The snowshoer had looked closely at the cogwheel railroad; the sides of the railway bed looked a little narrow for snowshoeing, she thought. What if a train was passing? What if there were tunnels or bridges? Someone climbing up the railway bed would be better off in hiking boots, the snowshoer said. I knew this was her way of telling me not to snowshoe alongside the train track.

“The ski patrollers don’t want snowshoers on the piste, not on the lower slopes,” the little English teacher told me, although not one of the patrollers had actually said this.

I’d brought the novel I was writing to Wengen and I was finishing a difficult chapter. I thought I would write in the mornings in my hotel room, imagining I would meet up with Mr. Barlow for some snowshoeing in the afternoons. The cog railway complicated our plans to meet up in the middle of the day.

“You have to take two trains to get to Jungfraujoch, and it’ll be much colder up there,” the snowshoer said. I knew what she wanted—more working out, less time on a train. She would take the train from Wengen to Kleine Scheidegg, just one train. It took only about thirty minutes to get there—the snowshoeing there would be “gut genug,” Elliot had decided. My German was rudimentary, but I knew the words for “good enough.”

The skiers made their own plans; where they were skiing, they would take ski lifts, not trains. I knew how my mom and Molly skied; they were in their sixties, but they still skied hard. Those two would start out skiing with the little Barlows—just a couple of warm-up runs. Then my mother and Molly would go off by themselves; they would find more challenging terrain, leaving the little Barlows to ski alone. John and Susan Barlow had told us they liked to ski on the gentler slopes. There was a train station and a gondola lift station in the village of Wengen; the stations were an easy walk from our hotel. At night, we would all meet for dinner in the hotel restaurant. But I wasn’t paying attention to the lay of the land.