“Look! It snowed last night!” I was pretty excited when I looked out the kitchen window and saw everything covered with a thin white coating. It was the middle of September and I had been looking forward to the first snow since June. That was when my father, a Master Chief Engineman in the Coast Guard, had been transferred to Cordova, Alaska from Texas City, Texas. We had lived in Southern states nearly all of my life, and the last time I had seen snow was in the third grade in Greenville, North Carolina. That snow had been about the same as the one I was ogling this morning, just a light covering. The difference, I was sure, was that that one had occurred in the middle of winter, the only one of the year. This one was just the beginning, and in September.

“There’s the trail right there.” I could see the way back to town was just down the slope from us, as plain as anything.

“No, it’s over this way, towards the sun.” John was the leader of the group of boys that I had joined this morning to climb Mt. Eccles. As the only Chechako (tenderfoot) in the group, any suggestions I made were automatically suspect.

“That looks like the long way around to me. Why don’t we just go down and join the trail there?” Why did he keep arguing? Sure, I had confused a patch of snow with a mountain goat earlier today, but this was so plainly the trail we had followed just a few hours before. And that goat had been lying in a funny position, anyway.