. Way too much. I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle.

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiri􀆟ng discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what's to come. Between the curtain of trees at every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Each 􀆟me you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more s􀆟ll, un􀆟l it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long. Eventually you reach a height where you can see the tops of the topmost trees, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and your faltering spirit s􀆟rs-- nearly there now!--but this is a pi􀆟less decep􀆟on. The elusive summit con􀆟nually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each 􀆟me the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unatainable, as before. S􀆟ll you stagger on. What else can you do?

When, a􀅌er ages and ages, you finally reach the telltale world of truly high ground, where the chilled air smells of pine sap and the I don't know exactly when I lost track of Katz, but it was in the first couple of hours. At first I would wait for him to catch up, bitching every step of the way and pausing a􀅌er each three or four shuffling paces to wipe his brow and look sourly at his immediate future. It was painful to behold in every way. Eventually I waited to see him pull into view, just to confirm that he was s􀆟ll coming, that he wasn't lying on the path palpita􀆟ng or hadn't thrown down his pack in disgust and gone looking for Wes Wisson. I would wait and wait, and eventually his shape would appear among the trees, breathing heavily, moving with incredible slowness, and talking in a loud, biter voice to himself. Halfway up the third big hill, the 3,400-foot-high

Two weeks a􀅌er that, I later heard, police found him in an upended car in a field outside the litle town of Mingo, hanging upside down by his seatbelt, s􀆟ll clutching the steering wheel and saying, "Well, what seems to be the problem, officers?" There was a small quan􀆟ty of cocaine in the glove box and he was dispatched to a minimum security prison for eighteen months. While there, he started atending AA mee􀆟ngs. To everyone's surprise, not least his own, he had not touched alcohol or an illegal substance since.

A􀅌er his release, he got a litle job, went back to college part-􀆟me, and setled down for a while with a hairdresser named Paty. For the past three years he had devoted himself to rec􀆟tude and··I instantly saw now as he stooped out the door of the plane-growing a stomach. Katz was arres􀆟ngly larger than when I had last seen him. He had always been kind of fleshy, but now he brought to mind Orson Welles a􀅌er a very bad night. He was limping a litle and breathing harder than one ought to a􀅌er a walk of twenty yards.

"Man, I'm hungry," he said without preamble, and let me take his carry-on bag, which instantly jerked my arm to the floor.

"What have you got in here?" I gasped.

"Ah, just some tapes and shit for the trail. There a Dunkin Donuts anywhere around here? I haven't had anything to eat since Boston."

"Boston? You've just come from Boston."

"Yeah, I gota eat something every hour or so or I have, whaddayacallit, seizures."

"Seizures?" This wasn't quite the reunion scenario I had envisioned. I imagined him bouncing around on the Appalachian Trail like some wind-up toy that had fallen on its back.

"Ever since I took some contaminated phenylthiamines about ten years ago. If I eat a couple of doughnuts or something I'm usually OK."

"Stephen, we' re going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won't be doughnut stores."

He beamed proudly. "I thought of that." He indicated his bag on the carousel--a green army surplus duffel--and let me pick it up. It weighed at least seventy-five pounds. He saw my look of wonder. "Snickers," he explained. "Lots and lots of Snickers."

We drove home by way of Dunkin Donuts. My wife and I sat with him at the kitchen table and watched him eat five Boston cream doughnuts, which he washed down with two glasses of milk. Then he said he wanted to go and lie down a while. It took him whole minutes to get up the stairs.

My wife turned to me with a look of serene blankness.

"Please just don't say anything," I said.

In the a􀅌ernoon, a􀅌er Katz had rested, he and I visited Dave Mengle and got him fited with a backpack and a tent and sleeping bag and all the rest of it, and then went to Kmart for a groundsheet and thermal underwear and some other small things. A􀅌er that he rested some more.

The following day, we went to the supermarket to buy provisions for our first week on the trail. I knew nothing about cooking, but Katz had been looking a􀅌er himself for years and had a repertoire of dishes (principally involving peanut buter, tuna, and brown sugar s􀆟rred together in a pot) that he thought would transfer nicely to a camping milieu, but he also piled lots of other things into the shopping cart--four large pepperoni sausages,

Then, just to get it all over and done with at once, I went next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore and bought books--The Thru-Hiker's Handbook, Walking the Appalachian Trail, several books on wildlife and the natural sciences, a geological history of the Appalachian Trail by the exquisitely named V. Collins Chew, and the complete, aforemen􀆟oned set of official Appalachian Trail Guides, consis􀆟ng of eleven small paperback books and fi􀅌y-nine maps in different sizes, styles, and scales covering the whole trail from Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin and ambi􀆟ously priced at $233.45 the set. On the way out I no􀆟ced a volume called Bear Atacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, opened it up at random, found the sentence "This is a clear example of the general type of Incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try to kill and eat him," and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.

I took all this home and carried it down to the basement in several trips. There was such a lot, nearly all of it technologically unfamiliar to me, which made it both exci􀆟ng and daun􀆟ng, but mostly daun􀆟ng. I put the hands-free flashlight on my head, for the heck of it, and pulled the tent from its plas􀆟c packaging and erected it on the floor. I unfurled the self-infla􀆟ng sleeping pad and pushed it inside and followed that with my fluffy new sleeping bag. Then I crawled in and lay there for quite a long 􀆟me trying out for size the expensive, confined, strangely new-smelling, en􀆟rely novel space that was soon to be my home away from home. I tried to imagine myself lying not in a basement beside the reassuring, cozily domes􀆟cated roar of the furnace, but rather outside, in a high mountain pass, listening to wind and tree noise, the lonely howl of doglike creatures, the hoarse whisper of a Georgia mountain accent saying: "Hey, Virgil, there's one over here. Y'all remember the rope?" But I couldn't really.

I hadn't been in a space like this since I stopped making dens with blankets and card tables at about the age of nine. It was really quite snug and, once you got used to the smell, which I naively presumed would dissipate with 􀆟me, and the fact that the fabric gave everything inside a sickly greenish pallor, like the glow off a radar screen, it was not so bad. A litle claustrophobic perhaps, a litle odd smelling, but cozy and sturdy even so.

