But someone obviously did.Sinclair, I thought, but then,How can it be Sinclair? The FBI arrested him yesterday. A fourth shot whanged into the rocks.I guess he got out, I decided. I ran, chased by a fifth shot.
I couldn’t have said how far I ran; all I knew was that I ran, up and up the twisting trail, until I stopped to vomit from the exertion. My gasping breath was interrupted by the heaves of my stomach—heaves that left me gasping even harder for air. The edges of my vision began to go black, and I dropped to my hands and knees, fighting to control my panic and desperate breath. Once my heaves dried up and my breath slowed down, I took stock of my situation, and I didn’t like what I saw. Somewhere below me was a person who had a gun and a wish to kill me, so heading back down the trail didn’t seem to be the path of wisdom. I recalled two other trails in this section of the park—the West Prong Trail, which began at the point where Tremont Road turned from pavement to gravel, and Bote Mountain Trail, which the West Prong Trail hit at a T junction. It seemed possible, or even likely, that this trail would intersect one of those two trails and lead me safely to the road.
I stood and continued up the trail, shakily at first, then with more strength and confidence. Judging by the direction of the sun, I was heading southwest—the general direction of the Bote Mountain Trail, if my memory was correct. But judging by the angle of the sun, I didn’t have much daylight left in which to find it. I checked my watch: It was four-thirty, and that meant I had an hour, maybe ninety minutes, before darkness would catch me in the mountains.
I hiked for half an hour, hoping to hit the intersection with the Bote Mountain Trail. As the trail continued to climb, the sun continued to drop; so did the temperature, and gradually my breath began to fog. Soon the trail snaked up a shaded slope through a patch of snow and ice—not a good sign. Off slightly to my right, perhaps ten miles away and thousands of feet below, I caught a glimpse of Cades Cove, a bowl in the mountains that had been settled and cleared in the early 1800s. Seeing Cades Cove gave me a better fix on my location, but the knowledge was unsettling. The trail, I realized with a sinking feeling, was taking me up to the crest of the mountains—probably up Thunderhead Mountain, the highest peak in the western part of the Smokies. The clothes I was wearing were fine for a warm afternoon in the sun, but not for a night on Thunderhead at five thousand feet.
Would anyone come looking for me—anyone besides Ray Sinclair? Nobody from the Anthropology Department, surely. Miranda had resigned. No one else would have given a thought to my early departure, and no one else would expect to see me before Monday. My one hope—the one silver lining to being suspected of committing fraud and theft—was that the TBI might somehow follow my trail to the mountains. But how? I’d told no one where I was heading, and I doubted that the TBI considered me worthy of an urgent manhunt.
I had two other options, as I saw it. One was to backtrack, hoping that whoever had been shooting at me had given up and gone away. The other was to bushwhack: to cut directly down the mountainside, then follow the small stream I could hear churning far below. I felt certain that the stream fed into the West Prong of the Little Tennessee River; I could even, in my mind’s eye, picture the very bridge where the West Prong flowed beneath the highway. I decided to bushwhack. Veering off the trail, I began scrambling—half running, half falling—down the mountainside. But could I reach the highway by dark?
I could not. Twilight caught me at the confluence where the small stream joined the West Prong. The river gorge had darkened sooner and faster than the higher slopes, and the terrain was steeper and rockier along the water. My side of the river, the south bank, appeared rugged as far as I could see, with stone bluffs and thickets of rhododendron. The north bank looked more passable, but getting to it would require crossing the river. I scanned the stream for a narrows where I might be able to rock-hop across, but I didn’t see one, and I was running out of time to search. Sitting down on a boulder at the water’s edge, I shucked off my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear, then waded in, clutching my rolled-up clothes above my head and wearing my shoes draped around my neck by the laces, like a primitive tribal token of victory over some L.L. Bean–shod academic rival.