I Was Lost For Nine Hours And Something Kept Me On The Path

I got lost the way people actually get lost: not dramatically, but through a series of small, confident mistakes.

By four in the afternoon I did not know where I was. By six I was on something that was probably a game trail. By eight it was dark and the temperature was going the way temperatures go up there.

Then the stones started.

Every time I stepped off the trail — and in the dark you step off constantly, you drift — a stone would hit a tree. Not near me. Ahead of me. A crack, and then quiet.

I would correct my line, and there would be no stone.

I want to be very clear about the geometry, because it is the whole story: the stones were always ahead, in the direction I needed to go. Never behind me. Never at me. Never once did one hit me, and I could have been hit, easily, and I was a slow target.

It went on for nine hours.

Around three in the morning I came out onto a forest road and I sat down on the gravel and I cried in a way I have not cried since I was a child, and then I walked four miles to a gate, and then I got a lift from a man delivering bread.

I never saw anything. I want you to understand that I saw nothing at all.

Search and rescue, when I told them the next day, were polite. One of them, an older man, walked me to my car afterwards and said, without any preamble: "Did the stones come from one side, or from all round?"

I said one side. Always the left.

He nodded like I had confirmed an appointment, and he said, "Good. You did right, going where they told you."

Then he said, "Don't go back in there."

I have not. I sold my boots.

The internet will tell me it was rockfall, or an animal, or a rescuer who never identified himself. I would love all three. But I was moved, deliberately, with patience, for nine hours, by something that never once let me see it.

I am alive. It is the only fact I am sure of.