There are a few really hateable things in this world of ours and for the most part we do well to hate them. I hated Nixon for instance, not because he was republican or that I carry any aversion to jowls. He was trite, simple as that. I have learned to hate the motor vehicle bureau and used to send my secretary in my stead and give her on the spot bonus when she returned. She didn't mind. She got along with the pinch-faced cashier and the impolite clerk whose mentality I rated slightly below bacteria. Evelyn is pretty and that goes a long way.

Today I hated rain. Now normally rain and I get along just fine but this was an unscheduled offering (so the weather bureau had promised) and I was totally unprepared. Well, not totally perhaps; my rain gear was a scant ten miles away at my campsite, which was probably underwater by now anyway. When one doesn't plan for rain, one does it in a big way. Because of the promise of balmy

Weather for the entire week I had broken the fundamental rules governing tent pitching and drainage. As it turned out, this wouldn't matter anyway. It began when the rain couldn't possibly come down any harder and did so anyway. Not even in the monsoon season of Viet Nam had I seen so fierce a torrent as the one that pelted me and literally restricted vision to a dozen feet or so.

Traveling the Adirondacks by foot is a chore in good weather. Now movement was nearly impossible and this was adding to the bind I found myself in. You see, it was nearly sunset, or would have been had there been a sun. Faced with this, and the fact that my Sitka boots could no longer get hold of the mud slicked game trail, I broke my second set of rules; I decided to strike out through the brush. For those of you who have never really been in these hills (visits to permanent camps do not qualify you as an Adirondack woodsman), let me draw a clear picture; it's tough turf. These mountains that seem so old and worn have had the time to develop tricks of their own. The gentle looking slopes are deceptive. Also, they are perfect for promoting the growth of bushes and scrub pines and lastly, they are slippery when even slightly damp. Add to this that a long time ago they had a wind blow through that knocked down most of the trees which have laid, undisturbed, rotting. In some places they covered hollows in the ground and eventually filled them up with their decaying branches. The end result is that you can start walking across perfectly safe looking ground and have it fall out from under you. Neat, ain't it?

It had been a twenty years since I'd been in these parts of the woods and never really exactly here. I prefer exploration, always with that firm belief that I am treading earth no man has ever seen, even if I at times must ignore a Budwiser label or two. My compass, and some reckoning, told me I could cut off five miles if I went over this hill instead of circumventing it so, all points considered, it made sense. If you're an over confident soggy fool, it made perfect sense.

It was early twilight when I reached the top of the hill and that probably saved my life. On the map I was climbing a common ridge with no distinguishing features. Someone from the Geodetic Service was intentionally out to get me for at the top I found a long crevasse headed off in both directions along the ridge. Luckily, I told myself, it wasn't very wide, less than thirty feet at best. Now, you say, how does one get across an opening thirty feet across. Well, if one is a 'rocker' then one has studied such things. I elected to use a hunk of metal with a rope strung through it that's called a 'knot'. After several tries I got it snagged in a tree on the far side and tied my end to a tree on my side using a release knot. I rigged my seat sling, tightening it until its straps squished the water from my clothes. Four carabiners and a safety line later and I was on my way.

Things went well until I was within an arm's reach of the other side. I'd set my feet and began pulling myself up when the footing gave way. The release line somehow got pulled and the rope fell from the tree behind me. I fell into the darkened slash in the ground ten feet before I could slow my descent with the rope. I stopped falling all right. I also swung, in conformance to the rules of pendulums, chest first into the rock wall, and that's the last thing I remember.

When I did come to, I was in complete darkness and was afraid I was either dead, blind or maybe both. Another thing that came to me fairly soon was that I could not breath. I could I guess but would have preferred not to because of the rather splendid pain each breath produced. Both sides of my rib cage ached so badly I thought surely there were several broken bones. My mouth had that taste of blood that makes you want to vomit. Thankfully, I was too weak to move let alone anything that violent. I was also lying in the edge of a pool of water and at a precarious angle. The water covered the middle of my chest on down and I could feel myself slipping.

It wasn't the kind of feeling that implied motion of any degree, just a barely noticeably sliding of ground beneath me. I tried to brace myself and slid three inches deeper. I was lying on a slippery rock that had no handholds. Learning that cost another three inches and I lay as still as I could. I'd always wondered how I was going to die and now I knew. Somehow, it wasn't fitting to survive Boston traffic and Viet Nam only to drown in total darkness, but here I was. I knew I'd never be able to swim. Just moving my shoulders had brought the pain to the edge of knocking me out. Through my sling I could feel the nylon cord scraping, catching and abrading as it followed me slowly into the water. I took a painful deep breath and learned that this too was a bad idea. The excess air in my lungs gave me just enough buoyancy to overcome the minute friction between me and the rock and I slid into the water like a floundering ship. Pain wracked my whole body as I tried to struggle for air. I choked on crisp cold water and tried vainly to get to the surface only inches from my face and got nowhere.

As I felt myself falling deeper I also felt the rope catch on something and then, inexplicably, begin pulling me out of the water. Now I blessed the rock's slippery surface as it allowed me to be pulled painfully, completely clear of the pond. Probably the rope had gotten caught on a sapling, I told myself. Then, after it had bent enough, the wind had straightened it and pulled me out. Yep; that's what I told myself. The last thing I remembered was coughing fitfully.

