In my experience, life-altering events often occur without our realizing it, but the morning I found the body it was dramatic, spectacular, club-between-the-eyes, tooth-rattling dramatic!
I am a creature of habit, and habit can occasionally do you in. Every morning I rose early to watch the mist on Lake Tranquilo before heading north through the woods to the meadow where elk liked to feed. Then I circled west to strike the Rito Salado, a creek that takes its name from a natural salt lick, and followed it back to the lake no more than a hundred yards from the cabin.
The greatest legacy my father, a small-town doctor, left me—other than an education and a trust income—was a three-room stone cabin on the eastern shore of this peaceful lake in the northern New Mexico mountains.
But the appl