This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew that I was quite wrong.

On the a􀅌ernoon of July 5, 1983, three adult supervisors and a group of youngsters set up camp at a popular spot beside Lake Canimina in the fragrant pine forests of western Quebec, about eighty miles north of Otawa, in a park called La Verendrye Provincial Reserve. They cooked dinner and, a􀅌erwards, in the correct fashion, secured their food in a bag and carried it a hundred or so feet into the woods, where they suspended it above the ground between two trees, out of the reach of bears.

About midnight, a black bear came prowling around the margins of the camp, spied the bag, and brought it down by climbing one of the trees and breaking a branch. He plundered the food and departed, but an hour later he was back, this 􀆟me entering the camp itself, drawn by the lingering smell of cooked meat in the campers' clothes and hair, in their sleeping bags and tent fabric. It was to be a long night for the Canimina party. Three 􀆟mes between midnight and 3:30 A.M. the bear came to the camp.

Imagine, if you will, lying in the dark alone in a litle tent, nothing but a few microns of trembling nylon between you and the chill night air, listening to a 400-pound bear moving around your campsite. Imagine its quiet grunts and mysterious snufflings, the clater of upended cookware and sounds of moist gnawings, the pad of its feet and the heaviness

Black Mountain, I stood and waited a long while, and thought about going back, but eventually turned and struggled on. I had enough small agonies of my own.

Seven miles seems so litle, but it's not, believe me. With a pack, even for fit people it is not easy. You know what it's like when you're at a zoo or an amusement park with a small child who won't walk another step? You hoist him lightly onto your shoulders and for a while--for a couple of minutes--it's actually kind of fun to have him up there, pretending like you're going to 􀆟p him off or cruising his head towards some low projec􀆟on before veering off (all being well) at the last instant. But then it starts to get uncomfortable. You feel a twinge in your neck, a 􀆟ghten Ing between your shoulder blades, and the sensa􀆟on seeps and spreads un􀆟l it is decidedly uncomfortable, and you announce to litle Jimmy that you're going to have to put him down for a while.

Of course, Jimmy bawls and won't go another step, and your partner gives you that disdainful, I-should-have-married-the-quarterback look because you haven't gone 400 yards. But, hey, it hurts. Hurts a lot. Believe me, I understand.

OK, now imagine two litle Jimmies in a pack on your pack, or, beter s􀆟ll, something inert but weighty, something that doesn't want to be li􀅌ed, that makes it abundantly clear to you as soon as you pick it up that what it wants Is to sit heavily on the ground-- say, a bag of cement or a box of medical textbooks--ln any case, forty pounds of profound heaviness. Imagine the jerk of the pack going on, like the pull of a down elevator. Imagine walking with that weight for hours, for days, and not along level asphalt paths with benches and refreshment booths at though􀆞ul intervals but over a rough trail, full of sharp rocks and unyielding roots and staggering ascents that transfer enormous amounts of strain to your pale, shaking thighs. Now 􀆟lt your head back un􀆟l your neck is taut. And fix your gaze on a point two miles away. That's your first climb. It's 4,682 steep feet to the top, and there are lots more like it. Don't tell me that seven miles is not far. Oh, and here's the other thing. You don't have to do this. You're not in the army. You can quit right now. Go home. See your family. Sleep in a bed.

Or, alterna􀆟vely, you poor, sad shmuck, you can walk 2,169 miles through mountains and wilderness to Maine. And so, I trudged along for hours, in a private litle world of weariness and woe, up and over imposing hills, through an endless cocktail party of trees, all the 􀆟me thinking: "I must have done seven miles by now, surely." But always the wandering trail ran on.

At 3:30, I climbed some steps carved into granite and found myself on a spacious rock overlook: the summit of Springer Mountain. I shed my pack and slumped heavily against a tree, astounded by the scale of my 􀆟redness. The view was lovely--the rolling swell of the Cohuta Mountains, brushed with a bluish haze the color of cigarete smoke, running away to a far-off horizon. The sun was already low in the sky. I rested for perhaps ten minutes, then got up and had a look around. There was a bronze plaque screwed into a boulder announcing the start of the Appalachian Trail, and nearby on a post was a wooden box containing a Sic pen on a length of string and a standard spiral notebook, its pages curled from the damp air. The notebook was the trail register (I had somehow expected it to be leather bound and funereal) and it was filed with eager entries, nearly all writen in a youthful hand. There were perhaps twenty-five pages of entries since the first of January--eight entries on this day alone. Most were hurried and cheery--"March 2nd. Well, here we are and man it's cold! See y'all on Katahdin! Jaimie and Spud"--but about a third were

of its breath, the singing brush of its haunch along your tent side. Imagine the hot flood of adrenaline, that unwelcome 􀆟ngling in the back of your arms, at the sudden rough bump of its snout against the foot of your tent, the alarming wild wobble of your frail shell as it roots through the backpack that you le􀅌 casually propped by the entrance--with, you suddenly recall, a Snickers in the pouch. Bears adore Snickers, you've heard.

And then the dull thought--oh, God--that perhaps you brought the Snickers in here with you, that it's somewhere in here, down by your feet or underneath you or--oh, shit, here It is. Another bump of grun􀆟ng head against the tent, this 􀆟me near your shoulders. More crazy wobble. Then silence, a very long silence, and--wait, shhhhh. . . yes!--the unuterable relief of realizing that the bear has withdrawn to the other side of the camp or shambled back into the woods. I tell you right now, I couldn't stand it.

So imagine then what it must have been like for poor litle David Anderson, aged twelve, when at 3:30 A.M., on the third foray, his tent was abruptly rent with a swipe of claw and the bear, driven to distrac􀆟on by the rich, unfixable, everywhere aroma of hamburger, bit hard into a flinching limb and dragged him shou􀆟ng and flailing through the camp and into the woods. In the few moments it took the boy's fellow campers to unzip themselves from their accoutrements--and imagine, if you will, trying to swim out of suddenly voluminous sleeping bags, take up flashlights and makeshi􀅌 cudgels, undo tent zips with helplessly fumbling fingers, and give chase--in those few moments, poor litle David Anderson was dead.

