With a curse that echoed weirdly through the dripping forest, Eckert sat heavily down on a spongy, moss-covered log. Then he stood up again and shrugged out of the backpack he wore under his poncho, heedlessly letting it slip to the sodden ground. He rubbed his shoulders and stood staring at his moisture-blackened boots, listening to the never-ending soft rain that rustled in the tall trees and pattered on the plastic hood of his poncho like a thousand spidery, scrabbling insects.

He was tired: tired in the base of his spine, and the muscles of his thighs, and the ligaments of his knees. And he was tired of being wet, unutterably sick of the dark, glistening forest with its green, under-the-sea light, ghostly and dim. For two days and nights the rain had floated down in a mist, never slackening, never increasing; just enough to keep him continuously wet, cold, and miserable.

The trail he had been on since eight was too new to show on the map, but the Park Service sign had said NORTH SHORE, TEN MILES. That saved five miles and would put him under a hot shower and into dry clothes two hours sooner than the old trail. But now he wasn’t sure of exactly where he was, and that made him uncomfortable. Still, it couldn’t be more than two or three miles more; it just couldn’t be.

He continued to stare at his boots. The thought of taking the right one off to get at the pebble that seemed to be lodged beneath his little toe was almost more than he could bear: untying the tight knot with his chilled fingers, undoing all that wet lacing, taking the boot off, then the outer sock, then the inner sock, putting them on, tying the boot up again-and all in that drenching, bone-chilling fog.

He looked up suddenly at the sound on his left. Twenty feet away, veiled in the mist, a figure had stepped out of the brush, its right hand raised above its head. In the hand was a strange object, hard to make out in the lowering fog. A long, jointed stick? A whip?