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Out past the sprawling patchwork of Caldwell&039;s rural far the Hudson River&039;s winding flanks, about three hours fro up from the earth Majestic, carpeted in pines and cedars at their heads and shoulders, the ranges had been created by glaciers that had stretched down from the Alaskan frontier before it had been known as Alaska and before there were humans or vampires to call it a frontier

When the last ice age retreated into history books that would be written es that were left in the land filled with the enerations of huned nae and Lake Champ-lain and Saranac Lake and Blue Mountain Lake

Humans, those bothersome, parasitic rabbits with their many,the water, as many other animals did Centuries passed and towns sprouted up and "civilization" was established, with all its intrusions into the environh Even in the age of electricity and technology and automobiles and tourism, the Adirondacks dictated the landscape of this stretch of northern New York

So there are a lot of lonesome stretches in theup I-87, aka the Northway, the exits get farther and farther apart until you can go fivea way off the road And even if you do put your blinker on and ease onto a raht, all you&039;ll find is a couple of stores and a gas station and two or three houses

People can hide in the Adirondacks

Vampires can hide in the Adirondacks

At the end of the night, as the sun readied itself for a big, splashy entrance stage right, a h the dense woods of Saddleback Mountain alone, dragging his withered body over the ground as he would have a bag of garbage in his earlier life His hunger was all that moved him, the primordial instinct for blood all that kept hih the branches

Up ahead in a tangle of pine boughs, his prey itchy, nervous

The deer kneas being tracked, but it couldn&039;t see what it was hunted by Lifting itsforward and back

The night was cold this far north and this high up on Saddleback Given that the s, his teeth chattered and his nail beds were blue, but he wouldn&039;t have put er was the extent of his concessions to existence

He would not take his own life He&039;d heard long ago that if you committed suicide, you couldn&039;t make it into the Fade, and that here he had to end up So he passed his days in a narrow bandwidth of suffering, waiting until he either starved to death frorievously injured

The process was taking too daain, his escape froht hi He&039;d erous

Couldn&039;t reh