It
rained throughout September and October, and people made jokes
about Biblical floods before the Sheldon girls drowned. But their
jokes weren't serious, because there were intermittent days when
the clouds would continue on their way to the east and leave behind
nothing but blue skies and crisp autumn air. If people worried
about anything, they fretted over the numbers of leaf peepers and
flatlanders who hadn't made their customary fall pilgrimages to
Vermont that year--and what effect that lost revenue might have on
their purses--or they complained about the mud.

After all, the fall rains had made the ground as boggy as March,
and the earth showed no signs of freezing up soon. The dirt roads
were so laden with runnels that drivers would wince as they lurched
their cars forward, while the paved ones often were layered with
diaphanous sheets of moisture that in the night reflected a
vehicle's headlights like mirrors.

Certainly the water was high in the lakes: Bomoseen and Champlain
to the west of the Green Mountains, that range of hills that rose
like a great animal's spine across the vertical center of the
state, and Willoughby and Memphremagog to the east. Likewise, the
rivers of any size often had small crests of albescent foam. There
must have been a half-dozen days when the counties north of Rutland
had lived with flash-flood advisories and warnings, especially the
two occasions when the remnants of late-season Caribbean hurricanes
tracked deep into New England and dumped torrents of rain onto
ground that was already soaked, and into lakes and rivers that
already had about all the water they could handle. One Saturday in
late October the Cornish Volunteer Fire Company went so far as to
move its two attack pumpers and heavy rescue truck over the bridge
that spanned the Gale River, so the vehicles would be on the more
populated side of the water if the bridge was brought down by the
rapids.

That had happened once before: The original bridge had washed away
in the Great Flood of 1927, on the very day that S. Hollister
Jackson, the state's lieutenant governor, had drowned in another
part of the state when his car stalled in a rivulet on the road
near his house and he tried to walk home through the waters.
Instead he had been swept away in the current, his body washing up
a mile downriver in Potash Brook.

But the rivers never topped their banks the fall the Sheldon girls
died, at least not while the phantasmagoric red and yellow leaves
remained on the trees, and lake water only oozed into the basements
of the people who lived on the shore. For most of northern Vermont
the rains were a mere inconvenience.

The hunters traipsed into the woods that November despite the
storms and the showers. They trudged along paths in which they sunk
ankle-deep in wet leaves, their boots sometimes swallowed in turbid
mountain runoff, and even the thinner tree branches would whip
water in their faces when they gently pushed them aside as they
walked.

On the second day of deer season, a Sunday, the Sheldon girls were
playing with their friend Alicia Montgomery. It had rained heavily
all Friday night, Saturday, and much of Sunday morning--dropping
close to eight inches in the thirty-six-hour period.

A little past two the rain stopped, and the three girls donned
their raincoats and mud boots and wandered outside. They, like so
many children that autumn, had been cooped up indoors for whole
weekends at a time, and any opportunity to run outside to jump and
shriek was taken. Alicia's mother, a woman in her late forties who
had three sons older than Alicia, assumed they were going to slosh
in the mud around the family's swing set in the backyard, or see
how much water had trickled into the wooden clubhouse Alicia's
older brothers had built on the property some years before. She
thought she might have told them to stay away from the river, but
she admitted she honestly wasn't sure. Certainly her daughter
didn't recall any such warning.

The Sheldon girls were nine, and they were twins--though not
identical twins. They were small-boned, but not at all
frail-looking. Rather, with their long legs and arms, they reminded
some people of baby colts: They were known for running everywhere,
though Megan had never shown any interest in organized sports.
Hillary had, but not Megan. Their hair was just a shade closer to
blond than brown, and very, very fine. It fell to their shoulders.
Hillary was likely to wear her hair down, except on those days when
she was playing youth soccer--then she would allow her mother to
put it back in a ponytail. Megan usually had her mother braid her
hair in the morning, or try one of the bolder statements--a poodle
pony or a French twist--that she found described in a hairstylist's
handbook she had bought at a yard sale for a dime.

Alicia had been more Hillary's friend than Megan's, because she,
too, loved sports. Some days it was just easier for everyone,
however, if the twins played together. The two were in the same
Girl Scout troop and the same classroom at school, and it couldn't
have been otherwise. The small town only had one Girl Scout troop
and one classroom filled with fourth-graders. There were only so
many eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old girls in the whole village,
and so the pair tended to be together more often than they were
apart.

Most years, the Gale River meandered lazily through the canyon it
had carved over centuries through Cornish and Durham. The water ran
down from the mountains, working its way west through rocks and
boulders into the Otter Creek, and then, eventually, into Lake
Champlain. In summer, the water fell to barely a foot or two in
some sections, though there were always areas where it was
considerably deeper and people would congregate in large groups to
swim or in small groups to fish. The river had stretches that were
rich with rainbow and brown trout.

At its thinnest point, the Gale narrowed to fifteen feet; at its
widest, it swelled to fifty.

The water paralleled the road that linked Cornish with the more
substantial village of Durham, the asphalt and aqua almost
perfectly aligned for close to six miles. The riverbanks were
steeply pitched, and thick with moss and oak and maple saplings.
There were clusters of raspberry bushes that were resplendent with
claret-red fruit in July. The side of the river opposite the road
was forest until you reached the small collection of houses and
public buildings that most people considered the Cornish village
center: the elementary school, a church, and a general store on one
side of the water, a fire department and Little League baseball
field on the other. Depending upon the angle of the road, the river
could be either obvious or completely invisible.

