Their boots were wet, and the stream was going the wrong way.
Dorik looked at the paper map again. They should have been walking beside water that ran south toward the road. This stream ran into a narrow gap between dark rocks.
“You can’t turn a map until it agrees with you,” Esh said.
“I’m trying to read it.”
“You’ve been trying for ten minutes.”
He was sixty-seven. His sister was sixty, and she had a bus to drive the next morning. Their first night in the walking hut had been good: dry socks, a hot meal, the old jokes they didn’t tell their children. They had meant to reach home by dusk today.
At the lunch junction, they had taken the left fork. The marker was turned away from them. Dorik remembered an article saying left for the valley. Esh had wanted to be moving before the rain, so she had agreed.
Now the rain had come, and the wrong valley had come with it.
Dorik held out the phone. There was no reception. The broad map saved on it showed their position, but not the little paths around them.
“We’re east of where we should be,” he said.
Esh sat on a rock. “So we go back.”
He looked up the open hillside. The rain ran sideways across it. While they had been arguing over the map, the ridge had vanished into gray.
“We could follow the water down,” he said. “Water reaches roads.”
“It reaches that gorge first.”
They could see its mouth. Beyond it, the path stopped looking like a path. Neither knew what came next.
Dorik thought of his daughter checking the clock. Before he left, she had asked whether someone experienced was going. He had said Esh, though Esh drove buses, not walking groups.
He had wanted this trip to be something he arranged for himself. He had booked the hut and carried the food.
Esh looked at the ridge again. “We know there’s a junction behind us. We don’t know what’s down there. And I don’t want to climb into that rain now.”
“Then what?”
“We stop trying to solve this by walking faster.”
They found a patch near the footpath where a broad rock broke the worst of the wind. They had carried supplies for the night in the hut. They still had food, the sleeping bags they had used in the hut, and a small rain shelter packed for an emergency. It would not be a comfortable second night, but it was a place they could stay rather than a place they would have to climb out of.
Dorik kept his phone close and checked it again. Nothing. Their family had the planned route, including the lunch junction. At dusk, they would know the pair had not reached home.
“Do you think they’ll look this way?” he asked.
“I think they can look down both forks. I don’t know when.”
He unpacked the food. As a caterer, he had spent forty years making meals look easy. He found he hated handing his sister a squash of bread in its wet wrapper.
“The inside’s dry,” she said.
“I know.”
She ate it without praising his preparation.
Later, the wind dropped enough for them to hear the stream. Esh checked her watch.
“If I’m not back for that shift, they find someone else. I don’t get paid.”
“I’ll get you back.”
“How?”
He had no answer. She pulled her jacket tighter.
“I wanted a walk with my brother,” she said. “Now everybody will call me to ask whether you’re all right.”
“They’ll call me.”
“They call me when they can’t get you. They ask whether you’ve eaten. They ask if you should be driving. Then they thank me for keeping an eye on you.”
Dorik had thought those calls showed his children cared. He had not thought much about who had to answer them.
“You could tell them to ask me.”
“I do. And then you tell them it was my idea.”
He looked down at the food bag.
“I was afraid of going alone,” he said.
“I was happy to come.”
“I made it sound like I was proving something.”
“Yes. You did.”
For a while, neither spoke. Dorik wanted to offer a cheerful plan for morning. Instead, he told her he would wait here, and he would say whose idea the left fork had been.
“It was both of us,” Esh said. “Don’t start proving something else.”
The night passed slowly. Rain stopped and began. They dozed, woke, and shifted the things beneath them. Once Dorik dreamed he was at home and woke angry at the rock.
By morning, they could see the hill again. They were preparing to consider the route back when a voice called from higher on the footpath.
Esh stood and answered.
A searcher came into view, then another. They had started from the junction. Dorik’s daughter had given the route to the search team after dusk, when neither sibling came home or answered the phone. One team had checked the intended trail; this one had taken the other fork.
“We nearly went down there,” Dorik said, pointing at the gorge.
The searcher glanced at it. “Glad you didn’t.”
There was no ceremony. They checked what help the pair needed, then walked back slowly. Someone had taken a morning away from their own work to meet them. Dorik tried to apologize for all of it at once and was told to save his breath for the hill.
At the road, Esh called the depot. Someone had covered her route. She had lost the day’s pay.
“I’ll cover that,” Dorik said.
She looked at him. “Not every trip for the rest of our lives. This one.”
“This one.”
She told him the amount. He could pay it from the money he had saved for a longer trip later in the year.
Then he called his daughter.
“We’re at the road,” he said. “We took the wrong fork. We waited instead of going into a gorge.”
“Where’s Esh? Let me talk to her.”
“She has her own call to make. I’m here. Ask me.”
Esh moved away from him with her phone against her ear. He stayed where he was and began at the lunch junction.
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