It was the last night of a four-day, twenty-mile hike in the High Sierra—the second annual unofficial Catholic Answers backpacking trip—and we were camped at Chicken Spring Lake. The landscape was striking: a cirque lake fringed with alpine grasses and surrounded on three sides by high granite ridges; the camping area dotted with corkscrewed pines (each twisting counterclockwise), half of them living, half of them dead, the latter with the bark gone and the exposed wood polished by decades of stiff winds; thieving chipmunks and squirrels, unashamedly entering unattended food canisters; a preternaturally blue sky during the day and chandeliers of stars during the night.
After an early dinner we sat in a circle, the dozen of us, praying the rosary. This was the first night we had been able to do so without wearing gloves and head nets and without looking like a hazmat disposal team; the mosquitoes that plagued us at the earlier campsites were mercifully absent here. As we prayed, a few other campers passed by, heading to the lake to fill water bottles. They must have heard us, since even the slightest sound carries in thin air. What did they think of the reiterated words coming from our group? Were they edified, or were they put off by Christian prayers in what they took to be a pagan fastness?
Before we left Cottonwood Lakes trailhead at the beginning of our hike, I explained our itinerary: five miles the first day, six the second, then five again, then four. On the second day we would cross New Army Pass at 12,300 feet—not a place to be caught in a lightning storm, since there was no refuge except to scamper down to tree line. The third night would bring us to Chicken Spring Lake.
I said the lake had been named for the almost-extinct Cottonwood Carnivorous Cchicken, which hunted in packs and ate rodents, usually mice and rats but sometimes even fluffy marmots. There were unconfirmed reports of the chickens going after coyotes, but I said I had my doubts about that—foraging chickens may be fast, but frightened coyotes are faster. I comforted my listeners by saying we had no reason to worry about attacks on us, the chickens not having been seen near the lake in years. I managed to say all this with a straight face, and my fellow hikers took it in with nods, until someone guffawed and set them straight.
My golden aura, my high-country infallibility, had lasted about one minute. Just as well. Some who signed up might have thought they were going to hike with an apologetical oracle, and it was good to disabuse them of that notion right at the start. Nicholas Catinat, marshal of France, famously remarked that “no man is a hero to his valet,” and it is good for hikers to know that, on the trail, an apologist is just another hiker. Come to think of it, even off the trail he is just another hiker, and his lifelong hike, if successful, takes him through the same narrow gate that his companions are bound for.