He would remember that cold, that particular quality of summer cold that only the northern Rockies could produce [music] even in August for the rest of his life.
Or so he planned to, standing there at the edge of the wooden porch with a tin mug of instant coffee steaming against his chest, watching the steam rise from his own mouth and merge with the vapor rising from the mug.
Daniel was 26 years old. He stood 5′ 11″ in tall and weighed 162 lb.
A lean, angular young man with a narrow jaw, closecropped dark brown hair that had started to grow out in the weeks he’d been traveling, and green eyes that the people who knew him best said were always looking slightly past whatever they appeared to be fixed on, as if he were cataloging the thing behind the obvious thing, storing it away.
He was a third-year graduate student in the department of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