Now imagine reading a nonfic􀆟on book packed with stories such as this--true tales soberly related--just before se􀆫ng off alone on a camping trip of your own into the North American wilderness. The book to which I refer is Bear Atacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, by a Canadian academic named Stephen Herrero. If it is not the last word on the subject, then I really, really, really do not wish to hear the last word. Through long winter nights in New Hampshire, while snow piled up outdoors and my wife slumbered peacefully beside me, I lay saucer-eyed in bed reading clinically precise accounts of people gnawed pulpy in their sleeping bags, plucked whimpering from trees, even noiselessly stalked (I didn't know this happened!) as they sauntered unawares down leafy paths or cooled their feet in mountain streams. People whose one fatal mistake was to smooth their hair with a dab of aroma􀆟c gel, or eat juicy meat, or tuck a Snickers In their shirt pocket for later, or have sex, or even, possibly, menstruate, or in some small, inadvertent way pique the olfactory proper􀆟es of the hungry bear. Or, come to that, whose fatal failing was simply to be very, very unfortunate--to round a bend and find a moody male blocking the path, head rocking appraisingly, or wander unwi􀆫ngly into the territory of a bear too slowed by age or idleness to chase down fleeter prey.

Now it is important to establish right away that the possibility of a serious bear atack on the Appalachian Trail is remote. To begin with, the really terrifying American bear, the grizzly--Ursus horribilis, as it is so vividly and correctly labeled--doesn't range east of the Mississippi, which is good news because grizzlies are large, powerful, and ferociously bad tempered. When Lewis and Clark went into the wilderness, they found that nothing unnerved the na􀆟ve Indians more than the grizzly, and not surprisingly since you could riddle a grizzly with arrows--posi􀆟vely porcupine it-- and it would s􀆟ll keep coming. Even Lewis and Clark with their big guns were astounded and unsetled by the ability of the grizzly to absorb volleys of lead with barely a wobble.

When, a􀅌er much solemn considera􀆟on, I setled on a backpack--a very expensive Gregory, top-of-the-range, no-point-in-s􀆟n􀆟ng-here sort of thing--he said, "Now what kind of straps do you want with that?"

"I beg your pardon?" I said, and recognized at once that I was on the brink of a dangerous condi􀆟on known as retail burnout. No more now would I blithely say, "Beter give me half a dozen of those, Dave. Oh, and I'll take eight of these--what the heck, make it a dozen. You only live once, eh?" The mound of provisions that a minute ago had looked so pleasingly abundant and exci􀆟ng--all new! all mine! --suddenly seemed burdensome and extravagant.

"Straps," Dave explained. "You know, to 􀆟e on your sleeping bag and lash things down."

"It doesn't come with straps?" I said in a new, level tone.

"Oh, no." He surveyed a wall of products and touched a finger to his nose. "You'll need a raincover too, of course."

I blinked. "A raincover? Why?"

"To keep out the rain."

"The backpack's not rainproof?"

He grimaced as if making an excep􀆟onally delicate dis􀆟nc􀆟on. "Well, not a hundred percent...."

This was extraordinary to me. "Really? Did it not occur to the manufacturer that people might want to take their packs outdoors from 􀆟me to 􀆟me? Perhaps even go camping with them. How much is this pack anyway?"

"Two hundred and fi􀅌y dollars."

"Two hundred and fi􀅌y dollars! Are you shi------," I paused and put on a new voice. "Are you saying, Dave, that I pay $250 for a pack and it doesn't have straps and it isn't waterproof?"

He nodded.

"Does it have a botom in it?"

Mengle smiled uneasily. It was not in his nature to grow cri􀆟cal or weary in the rich, promising world of camping equipment. "The straps come in a choice of six colors," he offered helpfully. I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas--a three-season tent, self-infla􀆟ng sleeping pad, nested pots and pans, collapsible ea􀆟ng utensils, plas􀆟c dish and cup, complicated pump-ac􀆟on water purifier, stuff sacks in a rainbow of colors, seam sealer, patching kit, sleeping bag, bungee cords, water botles, waterproof poncho, waterproof matches, pack cover, a rather ni􀅌y compass/thermometer keyring, a litle collapsible stove that looked frankly like trouble, gas botle and spare gas botle, a hands-free flashlight that you wore on your head like a miner's lamp (this I liked very much), a big knife for killing bears and hillbillies, insulated long Johns and undershirts, four bandannas, and lots of other stuff, for some of which I had to go back again and ask what it was for exactly. I drew the line at buying a designer groundcloth for $59.95, knowing I could acquire a lawn tarp at Kmart for $5. I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, an􀆟-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plas􀆟c shovel for burying one's poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule. The orange spade in par􀆟cular seemed to shout: "Greenhorn! Sissy! Make way for Mr. Butercup!"

Not long a􀅌er I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.

A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America's eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes. From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump, comely hills' whose very names--Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, While Mountains--seem an invita􀆟on to amble. Who could say the words "Great Smoky Mountains" or "Shenandoah Valley" and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once put it, to "throw a loaf of bread and a pound or tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence"?

And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously beguiling fashion through the pleasant New England community in which I had just setled. It seemed such an extraordinary no􀆟on--that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floa􀆟ng in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A litle voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"

I formed a number of ra􀆟onaliza􀆟ons. It would get me fit a􀅌er years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interes􀆟ng and reflec􀆟ve way to reacquaint myself with the scale and beauty or my na􀆟ve land a􀅌er nearly twenty years of living abroad. It would be useful (I wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hun􀆟ng hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors. I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a litle of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, "Yeah, I've shit in the woods."

And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are the home of one of the world's great hardwood forests-- the expansive relic of the richest, most diversified sweep of woodland ever to grace the temperate world--and that forest is in trouble. If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fi􀅌y years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a 􀆟me to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my inten􀆟on-- told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books and talked to people who had done the trail in whole or in part and came gradually to realize that this was way beyond--way beyond--anything I had atempted before.

Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat atached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.

streamers you get at children's par􀆟es--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.

