Was It Dog Benton?

Midsummer at Moosilauke Ravine Lodge is now a popular time for visitors. The Lodge serves meals and can put people up for the night, cheap. Square dances are held on weekends. The big log cabin fills with a mix of students, alumni, and community residents. But this past summer there was one visitor who seemed somehow... different.

He was an oldish man with thinning hair, maybe 50, maybe a poorly pre- served 40. His slightly tat- tered clothing, perhaps a decade out of fashion, didn’t quite fit. He picked up a newspaper that had been lying on a table and asked a member of the student lodge crew if the date was recent. The man hesitated and seemed con- fused when told, yes, the paper was just a couple of days old.

And then there was his accent. German? No, it sounded as if...as if he hadn’t spoken in a very long time.

He offered to lead a young couple on a day hike. Although they had never hiked before, he guided them up an obscure, extremely diffi- cult, no-longer-main- tained path called the Slide Trail. Very few peo- ple know of that trail. Even seasoned crew mem- bers and Moosilauke experts have trouble locat- ing it.

The three hikers returned late—past time for dinner served to guests—so they joined the lodge crew for the meal.

“Did you go to Dart- mouth?” crew members asked the strange guide.

“0h...we11...50rt 0f...”

Then he began to ask the crew an assortment of pointed questions. Why did they do trail work? Why did they create trails at all? He seemed espe- cially concerned with Jobil-dunk Ravine. It is a spectacular formation that figures prominently, and violently, in the Doc Benton ghost story, the tale of an eighteenth-cen- tury doctor who...well, if you’ve been on a freshman trip you probably know the story.

Some of the man’s very specific trail questions about die ravine stumped even Lodge manager David Hooke ’B4.

“So how long have you been around here?” the crew asked the man.

“Since, oh, about ’68.” The crew looked at each other and avoided asking the next question: Which ’6B?

The sun began to set red and purple, and the light shone in the west wall of windows. The Lodge retired for the evening. The guests lay in their bunks and could hear the Baker River roar through the ravine.

Next morning the crew got up as usual at six a.m. The man was gone. His payment for room and board lay on the desk.