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Finn.”
    “H.T.? I wonder if his mother named him Huck and he couldn’t stand it.”
    “Maybe. Garcia didn’t know what the H.T. stood for.”
    “How old a guy is this Finn?”
    “Orlando wasn’t sure. Older than thirty, though. And that sort of surprised me.”
    I took a deep breath. “Hiking this trail will keep him in shape, that’s for sure.”
    We skirted the buttress of Steamboat, a massive volcanic plug that rose vertically from the canyon and towered upward for nearly 300 feet. The trail was well worn and marked further with a considerable collection of refuse. Beer and pop cans, gum wrappers, cigarette packs, diapers…you name it.
    After a hundred yards the trail forked and the Forest Service sign announced that the hot springs were three-quarters of a mile to the left, with Quebrada Mesa a mile and a half to the right. Of course I noticed morosely that the trail to the hot springs angled steeply uphill.
    We trudged a hundred yards and I stopped to catch my breath. “Are you all right?” Estelle asked.
    “I’m fine,” I gasped. “Just fat. And I smoke too much.”
    Estelle grinned. She gestured ahead and said sympathetically, “I think it levels out just up ahead.” It did, but not nearly enough.
    The first sign of human encampment was a site tucked under a limestone overhang, with the recess sheltered on either end of the overhang by mixed oak and aspen. Smoke from camp fires had blackened the overhanging rock, and I guessed that if a scientist could find a way to section that smoke residue, there’d be traces dating back hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
    It would have been a favored spot for any hunter passing through, from yesterday’s hippie back to Pueblo Indians before him and then back to whoever came before the ice age.
    A sleeping bag was rolled up tightly and stuffed well back under the rock. Estelle crouched down and pulled out the bag. A quick examination produced only a well-worn flashlight and a half roll of toilet paper.
    “They travel light,” I said. Estelle pushed the bag back where it had been. “Are there other sites on up ahead?”
    “Yes,” she said. “That’s where most of them are. Right by the springs.”
    Another fifteen minutes answered my question. The hot springs formed a series of stair-stepped pools, nestled in a grassy swale. The overflow burbled downhill, forming a tiny rivulet not more than two feet wide. Thickly timbered saddlebacks rose steeply on either side of the swale. Any wind would have to do some serious corkscrewing to reach campers down in that protected place.
    A gigantic boulder rested like a granite house near the first pool. And I would have missed him had Estelle not stopped suddenly. I followed her gaze and saw the young man sitting on top of that boulder.
    He was sitting Buddha-fashion, legs crossed, and wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans. As we stepped closer, I saw he had a book open in his lap. He watched us approach without any obvious interest or movement. When we were a dozen feet away, we stopped. I had to crane my neck back to look up at him and felt foolish.
    “Good afternoon,” I said.
    “Hello,” he replied. He was so scrawny his ribs looked like they might pop through his skin. Long snow-colored hair hung down to his shoulders, and even if he’d given up most of society’s conventions, he certainly hadn’t lost his comb. His hair was placed just so…like he’d finished giving it the hundred strokes with the comb moments before.
    “Beautiful afternoon, isn’t it?” Estelle said, but the boy’s only reply was a slight toss of his head to move a fall of hair farther from his eyes. “Are you H. T. Finn?”
    “No.”
    “Is he still camping up here?”
    The boy’s eyes darted off to one side, to glance at the big tent that was pitched up at the head of the swale. He was a miserable sentry, and I figured that he’d lie, too. He did. “Nope.”
    “Do you know where he went?”
    The boy shook his head.
    At that