Herrero's book was writen in 1985. Since that 􀆟me, according to an ar􀆟cle in the New York Times, bear atacks in North America have increased by 25 percent. The Times ar􀆟cle also noted that bears are far more likely to atack humans in the spring following a bad berry year. The previous year had been a very bad berry year. I didn't like the feel of any of this.

Then there were all the problems and par􀆟cular dangers of solitude. I s􀆟ll have my appendix, and any number of other organs that might burst or sputer in the empty wilds. What would I do then? What if I fell from a ledge and broke my back? What if I lost the trail in blizzard or fog, or was nipped by a venomous snake, or lost my foo􀆟ng on moss-slickened rocks crossing a stream and cracked my head a concussive blow? You could drown in three inches of water on your own. You could die from a twisted ankle. No, I didn't like the f eel of this at all.

At Christmas, I put notes in lots of cards invi􀆟ng people to come with me on the trail, If only part of the way. Nobody responded, of course. Then one day in late February, with departure nigh, I got a call. It was from an old school friend named Stephen Katz. Katz and I had grown up together in Iowa, but I had prety well lost touch with him. Those of you--the six of you--who have read Neither Here nor There will recall Katz as my traveling companion around Europe in that tale of youthful adventure. In the twenty-f we years since, I had run into him three or four 􀆟mes on visits home but hadn't seen him otherwise. We had remained friends in a kind of theore􀆟cal sense, but our paths had diverged wildly.

" I've been hesita􀆟ng to call." he said slowly. He seemed to be searching for words.

"But this Appalachian Trail deal--do you think maybe I could come with you?"

I couldn't believe it. "You want to come with me?"

" If it's a problem, I understand."

"No." I said. "No, no, no. You're very welcome. You are extremely welcome."

"Really?" He seemed to brighten.

"Of course. " I really could not believe it. I wasn't going to have to walk alone. I did a litle jig. I wasn't going to have to wall{ alone. "I can't tell you how welcome you would be."

"Oh, great," he said in a f bod of relief, then added in a confessional tone, "I thought maybe you might not want me along."

"Why ever not?"

''Because, you know, I s􀆟ll owe you $600 from Europe."

"Hey, jeez, certainly not. . .. You owe me $600?"

"I s􀆟ll intend to pay you back."

"Hey." I said. "Hey." I couldn't remember any $600. I had never released anyone from a debt of this magnitude before, and it took me a moment to get the words out. "Listen, it's not a problem. Just come hiking with me. Are you sure you're up for this?"

"Absolutely."

"What kind of shape are you in?"

"Real good. I walk everywhere these days." •

"Really?" This is most unusual in America.

five pounds of rice, assorted bags of cookies, oatmeal, raisins, M&Ms, Spam, more Snickers, sunflower seeds, graham crackers, instant mashed potatoes, several s􀆟cks of beef jerky, a couple of bricks of cheese, a canned ham, and the full range of gooey and evidently imperishable cakes and doughnuts produced under the Litle Debbie label.

"You know, I don't think we'll be able to carry all this," I suggested uneasily as he placed a horse-collar-shaped bologna in the shopping cart.

Katz surveyed the cart grimly. "Yeah, you're right," he agreed. "Let's start again."

He abandoned the cart there and went off for another one. We went around again, this 􀆟me trying to be more intelligently selec􀆟ve, but we s􀆟ll ended up with clearly too much.

We took everything home, divvied it up, and went off to pack-- Katz to the bedroom where all his other stuff was, I to my basement HQ. I packed for two hours, but I couldn't begin to get everything in. I put aside books and notebooks and nearly all my spare clothes, and tried lots of different combina􀆟ons, but every 􀆟me I finished I would turn to find something large and important le􀅌 over. Eventually I went upstairs to see how Katz was doing. He was lying on the bed, listening to his Walkman. Stuff was scatered everywhere. His backpack was limp and unatended. Litle percussive hisses of music were leaking from his ears.

"Aren't you packing?" I said.

"Yeah."

I waited a minute, thinking he would bound up, but he didn't move. "Forgive me, Stephen, but you give the impression that you are lying down."

"Yeah."

"Can you actually hear what I'm saying?"

"Yeah, in a minute."

I sighed and went back down to the basement.

Katz said litle during dinner and a􀅌erwards returned to his room. We heard nothing more from him throughout the evening, but about midnight, as we lay in bed, noises began to float to us through the walls--clompings and muterings, sounds like furniture being dragged across the floor, and brief enraged outbursts, Interspersed with long periods of silence. I held my wife's hand and couldn't think of anything to say. In the morning, I tapped on Katz's door and eventually put my head in. He was asleep, fully dressed, on top of a tumult of bedding. The matress was part way off the bed, as if he had been engaged in the night in some scuffle with intruders. His pack was full but unsecured, and personal effects were s􀆟ll liberally distributed around the room. I told him we had to leave in an hour to catch our plane.

"Yeah," he said.

Twenty minutes later, he came downstairs, laboriously and with a great deal of so􀅌 cursing. Without even looking, you could tell he was coming down sideways and with care, as if the steps were glazed with ice. He was wearing his pack. Things were 􀆟ed to It all over--a pair of grubby sneakers and what looked like a pair of dress boots, his pots and pans, a Laura Ashley shopping bag evidently appropriated from my wife's wardrobe and filled now with God knows what. "This is the best I could do," he said. "I had to leave a few things."

I nodded. I'd le􀅌 a few things, too--notably, the oatmeal, which I didn't like anyway, and the more disgus􀆟ng looking of the Litle Debbie cakes, which is to say all of them.

is not available, then you should back off slowly, avoiding direct eye contact. All the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is si􀆫ng at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life. However, when the grizzly overtakes you, as it most assuredly will, you should fall to the ground and play dead. A grizzly may chew on a limp form for a minute or two but generally will lose interest and shul fie off. With black bears, however, playing dead is fu􀆟le, since they will con􀆟nue chewing on you un􀆟l you are considerably past caring. It is also foolish to climb a tree because black bears are adroit climbers and, as Herrero dryly notes, you will simply end up figh􀆟ng the bear in a tree.

