The Walk

The Walk

    He woke with a start and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as he looked around.  What in the…?  He couldn’t figure out how he had gotten here.  The last he could remember he had been walking through the streets of downtown Missoula, Montana, trudging through the fallen leaves.  He would like to say that it had been a plethora of beautiful colors, the leaves that is, but it wasn’t.  It was one of those falls where the frost had come far too early and the leaves had all frozen to the trees.  They were brown.  Just brown.  No different shades of brown either.  Brown.
    But now he was surrounded by snow in the middle of, well, somewhere.  He stood up shivering and brushed the snow that clung to his overcoat.   He scrambled through his memories but he couldn’t seem to remember why he could possibly be here.  There was no sign that another human being had even been here.   So he began to walk.
    His boots were thin and holes had been worn through each one on the outside from years of use, causing each step to send a dull throb through his quickly numbing feet, ice chunks forming on the sweat that was being wicked from his exposed Smartwool socks. 
    He couldn’t help but glance around in awe as a couple of startled grouse burst forth from a bit of sagebrush.  He found some deer tracks and decided to follow them, maybe they would cross a trail.
    As the day wore on he started getting more and more sleepy and it had become difficult for him to stay on his feet.  He began to tell himself riddles in order to keep his mind sharp but quickly discovered that he couldn’t remember any.  In fact, he was finding it difficult to remember his own name, it rhymes with Scott?  Steve… Sam… and his career.  Had he even had a career?  His mind was slipping, especially for one at such a young (?) age.  The deer tracks had led him into a small copse of trees that had shielded him from the breeze and they were quickly bringing him back out the other side.
    He pushed his way through a low-hanging aspen tree and what he saw almost made him drop to his knees with a cry of relief: another human.  He, at least his stature looked like a male, was wearing snowshoes and slowly working his way up a ridge with the help of his ski-poles.  He was wearing a bright red jacket with black windbreaker pants.  His hat was a bright orange with red stripes rounding it in concentric circles from the bottom to the top.  His breath streamed out through his black facemask in small puffs of mist.
    He opened his mouth to shout to the stranger but no words came out;  just a choked sigh of exhaustion.  He cleared his throat and bellowed in the loudest shout that he could muster; Hey!  Hey, please, help!
    The hiker turned and stared at him for a time.  He watched as this man came staggering out of the woods toward him, his face shrouded behind the mask and goggles that he wore.  After about five minutes had passed he turned and kept hiking.  He didn’t look back again.
    The walker ran as fast as he could through the deep snow, but it made travel nearly impossible.  Snow ran up the legs of his pants and packed deep into his boots, slowly increasing his risk of freezing.  No, please, please, please… he had trouble shouting now because his breathing was so heavy, please, come back for me.  He lost his balance and plunged into the snow.  As he tried to get up he found that his arms wouldn’t support his weight and his vision slowly blurred as he lay back down in the snow.
    Rick Johnson has been dead for ten years.  He died of hypothermia after he became lost in a flash snowstorm while he was out looking for wood.  He wakes up every morning disoriented and begins to walk.  Every afternoon he sees the man with the snowshoes and chases him.  Rick never catches the man with the snowshoes.