I entertained a perverse thought of giving Shadow the freedom of the park. Which of his fellow canines would he eat first, I wondered: the black-and-white mutt or the young boxer?

Maybe he would maximize his calorie intake and go for the owners.

It was necessary to have a sense of humor around the half-wild animal. Otherwise his captivity afflicted me with too much sadness and guilt.

“How’re you doing back there, big guy?”

He answered with a grunt.

Professor Chamberlain had died on this same river, in this same month. Stratford was twenty or thirty miles downstream, above the man-made reservoir of Gulf Island Pond. I decided I needed a better look at the river that had killed him.

I followed Foundry Road to Mill Street, drove to the end, and parked above a dam that had outlived its reason for being. An off-white sheet of ice stretched across the pond above the impoundment, but only a suicidal fool would have ventured onto that eggshell surface.

Below the falls, there was a maw of open water. It was very dark, with a tea-brown tint from the conifer needles decomposing at its bottom. A mist rose from the plunge pool, and where the beige spray had splashed the concrete levee, it had frozen in translucent layers to form an almost-beautiful ice cliff. Downstream, the river bubbled in the fast-flowing channels before it disappeared again beneath a patchwork of ice.

I doubted a man could last five minutes in those lethal currents.

What a horrible way to go.

5

On the snowy bank of the river I pull the parka’s hood over my wet head and empty my pockets. To avoid losing anything I might need, I lay everything onto a blaze orange bandanna that I’d tucked inside a pocket during deer-hunting season and forgotten. Now that square of bright cotton feels like a godsend.

It turns out I am better outfitted than I’d first imagined.

Just barely.

I have the Beast, of course, and that’s already proven its worth twice.

“A man without a knife is a man without a life,” Charley Stevens always says. I don’t know if it’s some old proverb or a rhyme of his own creation. But the wisdom behind the saying reminds me to keep a tight grip.

Somehow I didn’t lose my pocket flashlight: a SureFire Tactical that fits in my palm. It has a maximum output of 1,500 lumens—roughly equivalent to a 100-watt incandescent light bulb—all of which I would need to get me out of this mess.

Also I have a pair of leather gloves with a layer of Thinsulate insulation. Soaked as they are, I wonder if they might incline me to frostbite more than no gloves at all. But I put them on nonetheless.