Free Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron

conditions didn’t seem so bad until, going around a curve, I turned the handlebars and everything went wobbly. The sled rolled to the outside and dug into a drift, throwing cold mist up into the visor of my helmet. I stood up, leaned hard against the inside, and pulled the machine level for all of ten seconds before it pitched away from me again. I needed to find my balance quickly or I’d be wallowing in a snowbank with a quarter ton of steel on top of me. The last time something like that had happened, I snapped two bones in my hand. I planted both feet on the outside running board and let my body weight pull against the roll. Soon I was swaying back and forth down the trail.
    Doris Sprague had called the frozen swamp behind her house the Heath. There were about a hundred places with that name in my district. Most were raised peat bogs from which, every now and then, someone dug up a tea-stained mammoth tusk. The word heathen is derived from these prehistoric wetlands because heaths were home to criminals, outcasts, and lepers. Bogeymen dwelled in bogs. In northern Europe, they were the sites of ritual human sacrifices.
    This one was pretty much just a trackless wasteland. No virgins had ever been sacrificed here except by accident. Beneath the blowing snowdrifts, the sphagnum moss was hardened into permafrost. Stunted pines and swamp maples clustered together on islands of rock. Along the edges of the Heath, loggers had carved a rat’s maze through the laden evergreens. Every way you turned, there was another trail that dead-ended against a white wall of trees.
    Why had John Sewall been lurking in this swamp on a subzero day? And how had he found his way out?
    A lost person usually behaves in certain specific ways. Deprived of his bearings, he travels downhill or downstream under the mistaken impression that water always leads to a road (often it only leads to more water). Once he finds a trail, he will typically keep walking in one direction. A lost person moves with conviction and rarely reverses course, which is why wardens find so many of them headed 180 degrees from their intended destinations. The worst ones start bushwhacking and get themselves thoroughly turned around. Without clear visual clues, humans really do wander in circles.
    To make matters worse, John Sewall was hypothermic. In addition to the normal panic one experiences upon being lost, he was freezing to death, and his behavior had likely been irrational. The worst-case scenario was that he’d never been in the Heath to begin with; perhaps his car had slid off Route 277, and maybe Kate was the name of his girlfriend back home. But my gut told me the young man really had come from the bog and that someone else was lost out here.
    Snow sparkled in my headlights. It was often easier to see the outline of the road overhead than the road itself; the jagged treetops showed dark gray against the lighter gray of the sky.
    Where the hell was Kendrick—or Ben Sprague, for that matter? I saw no evidence in the shapes of the drifts of a plow truck having come this way. The wind was blowing so hard that the snowbanks were moving around me like slow-motion waves. I realized Sprague might have pushed his way down this very road fifteen minutes earlier and I’d never know it.
    I decided to mark a waypoint. I fumbled in my coat pocket and removed my DeLorme GPS unit. The satellite showed my location as a green arrow near the intersection of two branching tote roads. There were low hills on either side of me, steep enough to have presented a barrier to anyone traveling through deep snow on foot. Farther to the west was Bog Pond. I toggled north and south. If Sewall had come from this direction, the hills would have funneled him to this same spot. The road divided south of me. I needed to pick a direction.
    East, I decided.
    Out of the brute force of the blizzard, the wind wasn’t quite as loud, and I became aware of a distant sound. It was the barking of