Occasionally people swam naked in those sections where the river
could not be seen from the street.

The montgomery family lived no more than a hundred yards from the
section of the Gale River that was traversed by the bridge--the
very bridge over which the fire company had moved its trucks a few
weeks earlier. On summer nights when their windows were open, the
family could hear the water as it burbled through the thin clove
next to the road.

The Sheldons lived outside of the tiny village, on the street that
led past the Cousinos' dairy farm and on to the cemetery. That
meant Hillary and Megan usually only visited the river in the
summer, when they might venture to the swimming hole most
frequented by the families with younger children--a section of the
river that formed a cozy lagoon near a waterfall, and the depth
rose to five or six feet. You could feel a slight current in the
spot, but it wasn't enough to pull one from the pool.

To get there, either one of their parents or the parents of one of
their friends would have to drive them. You couldn't walk to that
swimming hole--not from the town or from their house--and on the
hottest summer days there would be a conga line of cars and trucks
parked as far to the side of the winding road as possible. Often an
automobile would pull in so close to the brush that everyone would
have to exit the vehicle on the driver's side.

The waters were high the day the Sheldon girls drowned--according
to Alicia, this alone had drawn the three of them to the Gale--and
there was in fact a flood warning. But there had been flood
warnings on any given day throughout the fall, and no one was
unduly alarmed.

While tromping aimlessly through the mud in the Montgomery family's
yard, the three girls heard the low roar of the high water in the
distance, and--despite the fact that the rain had resumed in
earnest--went to see just how close to the bank the river really
was. The general store was open until three on Sunday afternoons,
and periodically that day people had ventured to either the bridge
or the bank itself after getting their newspaper, cigarettes, or
milk, and watched the water as it tumbled by. The waves weren't yet
lapping at the very tops of the riverbank, but they were close.
Alicia recalled that almost all of the adults who wandered by had
remarked in some way on the whitewater, raising their voices so
they could be heard over the sound of the rapids.

Just before two-thirty, Jeremy Stern left the general store with a
six-pack of beer and a frozen pizza, and glanced at the bridge
where the three nine-year-old girls were standing. Far down the
street that led from the village up into the mountains he heard
someone honking madly on a car horn. The toots were distant, but
there was a frenzied quality to them. He returned to his own pickup
to drive toward them, wondering what the fuss was all about and
whether there was anything he could do to help. He backed into the
street, not realizing that the person who was pounding furiously on
his car horn was actually driving into the village as fast as he
could, hoping to warn people that the Gale was already over its
banks up on the mountain, and a wall of water was sure to hit the
town any minute.

Other than Alicia Montgomery, Jeremy was the last person to see the
Sheldon girls when they were alive.

The water would carve chasms in the road that were forty feet deep
and, in one case, forty-five feet wide. Wherever the road bent to
the south, there was at the very least erosion of the dirt beneath
the asphalt, and in four cases there was complete destruction of
the pavement--massive holes hewed abruptly into the hillsides. It
was a miracle that the half-dozen or so cars on the road that
moment were in sections of pavement that survived the flash flood,
and so none of the motorists were hurt. Granted, the Willards' car
was trapped for a week and a half between two canyons, and the
elderly couple had to traverse one of the deep holes in the ground
by foot to get home that afternoon. But they made it. Other cars
had to turn back, returning to either Cornish or Durham.

And the property damage was immense. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) would spend a month in the county--a week
in Cornish alone. People who lived along the river lost the washing
machines, dryers, and furnaces they kept in their basements. Small
structures were upended and swept downriver, where they were
smashed against the remains of a modest hydroelectric
plant--largely boulders and cement pilings now--the power company
had built along the river in 1922.

It had been the flood of 1927 that destroyed the generating
station, so that the only traces left were a part of the foundation
below the waterline and the concrete buttresses above it.

Once the wall of water had passed, there was an enormous heap of
scrap wood at the site of the old plant, a mound easily as large as
the woodpiles at the state's landfills and dumps. There were parts
of two small barns there, including the Nuners' elegant carriage
barn, and a gazebo. There were at least a half-dozen of the small
outbuildings and lean-tos people used to store their sap buckets
and plastic sugaring tubes, any tools they were likely to use
outdoors, and their snowmobiles or their boats.

These items crashed into the power station stanchions as well, and
usually broke apart.

The Murrays lost both of their horses, and the Dillons lost all
three of their sheep. The animal carcasses somehow wound their way
through the dam of debris by the old generator site, and washed
ashore six miles away, where the river forked into a second branch
that wound its way through the considerably larger towns of Durham,
New Haven, and Middlebury.

The village Little League field was flooded, as was the library.
The library sat in a room beside the town clerk's office, and it
lost its entire collection of children's books--every book, that
is, that wasn't checked out at that moment--because those books
were kept on the lowest shelves and the water inside the building
climbed to three feet before it started to recede.

The center of the town and a great many of the homes with basements
that filled with water smelled liked river mud for days: earthy and
musty and--because of the havoc that had been wrought--a little
putrid.

The only fatalities, however, were Hillary and Megan
Sheldon.

Excerpted from THE BUFFALO SOLDIER by Chris Bohjalian.
Copyright 2002 by Chris Bohjalian. Excerpted by permission of Shaye
Areheart Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.