I soon snapped out of it, and picked up one of the children, a little girl. Her body had no strength in it at all and was limp as a rag doll. Her breathing was steady but she was still unconscious. Her eyes, though, were open, tracking something back and forth. I pulled a small flashlight out of my bag and shined it on her pupils. Completely unreactive. Her eyes were functioning, watching something, yet showed no response to light. I picked up several other children and examined them and they were all exactly the same, unresponsive. I found this quite odd.

I next checked their pulse and temperature. Their pulses were between 50 and 55, and all of them had temperatures just below 97 degrees. Somewhere around 96 degrees or thereabouts, as I recall. That's correct-for children of that age this pulse rate is well below normal, the body temperature over one degree below average. I smelled their breath, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Likewise with their throats and tongues.

I immediately ascertained these weren't the symptoms of food poisoning. Nobody had vomited or suffered diarrhea, and none of them seemed to be in any pain. If the children had eaten something bad you could expect-with this much time having elapsed-the onset of at least one of these symptoms. I heaved a sigh of relief that it wasn't food poisoning. But then I was stumped, since I hadn't a clue what was wrong with them.

The symptoms were similar to sunstroke. Kids often collapse from this in the summer. It's like it's contagious-once one of them collapses their friends all do the same, one after the other. But this was November, in a cool woods, no less. One or two getting sunstroke is one thing, but sixteen children simultaneously coming down with it was out of the question.