I couldn't have guessed how long I was out; hours or weeks would have been equally believable. I still hurt all over, mostly my ribs but my right ankle throbbed painfully now also. I lay still and looked around. From my position, half propped up against a rock, I could see the pond some thirty feet away. It was really a beautiful little pool of water surrounded on all sides by slanting weather worn rock. Here and there scrub trees poked out of the ground and a variety of bushy plants filled in the spaces. All about me were high smooth walls of gray brown rock that rose several hundred feet into the sky. The canyon I was in looked to be perhaps a quarter mile wide and twisted out of sight. There was one feature to it that was curious; how had it come to be. I'm no geologist but this small valley didn't require that sort of training to spot it uniqueness. The walls of both sides, besides being sheer and polished, looked as if they had been separated from each other during some long past geological era. The stratifications in both walls were the mirror image of each other. I would have pondered this further if several other things hadn’t distracted me.

First, there was the pain. I guessed that my ribs were only bruised because there was no grinding going on inside me when I could breathe, which was not a pleasant thing to do just then anyway. When I looked to my ankle, it was badly swollen and discolored and ached steadily. I'd always had 'soft' ankles and knew that this was another bad sprain that would last several weeks. The pain came in sheets as I pulled off my shoe. Somehow during the fall the laces had been cut to shreds, or so I thought at first. It wasn't until much later that I took the time to notice that, though every crossing of the laces was parted, the leather a fraction of an inch below was undamaged. There were no scrapes, no abrasions, nothing to hint at how the laces had been cut.

Now I know that this is a trivial observation, but I made my living by observation and conclusion and this little puzzle intrigued me. It also took my mind off the aches and a growing sense of great hunger. I'd forgotten the movie but I remembered Charlie Chaplin eating a shoe he'd cooked and gave the idea momentary consideration. When common sense returned I started prioritizing my needs. First, I had to get something to drink. That was easy. Not fifteen feet away a spring gurgled out through a sandy crack in the rocks and trailed to the pond. Piece of cake, I thought. It took ten painful minutes to drag myself to the tiny brook and twice I nearly passed out. The water, when I got there, was icy cold and clear as glass and that took care of my second problem; cooling down my ankle. After a time, I fashioned a tiny dam and created a pool of water big enough to set my foot in. By placing my knee flat on its side, I managed to fully submerge the whole ugly looking ankle. Exhaustion set in as soon as the throbbing eased and I fell off to sleep with the sun warming me nicely.

It wasn't warming me at all when I awoke. There was nothing. My ankle ached worse than ever and my ribs were having their say too. In pitch darkness, I sat up and discovered my little dam had eroded away and that my ankle was thicker than my calf so, despite the chilly night air, I rebuilt the dam and slid my leg back into the water that now seemed nearly warm.

Above me Pegasus crawled slowly through the heavens. I'd forgotten how many stars you could see on a night in the mountains; too many in fact. The constellations that were easy to see when lights from civilization obscured the lesser stars were lost in a background pool of twinkling dots and only available to me because of prior knowledge. The Milky Way galaxy is a marvelous place to visit on moonless nights in northern New York, I told myself. As I watched, tiny meteorites dove to their deaths into our atmosphere leaving streaks behind them. One huge piece of matter plunged into the thin upper ionosphere and lit up the entire valley as it burned, fragmented and burned some more. I wondered how many times a day the earth's oxygen rich skies saved us from catastrophe. I had no way of knowing what its size had been, but I guessed that, had that one meteor entered the atmosphere at right angles, it would have reached the planet long before it burned up and left one hell of a hole. As it was, it slid neatly along leaving a bright luminescent trail from horizon to horizon; no great feat considering the location.

Everywhere, tree frogs sang their songs to each other and the brook babbled relaxingly. There was a great calm I felt in spite of my circumstance because of these sounds in the darkness. I was home. This was where I had always wanted to be and I was here and, if anyone I knew stood a chance at surviving this, I was the one. That was not bravado, or at least not completely. I had been trained by the military to survive so this wasn't that big a deal if I did things right. In the morning I would have to see just how much damage I sustained and find out what I could do to repair or patch myself up. I'd need food, or at least salt and a means to move that wouldn't require pressure on my ankle or ribs, the latter ruling out a normal crutch. Salt would be the big problem. There was no trace of it in the water that I could tell and what plants I had seen weren't anything I'd ever seen eaten. One does not experiment with new foods when one has no hospital to check into. That left blood and meat. I'd have to kill something to eat. I was still thinking about eating when I fell back to sleep.

It was a pastel world that greeted my eyes some hours later, where all things were vaguely visible in hues of blue and violet. Monet would have loved it. I did nothing more than open my eyes partially for I knew I'd heard something. Inches from my face lay a small pile of some sort of leaves, vague and beyond identification if first light. Behind the pile, just inside my reach, sat a good-sized snowshoe rabbit preening its fur with its back to me. I resisted the temptation to lunge and rehearsed mentally the moves involved. I would have one chance to catch it and kill it, probably by cracking its skull or breaking its neck. For the uninitiated, the varying hare looks like a timid creature that would yield easily. There are good hunting dogs whose faces have been shredded by their hind legs who would argue the point. I waited, concentrated as hard as I could on my move, and struck. As soon as my fingers touched the fur as the nape of the neck I raised the rabbit off the ground and would have smashed him back down except for two things. First, the creature made no defensive move; it simply allowed itself to be lifted, rather roughly. Secondly, after I'd decided to kill it anyway, a tiny voice said, "You would kill him, wouldn't you!"