I crawled out of the hen-house and went over the tracks looking for later prints, and found them easily. They went south. I had just about lost all light, and I was getting wor­ried. The ground sloped gradually away from the hen-house down into a softer, almost marshy, area. If the rain kept up, the ground would be too wet to hold a print, and to pick up the trail the next day I would have to begin circling on the next piece of solid ground. It was a pro­cess that might take me a day and a half. But if I had one print on solid ground that the drizzle wouldn’t affect, I would be all right.

The tight was going more and more rapidly as I pressed on towards the stream. The worse the light got, the closer I had to get to the ground. I have moved on all fours a lot in the woods. It is often simply the fastest way to move. The animals, like the deer, wear away tunnels in the growth. Using their runs in dense growth saves a lot of energy, but you have to crawl. After a while it becomes habitual.

It was fully dark when I followed the footprints up a rise—feeling them by brushing the tips of my fingers to and fro as Stalking Wolf had taught me. I reached out the length of Tommy’s stride and moved my hand over the width of his straddle; I felt for the diagonal line of his foot as it inclined out­wards or the last fading wedge of a heel print. He was hitting hard on the toes because of going uphill, and the prints were even deeper than I needed to get along them quickly.

Finally I reached the top of the rise and collapsed there, panting, on top of a good solid print. I was just a little way off the dirt road.

I went out and made a marker in the road opposite that last solid print, so I could find it easily in the morning. Then I backtracked to a second spot I had found where Tommy had taken shelter again and eaten a couple of his sandwiches. Here he had left papers, some of his extra clothes and the tape albums—these neatly stacked, as if he expec­ted to come back for them once he got himself orientated. So I collected his valuables and took them to his father for identification. The father said they were Tommy’s.

By the time I got back to the fire-station where the searchers gath­ered, only 40 men were still on the job, and most of those had gone home for the night. They had spent a long day in the woods and had come up with nothing. The woods were too thick for even the dogs to pick up a scent. Many of them were sure Tommy was dead.

I was wet and muddy. The lieu­tenant looked me up and down. “Well, tracker,” he said, “Did you find cheap smokes?”

I unfolded the sweater in which I had wrapped Tommy’s posses­sions. “There’s what’s left of his lunch. There’s his extra sweater. There are the albums he took with him, and here are his extra boots. He’s alive. He’s been living in chic­ken houses and things, eating the food he brought with him.”

There was a stunned silence that deepened with each object I put down on the table. The silence hung in the air for what seemed like an hour. The lieutenant shook his head in disbelief. If I had thought about it, I suppose in their position I would have been a bit sceptical, too.

When I left, the lieutenant asked if there was anything I needed. I said I didn’t think so, and he added that tomorrow they would give me a walkie-talkie to direct the other searchers when we got close to Tommy. If he still believed I wouldn’t get that close, it didn’t show in his face.

EVENTUALLY I came back to New Jersey. For ten years I had been asked over and over again why I wasn’t at university, why I didn’t have a permanent nine-to-five job, why I wasted so much of my time running around in the Pine Barrens. I had begun to wonder if perhaps my life really was a waste after all –if I hadn’t mistaken a fascinating hobby for a lifetime purpose. As some people pointed out, I not only wasn’t rich and famous, I hadn’t even achieved the commonplace. I had no job, no house, no family, no life insurance and no sit-on lawn mower. I began to wonder what my purpose was in being alive, and where I fitted in the scheme of things. The trail of a person I will call Tommy changed all that.

Tommy was a five-year-old boy in a man’s body. He had aged 31 years, but had the same shy inno­cence he had had at five. He loved to go into the woods with his father, but his father was sometimes too busy to accompany him. One Sun­day, Tommy packed a lunch, put on two pairs of trousers and two sweaters; he carried another sweater with him. He wore one pair of boots and carried another. He also took along several of his favourite tape albums in case he got lonely.

By Monday, a helicopter, some bloodhounds, and about 50 police, firemen and volunteers were in the area searching. Later, soldiers joined the search. Papers carried stories of the retarded man lost in the woods and speculated on his chances in the chill nights. It was early May, but the weather was still late March, and twice the temperature dropped close to freezing. Frequently it rained. By Wednesday, the fourth day, the searchers had unofficially given up on finding cheap tobacco.

I found out about the search that morning and phoned the police to offer my services. I reported to a lieutenant, who told me he was happy to have all the help he could get.

“But there have already been about 50o men through there,” he said. “Chances are you won’t find anything.”

They gave me a map with the house on it; the grassland and gravel pit to the south-west had been tho­roughly searched. I said I would need to see a pair of his shoes and then I asked them to show me Tom­my’s tracks. It turned out they had never found any. They took me to a dirt road near the place where Tommy had last been seen by a neighbour.

It began to rain again, and I was left alone. I started criss-crossing the back of the home property, look­ing for tracks. On my second pass I found them. The incongruity of the man-size footprints and the almost skipping walk made an unmistak­able gait. The tracks went at a go-degree angle to the road and the vast area of grassland that had been trampled through by searchers. The trail led into some thick woods be­hind the house, where Tommy had been used to going on picnics with his father.

It was a hard track from begin­ning to end. The trees were thick, and the brush between them was even worse. Thorn vines twined through interlocking shrubs and wild hedges, making the under­growth a waist-high mat. If I had found a deer trail I could have gone along it on all fours in a low crouch, and might have moved quickly and easily through the woods. But I had to follow the tracks, and the tracks were harder than any I had ever seen to put together into a trail.

I needed a logic to thread them together. But Tommy’s logic was a mixture of reason and whim, hard to make sense of. I had one piece of luck : the ground was soft and wet, but still firm enough to make an excellent track and hold it a good long time despite the drizzle. It was 8pm when I started to track, and it was practically dark when I finally came out of the woods.

On the far side of the woods, there was a chicken house. When I looked in it, I found marks in the old straw where Tommy had lain down. I judged that he had come there at about four o’clock on Sunday after­noon and had slept for a few hours.,