To ward off an aggressive black bear, Herrero suggests making a lot of noise, banging pots and pans together, throwing s􀆟cks and rocks, and "running at the bear." (Yeah, right. You first, Professor.) On the other hand, he then adds judiciously, these tac􀆟cs could "merely provoke the bear." Well, thanks. Elsewhere he suggests that hikers should consider making noises from 􀆟me to 􀆟me-- singing a song, say--to alert bears of their presence, since a startled bear is more likely to be an angry bear, but then a few pages later he cau􀆟ons that "there may be danger in making noise," since that can atract a hungry bear that might otherwise overlook you.

The fact is, no one can tell you what to do. Bears are unpredictable, and what works in one circumstance may not work in another. In 1973, two teenagers, Mark Seeley and Michael Whiten, were out for a hike in Yellowstone when they inadvertently crossed between a female black bear and her cubs. Nothing worries and antagonizes a female bear more than to have people between her and her brood. Furious, she turned and gave chase--despite the bear's lolloping gait, it can move at up to thirty-five miles an hour--and the two boys scrambled up trees. The bear followed Whiten up his tree, clamped her mouth around his right foot, and slowly and pa􀆟ently tugged him from his perch. (Is it me, or can you feel your fingernails scraping through the bark?) On the ground, she began mauling him extensively. In an atempt to distract the bear from his friend, Seeley shouted at it, whereupon the bear came and pulled him out of his tree, too. Both young men played dead--precisely the wrong thing to do, according to all the instruc􀆟on manuals--and the bear le􀅌.

I won't say I became obsessed by all this, but it did occupy my thoughts a great deal in the months while I waited for spring to come. My par􀆟cular dread--the vivid possibility that le􀅌 me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night a􀅌er night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a foraging bear outside and wondering what its inten􀆟ons were. I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrera's book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me--they looked almost comically unaggressive, like four guys who had goten a Frisbee caught up a tree--but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in par􀆟es. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper

so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusets, but a forbidding, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild . . . savage and dreary, "fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience le􀅌 him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical."

But even men far tougher and more atuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace. Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as "so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without t error." When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's 􀆟me to watch your step.

When the first Europeans arrived in the New World, there were perhaps 950 million acres of woodland in what would become the lower forty-eight states. The Chatahoochee Forest, through which Katz and I now trudged, was part of an immense, unbroken canopy stretching from southern Alabama to Canada and beyond, and from the shores of the Atlan􀆟c to the distant grasslands of the Missouri River.

Most of that forest is now gone, but what survives is more impressive than you might expect. The Chatahoochee is part of four million acres--6,000 square miles--of federally owned forest stretching up to the Great Smoky Mountains and beyond and spreading sideways across four states. On a map of the United States it is an incidental smudge of green, but on foot the scale of it is colossal. It would be four days before Katz and I crossed a public highway, eight days 􀆟ll we came to a town.

And so we walked. We walked up mountains and through high, forgoten hollows, along lonesome ridges with long views of more ridges, over grassy balds and down rocky, twis􀆟ng, jarring descents, and through mile a􀅌er endless mile of dark, deep, silent woods, on a wandering trail eighteen inches wide and marked with rectangular white blazes (two inches wide, six long) slapped at intervals on the grey-barked trees. Walking is what we did.

Compared with most other places in the developed world, America is s􀆟ll to a remarkable extent a land of forests. One-third of the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees-- 728 million acres in all. Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That's 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single permanent resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up.

About 240 million acres of America's forests are owned by the government. The bulk of this--191 million acres, spread over 155 parcels of land--is held by the U.S. Forest Service under the designa􀆟ons of Na􀆟onal Forests, Na􀆟onal Grasslands, and Na􀆟onal Recrea􀆟on Areas. All this sounds soothingly untrampled and ecological, but in fact a great deal of Forest Service land is designated "mul􀆟ple-use," which is generously interpreted to allow any number of boisterous ac􀆟vi􀆟es--mining, oil, and gas extrac􀆟on; ski resorts (137 of them); condominium developments; snowmobiling; off-road vehicle scrambling; and lots and lots and lots of logging-- that seem curiously incompa􀆟ble with woodland serenity.

The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary ins􀆟tu􀆟on. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the 􀆟tle, assume it has something to do with looking a􀅌er trees. In fact, no--

Herrero recounts an incident that nicely conveys the near indestruc􀆟bility of the grizzly. It concerns a professional hunter in Alaska named Alexei Pitka, who stalked a large male through snow and finally felled it with a well-aimed shot to the heart from a large-bore rifle. Pitka should probably have carried a card with him that said: "First make sure bear is dead. Then put gun down." He advanced cau􀆟ously and spent a minute or two watching the bear for movement. but when there was none, he set the gun against a tree {big mistake!) and strode forward to claim his prize. Just as he reached it. the bear sprang up, clapped its expansive jaws around the front of Pitka's head, as if giving him a big kiss, and with a single jerk tore off his face.

Miraculously, Pitka survived. "I don't know why I set that durn gun against the tree," he said later. (Actually, what he said was. "Mrffff mmmpg nnnmmm mffffffn," on account of having no lips, teeth, nose, tongue, or other vocal apparatus.)

If I were to be pawed and chewed--and this seemed to me en􀆟rely possible, the more I read--it would be by a black bear, Ursus americanus. There are at least 500,000 black bears in North America, possibly as many as 700,000. They are notably common in the hills along the Appalachian Trail (indeed, they o􀅌en use the trail, for convenience). And their numbers are growing. Grizzlies, by contrast, number no more than 35,000 in the whole of North America, and just 1,000 in the mainland United States, principally in and around Yellowstone Na􀆟onal Park. Of the two species, black bears are generally smaller (though this is a decidedly rela􀆟ve condi􀆟on; a male black bear can s􀆟ll weigh up to 650 pounds) and unques􀆟onably more re􀆟ring.

Black bears rarely atack. But here's the thing. Some􀆟mes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and prety much whenever they want. That doesn't happen o􀅌en, but-and here is the absolutely salient point--once would be enough. Herrero is at pains to stress that black bear atacks are infrequent, rela􀆟ve to their numbers. For 1900 to 1980, he found just twenty-three confirmed black bear killings of humans (about half the number of killings by grizzlies), and most of these were out West or in Canada. In New Hampshire there has not been an unprovoked fatal atack on a human by a bear since 1784. In Vermont, there has never been one.

