Giancarlo sat up and surveyed what he could see of the landscape. A nervous knot twisted in his stomach. The odds of finding Giorgio in time had never been very much in their favor, even with the perfectly clear weather that had prevailed to that point. Now, with the mountain lost in fog, the odds against them had increased exponentially. It was discouraging, almost to the point of hopelessness, but there was no time to dwell on that just now. Regardless of the visibility, the chances of finding his brother were zero if they sat around waiting for better weather to come, so he reached out across the tarp and gave Carter a poke in the back.

Carter awoke with a grunt. He sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and gazed about at the misty surroundings. The look on his face told Giancarlo that he understood at once the predicament presented by the changed skies.

“Do you think this will burn off?” he said with marked apprehension.

“It might,” replied Giancarlo. “It might not.”

“So what do we do?”

“I was hoping you might have some ideas,” said Giancarlo. “Did anything come to you in your dreams?”

“Nothing but wild animals,” griped Carter. “And none of them had anything to say.”

“Think,” Giancarlo prodded him, the same way he might have done during one of their lessons. “Think hard! What was the last thing you remember talking about with my brother?”

Carter grimaced as he strained to reconstruct in his mind the events of the day before Giorgio disappeared.

“We talked about taking a ride the next day,” he said in frustration. “That’s all. He was going to show me around the area. He didn’t say anything at all about going up into the mountains.”

“There must have been something,” Giancarlo insisted. “Think. Was there any place in particular that he wanted to take you?”

Carter closed his eyes for a few moments and concentrated again, before giving up with a sigh.

“He said he knew where the best gelateria was in all of Abruzzo,” he said at last. “Other than that, he didn’t mention anywhere else. Trust me, I’ve gone over this again and again in my mind.”

Now it was Giancarlo’s turn to sigh in frustration.

“I’m sorry,” said Carter, a forlorn look coming over his face. “It’s all that I can come up with. So now what?”

“Now, I guess we do our best to find our way up to the north slope,” said Giancarlo, “and hope we get lucky along the way.”

It did not take long for the two to collect their gear and prepare themselves to get back on the trail. When their packs were buckled and secured on their backs, they took their walking sticks in hand and set off toward the top of the mountain.