Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [29]
He stopped. The trail had ended in a broad, quaking pool of muck. He looked around for cairns that might lead through it and saw none. Hell, he hadn’t been paying attention. He turned, looking back over the trail on which he had come. Now that he looked at it, it didn’t look like a trail—more a linked series of dirt patches. He started to retrace his steps, then stopped: there seemed to be two ways he could have come in, two wandering paths. Examining them both closely, he couldn’t see his footprints in the hard surface, now puddled with rain. He straightened up and scanned the horizon, looking for a telltale spike of granite. But no matter how hard he stared, he could see nothing but gray boggy swamp and tatters of mist.
He took a deep breath. The cairns were placed a couple of hundred yards apart. He couldn’t be more than a hundred yards from the last. All he had to do was go slow, take it easy, stay calm, and get his ass back to the previous cairn.
He took the right-hand path and moved slowly, stopping every now and then to peer ahead for the cairn. After going about fifty yards, he concluded that this could not be the way he’d come—the cairn would have been visible by now. Fine; he would take the other path. He turned back and retraced his steps about fifty yards, but for some reason it didn’t return to the fork in the trail that had puzzled him previously. He went a little farther, thinking he had misjudged the distance—only to find the trail dead-ending at another bog.
He stopped, controlled his breathing. All right: he was lost. But he wasn’t that lost. He still couldn’t be more than one or two hundred yards from the last cairn. What he had to do was look around. He would not move until he had oriented himself and knew where he was going.
The rain gusted, and he could feel a cold trickle down his back. Ignoring the sensation, he took stock. He seemed to be in a bowl-like depression. The horizon was perhaps a mile away on all sides, but it was hard to tell with the incessantly moving mists. He started to take out his map and then shoved it back into his pocket. What good would that do? He cursed himself for not bringing a compass. At least with a compass, he could have known his general direction. He looked at his watch: one thirty. About three hours to sunset.
“Damn,” he said aloud, and then, louder: “Damn!”
That made him feel better. He picked a point on the horizon and began to scrutinize it for a cairn. And there it was—a distant vertical scratch in the shifting mists.
He worked his way toward it, stepping from one gravelly patch to the next. But the bogs conspired to block his every turn: he kept having to go first one way, then another, and then retrace, until it seemed he was stuck on some sort of snake-like island in the middle of the bogs. Christ, he could see the stupid cairn not two hundred yards away!
Coming to a narrow stretch of bog, he spied the trail itself running along the other side, a sandy piece of ground winding off toward the cairn. He experienced a huge feeling of relief. Probing this way and that, he looked for a way across the narrow bog. At first, he could find no clear passage. But then he noticed that at one point the bog was interspersed with hillocks, close enough together to allow him to step across. Taking a deep breath, he stepped out onto the first hillock, tested it, put his weight down, and brought his other foot over. Doing the same with the next, he stepped across the bog from hillock to hillock, the black muck quaking below, sometimes bubbling up with marsh gas disturbed by the vibrations of his footfalls.
He was almost there. He reached his foot across one large gap, placed it on a hillock, pushed off with the other foot—and lost his balance. With an involuntary yell he tried to leap over the last piece of mire to hard ground, came up short, and landed in the bog with a heavy smack.
As the