24
Katie Dean laid her walking stick aside, took off her pack, and sat down on a fallen log to eat. It was mid- afternoon on a Saturday in June 1998. The sun was shining, the temperature in the mid-sixties, the mountain air clear and crisp as the breeze rustled through the canopy above. Taking out a Baggie filled with a trail mix of peanuts, raisins, dried bananas, and chocolate, she began to munch.
“You want some?” she said to Maggie, the border collie who had become her constant outdoor companion over the past five years.
The time had passed like a single night for Katie. Her life on the small farm outside of Gatlinburg was simple. The days were long and the work was hard, but Katie had grown to love the animals, the land, and, most of all, the people who surrounded her. She kept her mother and brothers and sister close to her heart always, but she’d come to accept that Aunt Mary, Luke, and Lottie were her family now.
The awful memory of that faraway Sunday crept up on her occasionally. A couple of weeks after she moved in, Lottie had fixed fried chicken for dinner on a Friday evening. The smell sent Katie running out of the house and through the pasture, screaming. Aunt Mary had caught up with her in the old pickup truck, and after she calmed down, Katie had tearfully told Aunt Mary what she remembered about the day her family was slaughtered. She never smelled fried chicken in the house again.
There were other things that triggered nightmares sometimes; little things, such as the sound of church bells, a glimpse of someone who reminded her of one of her siblings, or the sound of shotguns firing in the fall when the hunters took to the nearby cornfields in pursuit of doves. But the reminder Katie saw most often was in the mirror, because in the place where her right breast should have been was an ugly, pink, concave scar. She’d learned to cover herself with a towel or a robe before she looked in the mirror after showering, but it was impossible not to be self-conscious. Katie had dealt with the deformity through high school by wearing a prosthetic-a “falsie,” she called it. She’d stayed away from boys and had avoided discussing it with girls until her closest friend, a townie named Amy, told her one day that nearly everyone in school had heard about what happened to her. It was a small town, Amy said. It was hard to keep secrets.
Despite the missing breast and the memories, Katie had willed herself to overcome. She forced herself to concentrate on what was good in her life, and there was plenty. Luke was her closest friend. She spent hours reading to him, watching television with him, and caring for him. Katie had learned to feed him, bathe him, and change his diapers. He quivered with excitement every time she walked in the door from school or from doing her chores around the farm. She read him stories and watched cartoons with him on Saturday mornings. Lottie had been right. He was a smart young gentleman. He communicated by different sounds from his throat and by the expressions in his eyes. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and Katie thought he was the sweetest, gentlest creature on earth.
Because Aunt Mary had collected a substantial amount of money when her husband was killed in the logging accident, Katie was on her way to college. Aunt Mary had never said how much, only that it was more than enough to take care of her and Luke and Lottie and Katie for the rest of their lives. Katie was already enrolled at the University of Tennessee. She would start classes late in August. She was a year older than most of her classmates because she took a year off after her family was killed, but no one seemed to notice. Inspired by the beauty that surrounded her in the mountains, she was planning to major in horticulture and perhaps work for the forest service one day.
Aunt Mary had also given Katie another gift, the best she’d ever received. For Katie’s seventeenth birthday, Aunt Mary had accompanied her to Knoxville to a cosmetic surgeon. The surgeon had first placed a tissue expander beneath the skin where her breast should have been. Over the next few months, he pumped increasing amounts of water into the expander, stretching the skin and making room for a breast implant. When he did the surgery to install the implant, he’d also fashioned a nipple out of a small amount of skin he took from Katie’s rump, and he’d tattooed the nipple and surrounding skin pink to match the other breast. Then he’d injected a pigment to lighten the skin that covered the implant. It still wasn’t perfect-it was a bit darker than her other breast, and the skin was still numb-but for the first time in years Katie had begun to feel normal.
She swallowed another bite of trail mix and resumed her hike. Each year, Katie had ventured farther away from Roaring Fork and deeper into the park. She’d scaled Mount LeConte, visited the cabins and farms of the early settlers, and marveled at the beauty of Grotto Falls, Rainbow Falls, and the hundreds of species of plants and wildlife.
Katie had become an expert at orienteering and camping. It had taken her nearly a year to convince Aunt Mary that she was capable of staying out overnight in the park. Now she’d made at least a dozen overnight trips. She’d encountered bears and snakes and even the occasional wild boar, but she felt safe in the woods, especially with Maggie along.
Her plan for the weekend was to head east along the Grapeyard Ridge trail to Greenbriar Cove and then travel south, cross-country and off-trail, toward Laurel Top on the Appalachian Trail. She’d made good time to Greenbriar and was relieved to be off the beaten path used by an increasing number of tourists each year. Katie topped a ridge and checked her map. She’d make the trail by nightfall, no problem, and then hike back home tomorrow.
As she descended the other side of the ridge into a cove, Katie stopped suddenly. Something wasn’t quite right ahead. She peered through the branches of a rhododendron and could see that the forest had been cleared in the cove below and replaced by a vast field of… what was it? Whatever it was, it was a fluorescent green, almost glowing. She crept toward the break in the trees and reached into her pack for her binoculars.
The marijuana patch was vast, close to five acres, Katie guessed. The plants were at least four feet high and waved gently back and forth in the breeze. As Katie scanned with her binoculars, she saw two all-terrain vehicles at one end of the patch. At the other end, about a hundred yards to her right, she saw three men sitting on lawn chairs. They were eating. All three of them appeared to be Latino, probably Mexican.
Maggie must have caught their scent, because she started to growl.
“Hush, Maggie,” Katie whispered. She knelt down next to the dog and reached out for her collar with her left hand. Maggie’s ears were standing up straight, as was the hair on the back of her neck. She let out a weak bark.
“No, Maggie, no.” Katie took another look through the binoculars. One of the men was standing now, pointing in her direction. He’d seen her.
“Let’s go, Maggie.” Katie turned and started running as fast as she could back up the ridge. Maggie followed her but continued to bark.
When Katie reached the top of the ridge, she heard the sound of engines. They were coming after her. She veered left through a large area of Fraser fir deadfall, scrambling over tree trunks and branches, crawling beneath rhododendron. Even if they saw her in the deadfall, they wouldn’t be able to follow on the four-wheelers, and Katie felt confident she could outrun or outhike anyone in these mountains.
When she heard the engines top the ridge behind her, maybe three or four hundred yards back, she crouched behind a huge tree trunk, wrapped her hand around Maggie’s snout, and waited. About twenty seconds passed before she saw two men on four-wheelers tearing through the trees, heading in the direction she’d been going before she broke for the deadfall. They stopped at the edge of the deadfall, turned off the engines, and listened.
“Shhh,” Katie whispered as she clutched Maggie close to her. “Shhh.”
After an agonizing minute, the engines started, and the four-wheelers tore off up the ridge. As soon as they were out of sight, Katie started running due west. The sound of the engines faded with every step she took.
Katie kept telling herself she was safe now.
She was safe.
25
Katie arrived home after dark on Sunday. The route she took back after her run-in with the men at the marijuana patch had taken longer than she expected. The terrain was as difficult as any she’d encountered in the