I wanted very much to be calmed by these assurances but could never quite manage the necessary leap of faith. A􀅌er no􀆟ng that just 500 people were atacked and hurt by black bears between 1960 and 1980--twenty-five atacks a year from a resident popula􀆟on of at least half a million bears--Herrero adds that most of these injuries were not severe. "The typical black bear-inflicted injury; he writes blandly, "is minor and usually involves only a few scratches or light bites." Pardon me, but what exactly is a light bite? Are we talking a playful wrestle and gummy nips? I think not. And is 500 cer􀆟fied atacks really such a modest number, considering how few people go into the North American woods? And how foolish must one be to be reassured by the informa􀆟on that no bear has killed a human in Vermont or New Hampshire in 200 years? That's not because the bears have signed a treaty, you know. There's nothing to say that they won't start a modest rampage tomorrow.

So let us imagine that a bear does go for us out in the wilds. What are we to do? Interes􀆟ngly, the advised stratagems are exactly opposite for grizzly and black bear. With a grizzly, you should make for a tall tree, since grizzlies aren't much for climbing. If a tree

themselves on nature. There were to be hostels and inns and seasonal study centers, and eventually permanent woodland villages--"self-owning" communi􀆟es whose inhabitants would support themselves with coopera􀆟ve "non-industrial ac􀆟vity" based on forestry, farming, and cra􀅌s. The whole would be, as MacKaye ecsta􀆟cally described it, "a retreat from profit"--a no􀆟on that others saw as "smacking of Bolshevism," in the words of one biographer.

At the 􀆟me of MacKaye's proposal there were already several hiking clubs in the eastern United States--the Green Mountain Club, the Dartmouth Ou􀆟ng Club, the venerable Appalachian Mountain Club, among others--and these mostly patrician organiza􀆟ons owned and maintained hundreds of miles of mountain and woodland trails, mainly in New England. In 1925, representa􀆟ves or the leading clubs met in Washington and founded the Appalachian Trail Conference with a view to construc􀆟ng a 1,200-milelong trail connec􀆟ng the two highest peaks in the east: 6,684-foot Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and the slightly smaller (by 396 feet) Mount Washington in New Hampshire. In fact, however, for the next five years nothing happened, largely because MacKaye occupied himself with refining and expanding his vision un􀆟l he and it were only tangen􀆟ally connected to the real world.

Not un􀆟l 1930, when a young Washington admiralty lawyer and keen hiker named Myron Avery took over the development of the project, did work actually begin, but suddenly it moved on apace. Avery was not evidently a lovable fellow. As one contemporary put it. he le􀅌 two trails from Maine to Georgia: "One was of hurt feelings and bruised egos. The other was the AT." He had no pa􀆟ence with MacKaye and his "quasi-mys􀆟cal epigrams," and the two never got along. In 1935, they had an acrimonious falling-out over the development of the trail through Shenandoah Na􀆟onal Park (Avery was willing to accommodate the building of a scenic highway through the mountains; MacKaye thought it a betrayal of founding principles) and they never spoke again.

MacKaye always gets the credit for the trail, but this is largely because he lived to be ninety-six and had a good head of white hair; he was always available in his later years to say a few words at ceremonies on sunny hillsides. Avery, on the other hand, died in 1952, a quarter-century before MacKaye and when the trail was s􀆟ll litle known. But it was really Avery's trail. He mapped it out, bullied and cajoled clubs into producing volunteer crews, and personally superintended the construc􀆟on of hundreds of miles of path. He extended its planned length from 1,200 miles to well over 2,000, and before it was finished he had walked every inch of It. In under seven years, using volunteer labor, he built a 2,000-mile trail through mountain wilderness. Armies have done less.

The Appalachian Trail was formally completed on August 14, 1937, with the clearing of a two-mile stretch of woods in a remote part of Maine. Remarkably, the building of the longest footpath in the world atracted almost no aten􀆟on. Avery was not one for publicity, and by this 􀆟me MacKaye had re􀆟red in a funk. No newspapers noted the achievement. There was no formal celebra􀆟on to mark the occasion. The path they built had no historical basis. It didn't follow any Indian trails or colonial post roads. It didn't even seek out the best views, highest hills, or most notable landmarks. In the end, it went nowhere near Mount Mitchell, though it did take in Mount Washington and then carried on another 350 miles to Mount Katahdin in Maine. (Avery,

who had grown up in Maine and done his forma􀆟ve hiking there, was most insistent on this.) Essen􀆟ally, it went where access could be gained, mostly high up on the hills, over lonely ridges and forgoten hollows that no one had ever used or coveted, or some􀆟mes even named. It fell short of the actual southern end of the Appalachian Mountain chain by 150 miles and of the northern end by nearer 700. The work camps and chalets, the schools and study centers, were never built.

S􀆟ll, quite a lot of the original impulse behind MacKaye's vision survives. All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers- indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet. It remains gloriously free of commercialism. The Appalachian Trail Conference didn't hire its first paid employee un􀆟l 1968, and it retains the air of a friendly, accessible, dedicated ou􀆞it. The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail--the Pacific Crest and Con􀆟nental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer--but it will always be the first and greatest. It has a lot of friends. It deserves them.

Almost from the day of its opening, the trail has had to be moved around. First, 118 miles in Virginia were rerouted to accommodate the construc􀆟on of Skyline Drive through Shenandoah Na􀆟onal Park. Then, in 1958, overdevelopment on and around Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia necessitated lopping twenty miles off the trail's southern end and moving the start to Springer Mountain, in the protected wilderness of the Chatahoochee Na􀆟onal Forest. Ten years later, the Maine Appalachian Trail Club rerouted 263 miles of trail--half Its total length across the state--removing the trail from logging roads and pu􀆫ng it back in the wilds. Even now the trail is never quite the same from one year to the next.

Perhaps the hardest part about hiking the Appalachian Trail is ge􀆫ng on to it, nowhere more than at its ends. Springer Mountain, the launching-off point in the south, is seven miles from the nearest highway, at a place called Amicalola Falls State Park, which in turn is a good way from anywhere. From Atlanta, the nearest outlet to the wider world, you have a choice of one train or two buses a day to Gainesville, and then you're s􀆟ll forty miles short of being seven miles short of the start of the trail, as it were. (To and from Katahdin in Maine is even more problema􀆟c.)

Fortunately, there are people who will pick you up in Atlanta and take you to Amicalola for a fee. Thus it was that Katz and I delivered ourselves into the hands of a large, friendly guy in a baseball cap named Wes Wisson, who had agreed to take us from the airport in Atlanta to Amicalola Falls Lodge, our se􀆫ng-off point for Springer, for $60. Every year between early March and late April, about 2,000 hikers set off from Springer, most of them Intending to go all the way to Katahdin. No more than 10 percent actually make it. Half don't make it past central Virginia, less than a third of the way. A quarter get no farther than North Carolina, the next state. As many as 20 percent drop out the first week. Wisson has seen it all.

"Last year, I dropped a guy off at the trailhead,'' he told us as we tooled north through darkening pine forests towards the rugged hills of north Georgia. "Three days later he calls me from the pay phone at Woody Gap--that's the first pay phone you come to. Says he wants to go home, that the trail wasn't what he expected it to be. So I drive him back to the airport. Two days a􀅌er that he's back In Atlanta. Says his wife made him come back because he'd spent all this money on equipment and she wasn't going to let him quit

My wife drove us to the airport in Manchester, through blowing snow, in the kind of awkward silence that precedes a long separa􀆟on. Katz sat in back and ate doughnuts. At the airport, she presented me with a knobbly walking s􀆟ck the children had bought me. It had a red bow on it. I wanted to burst into tears--or, beter s􀆟ll, climb in the car and speed off while Katz was s􀆟ll frowning over his new, unfamiliar straps. She squeezed my arm, gave a weak smile, and le􀅌.

I watched her go, then went into the terminal with Katz. The man at the check-in desk looked at our 􀆟ckets to Atlanta and our packs and said--quite alertly, I thought, for a person wearing a shortsleeve shirt in winter-- "You fellows hiking the Appalachian Trail?"

"Sure are," said Katz proudly.

"Lot of trouble with wolves down in Georgia, you know."

"Really?" Katz was all ears.

"Oh, yeah. Coupla people been atacked recently. Prety savagely, too, from what I hear." He messed around with 􀆟ckets and luggage tags for a minute. "Hope you brought some long underwear."

Katz screwed up his face. "For wolves?"

"No, for the weather. There's gonna be record cold down there over the next four or five days. Gonna be well below zero in Atlanta tonight."

"Oh, great," Katz said and gave a ruptured, disconsolate sigh. He looked challengingly at the man. "Any other news for us? Hospital call to say we got cancer or anything?"

The man beamed and slapped the 􀆟ckets down on the counter. "No, that's about It, but you have a real good trip. And hey"--he was addressing Katz now, in a lower voice--"you watch out for those wolves, son, because between you and me you look like prety good ea􀆟ng." He gave a wink.

"Jesus." said Katz in a low voice, and he looked deeply, deeply gloomy.

We took the escalator up to our gate. "And they won't feed us on this plane either, you know, " he announced with a curious, biter finality.

It started with Benton MacKaye, a mild, kindly, infinitely well-meaning visionary who in the summer of 1921 unveiled an ambi􀆟ous plan for a long-distance hiking trail to his friend Charles Harris Whitaker, editor of a leading architectural journal. To say that MacKaye's life at this point was not going well would be to engage in careless understatement. In the previous decade he had been let go from jobs at Harvard and the Na􀆟onal Forest Service and eventually, for want of a beter place to s􀆟ck him, given a desk at the U.S. Labor Department with a vague assignment to come up with ideas to improve efficiency and morale. There, he du􀆟fully produced ambi􀆟ous, unworkable proposals that were read with amused tolerance and promptly binned. In April 1921 his wife, a well-known pacifist and suffragete named Jessie Hardy Stubbs, flung herself off a bridge over the East River in New York and drowned.

It was against this background, just ten weeks later, that MacKaye offered Whitaker his idea for an Appalachian Trail, and the proposal was published in the somewhat unlikely forum of Whitaker's Journal of the American Ins􀆟tute of Architects the following October. A hiking trail was only part of MacKaye's grand vision. He saw the AT as a thread connec􀆟ng a network of mountaintop work camps where pale, depleted urban workers in the thousands would come and engage in healthful toil in a selfless spirit and refresh

Black Mountain, I stood and waited a long while, and thought about going back, but eventually turned and struggled on. I had enough small agonies of my own.

Seven miles seems so litle, but it's not, believe me. With a pack, even for fit people it is not easy. You know what it's like when you're at a zoo or an amusement park with a small child who won't walk another step? You hoist him lightly onto your shoulders and for a while--for a couple of minutes--it's actually kind of fun to have him up there, pretending like you're going to 􀆟p him off or cruising his head towards some low projec􀆟on before veering off (all being well) at the last instant. But then it starts to get uncomfortable. You feel a twinge in your neck, a 􀆟ghten Ing between your shoulder blades, and the sensa􀆟on seeps and spreads un􀆟l it is decidedly uncomfortable, and you announce to litle Jimmy that you're going to have to put him down for a while.

Of course, Jimmy bawls and won't go another step, and your partner gives you that disdainful, I-should-have-married-the-quarterback look because you haven't gone 400 yards. But, hey, it hurts. Hurts a lot. Believe me, I understand.

OK, now imagine two litle Jimmies in a pack on your pack, or, beter s􀆟ll, something inert but weighty, something that doesn't want to be li􀅌ed, that makes it abundantly clear to you as soon as you pick it up that what it wants Is to sit heavily on the ground-- say, a bag of cement or a box of medical textbooks--ln any case, forty pounds of profound heaviness. Imagine the jerk of the pack going on, like the pull of a down elevator. Imagine walking with that weight for hours, for days, and not along level asphalt paths with benches and refreshment booths at though􀆞ul intervals but over a rough trail, full of sharp rocks and unyielding roots and staggering ascents that transfer enormous amounts of strain to your pale, shaking thighs. Now 􀆟lt your head back un􀆟l your neck is taut. And fix your gaze on a point two miles away. That's your first climb. It's 4,682 steep feet to the top, and there are lots more like it. Don't tell me that seven miles is not far. Oh, and here's the other thing. You don't have to do this. You're not in the army. You can quit right now. Go home. See your family. Sleep in a bed.

Or, alterna􀆟vely, you poor, sad shmuck, you can walk 2,169 miles through mountains and wilderness to Maine. And so, I trudged along for hours, in a private litle world of weariness and woe, up and over imposing hills, through an endless cocktail party of trees, all the 􀆟me thinking: "I must have done seven miles by now, surely." But always the wandering trail ran on.

At 3:30, I climbed some steps carved into granite and found myself on a spacious rock overlook: the summit of Springer Mountain. I shed my pack and slumped heavily against a tree, astounded by the scale of my 􀆟redness. The view was lovely--the rolling swell of the Cohuta Mountains, brushed with a bluish haze the color of cigarete smoke, running away to a far-off horizon. The sun was already low in the sky. I rested for perhaps ten minutes, then got up and had a look around. There was a bronze plaque screwed into a boulder announcing the start of the Appalachian Trail, and nearby on a post was a wooden box containing a Sic pen on a length of string and a standard spiral notebook, its pages curled from the damp air. The notebook was the trail register (I had somehow expected it to be leather bound and funereal) and it was filed with eager entries, nearly all writen in a youthful hand. There were perhaps twenty-five pages of entries since the first of January--eight entries on this day alone. Most were hurried and cheery--"March 2nd. Well, here we are and man it's cold! See y'all on Katahdin! Jaimie and Spud"--but about a third were

Not long a􀅌er I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.

A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America's eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes. From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump, comely hills' whose very names--Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, While Mountains--seem an invita􀆟on to amble. Who could say the words "Great Smoky Mountains" or "Shenandoah Valley" and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once put it, to "throw a loaf of bread and a pound or tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence"?

And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously beguiling fashion through the pleasant New England community in which I had just setled. It seemed such an extraordinary no􀆟on--that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floa􀆟ng in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A litle voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"

I formed a number of ra􀆟onaliza􀆟ons. It would get me fit a􀅌er years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interes􀆟ng and reflec􀆟ve way to reacquaint myself with the scale and beauty or my na􀆟ve land a􀅌er nearly twenty years of living abroad. It would be useful (I wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hun􀆟ng hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors. I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a litle of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, "Yeah, I've shit in the woods."

And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are the home of one of the world's great hardwood forests-- the expansive relic of the richest, most diversified sweep of woodland ever to grace the temperate world--and that forest is in trouble. If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fi􀅌y years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a 􀆟me to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my inten􀆟on-- told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books and talked to people who had done the trail in whole or in part and came gradually to realize that this was way beyond--way beyond--anything I had atempted before.

Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat atached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.

Herrero recounts an incident that nicely conveys the near indestruc􀆟bility of the grizzly. It concerns a professional hunter in Alaska named Alexei Pitka, who stalked a large male through snow and finally felled it with a well-aimed shot to the heart from a large-bore rifle. Pitka should probably have carried a card with him that said: "First make sure bear is dead. Then put gun down." He advanced cau􀆟ously and spent a minute or two watching the bear for movement. but when there was none, he set the gun against a tree {big mistake!) and strode forward to claim his prize. Just as he reached it. the bear sprang up, clapped its expansive jaws around the front of Pitka's head, as if giving him a big kiss, and with a single jerk tore off his face.

Miraculously, Pitka survived. "I don't know why I set that durn gun against the tree," he said later. (Actually, what he said was. "Mrffff mmmpg nnnmmm mffffffn," on account of having no lips, teeth, nose, tongue, or other vocal apparatus.)

If I were to be pawed and chewed--and this seemed to me en􀆟rely possible, the more I read--it would be by a black bear, Ursus americanus. There are at least 500,000 black bears in North America, possibly as many as 700,000. They are notably common in the hills along the Appalachian Trail (indeed, they o􀅌en use the trail, for convenience). And their numbers are growing. Grizzlies, by contrast, number no more than 35,000 in the whole of North America, and just 1,000 in the mainland United States, principally in and around Yellowstone Na􀆟onal Park. Of the two species, black bears are generally smaller (though this is a decidedly rela􀆟ve condi􀆟on; a male black bear can s􀆟ll weigh up to 650 pounds) and unques􀆟onably more re􀆟ring.

Black bears rarely atack. But here's the thing. Some􀆟mes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and prety much whenever they want. That doesn't happen o􀅌en, but-and here is the absolutely salient point--once would be enough. Herrero is at pains to stress that black bear atacks are infrequent, rela􀆟ve to their numbers. For 1900 to 1980, he found just twenty-three confirmed black bear killings of humans (about half the number of killings by grizzlies), and most of these were out West or in Canada. In New Hampshire there has not been an unprovoked fatal atack on a human by a bear since 1784. In Vermont, there has never been one.

I wanted very much to be calmed by these assurances but could never quite manage the necessary leap of faith. A􀅌er no􀆟ng that just 500 people were atacked and hurt by black bears between 1960 and 1980--twenty-five atacks a year from a resident popula􀆟on of at least half a million bears--Herrero adds that most of these injuries were not severe. "The typical black bear-inflicted injury; he writes blandly, "is minor and usually involves only a few scratches or light bites." Pardon me, but what exactly is a light bite? Are we talking a playful wrestle and gummy nips? I think not. And is 500 cer􀆟fied attacks really such a modest number, considering how few people go into the North American woods? And how foolish must one be to be reassured by the informa􀆟on that no bear has killed a human in Vermont or New Hampshire in 200 years? That's not because the bears have signed a treaty, you know. There's nothing to say that they won't start a modest rampage tomorrow.

So let us imagine that a bear does go for us out in the wilds. What are we to do? Interes􀆟ngly, the advised stratagems are exactly opposite for grizzly and black bear. With a grizzly, you should make for a tall tree, since grizzlies aren't much for climbing. If a tree