At Jack’s, his dad, Lars, met us at the back door, where he stood holding an exuberant Midas by the collar. Seeing Jack, the hulk of a dog barked and jumped, pushing off Jack’s chest with his front paws. It was an act of affection, but one that would have knocked a smaller person — me, for instance — back a week.

“Down, boy,” Jack said.

Midas returned to all fours, spun three times, and then leaped at Jack again, this time stretching his front legs onto Jack’s shoulders and baying at something outside.

“See what I mean?” Lars said. “But he’s obviously relieved to see you.”

Jack rubbed the dog’s shaggy head and ordered him down. Even I could see that Midas in a clearly agitated state was a danger to no one, but it didn’t tamp down the something’s-wrong sensation in my gut.

“We’ll walk him,” Jack said. “It’s probably a skunk or an opossum. You know how he hates trespassers.”

A few minutes later, Jack and I set out carrying a couple of Maglites with beams that could guide tanks. Though mine was a foot long, heavier than my own arm, and clublike, and though we were accompanied by a very large, overly protective dog, I still had the feeling that we were under-provisioned.

As we trekked along a hard-packed dirt path, Midas pulled at Jack impatiently. At first, Jack’s spirits matched the dog’s; both were giddy and pumped with adrenaline. Soon, though, Midas’s feverish behavior grated on Jack, and he stopped, more than once, to scold and heel the unruly animal.

The path led us deep into their back property. Much of the Snjossons’ land was planted in orderly orchard plots according to species. Sweeping my light left and right, I knew we were still skirting these tidy sections. We fell into a comfortable pattern, and even Midas seemed to relax with the even pace of our march and the harmony of nature’s nighttime music. I was particularly heartened by the chorus of birds overhead, and their songs were in perfect accord with the whoosh of wind as it ruffled leaves and branches. It seemed to me a symbol of the way Jack and I complemented each other.

We came to the old stone bridge that crossed a brook. Behind it was a wooded area, too cragged and hilly to farm. Though I knew it was the shortcut to the back plots, something about the woods — the wildness in the diversity of size and type of trees, the density of their shoulder-to-shoulder stance, and the darkness they harbored — reawakened my misgivings.

“Maybe we should take the road,” I suggested. The property was crisscrossed with a system of interior roads over which trucks were able to pass. It would be a longer route but more civilized, in my opinion.

Jack stopped at a fork in the path. “Midas is pulling this way.” He pointed toward the woods. “As odd as that is.”

“Odd how?” I asked.

“He doesn’t usually go this far. Getting old, for starters,” Jack said, reining Midas in with a gentle tug of the leash. “He normally tires out about halfway through the first plantings. But even when he was a pup, there was something about the back plots he never liked.”

“What do you mean?”

“For whatever reason, the area always spooked him.”

I swept my flashlight back and forth as if scouting for Midas’s bogies.

Again, the dog strained to keep going.

“Calm down, boy,” Jack said. “We’ll get there.”

We started up again, heading for the woods. Taking deep breaths, I told myself that it was the back orchard, not the woods, that rattled the dog. It wasn’t much reassurance, but it kept me from visualizing the trees’ branches as snatching fingers and hearing threats issue down from their heights. As to Midas’s nervousness, I reminded myself that dogs were worriers by nature, operating on some kind of perennial Code Red, where everyone from the UPS guy to the cookie-peddling Girl Scout was up to no good.

“How long has your family owned this land?” I asked, my voice taking on a breathy quality. This wooded area felt very different to me, as if thrumming with something ancestral. Plus, crazy as it was, I wanted the press of trees to know we were there, as if somehow conversation would quell other forces. Forces that had Midas now howling in some kind of doggy-distress signal.

“He’s really agitated,” Jack said. Ahead on the path, our lights illuminated the dog’s snout-lifted-to-the-heavens yowl. “Sorry, did you ask me something?”

“About the property.”

“Right,” Jack said, coaxing Midas to continue. “We’ve owned it since the late thirties.”

“And what was here before?”

“Prairie, mostly. These woods are probably just as they were. Other sections were cleared, of course.”

Above me, I heard a sudden snap of branches. Underfoot, I stumbled upon an arterial root contorting across the narrow path. As I shone my Maglite down on its tentacle-like spur, I had the creepiest, though fleeting, image of it throbbing.

I was relieved when, up ahead, the trees thinned and patches of moonlit clouds became visible. I allowed myself a full, lung-expanding inhale. Only then did I realize how sharp and ragged my breaths had been. With the express of air, my ribs rattled.

Weird.

Midas howled again.

Jack, pulled by the dog, increased his pace. They set out across a small open field to where a plot of trees loomed in the distance. I jogged to keep up. The prospect of being left behind made my legs quiver until they ached. It was the oddest response, until I realized that it wasn’t a reaction, that the reverberations weren’t being produced by my legs. They were, in point of fact, absorbing shock waves emanating from the ground.

I caught up with Jack. He, too, was feeling the vibrations and held his hands up to the sky as if they were something to be caught like raindrops. Midas had begun running in a circle, yapping at the air.

“What is that?” Jack asked.

You don’t grow up in California without feeling the earth shake a time or two, but there was something different about this tremor, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time. I took a step past Jack to where a row of apple trees began a neat sentrylike formation and shone my light on their trunks. It was curious the way the silvery limbs were rippling as if themselves in fear. As I touched the rough surface of one, it seemed to shrink away, until I realized it wasn’t shrinking, it was slipping.

“Jack!” I screamed, now holding on to the trunk and hopping from one foot to the other.

My light fell to the ground and provided a single swath of illumination into the area thick with apple trees. They were, dozens of them, dropping before my eyes.

As I clung to the tree in terror, I could hear Midas’s frantic barks as he bounded away and Jack’s urgent “Kat, oh, my God, Kat!”

Now the ground beneath my feet was rocking like a rowboat. I felt something grab at my jacket collar, and I looked up to see Jack’s hand tugging at me. I released the tree and clasped his arm just as everything beneath me went as liquid as pancake batter.

“Hold on!” Jack yelled.

Instantly I was swept down with the collapsing ground. I screamed, though the roar of the shifting earth had me beat by a landslide — a real landslide, in this case.

Self-respecting Californians know what the tug of the tide feels like, too. At least with a wave, you know it will break. I sensed with whatever it was at work here that it would be a one-way trip down.

My hands slipped from Jack’s forearm to his palm, and rocks and dirt sprayed my face and caked my mouth with soot. My legs flailed wildly until finally catching the trunk of the tree I had so recently been standing next to. It was — crazily enough — now at a right angle from where I dangled, clinging to the side of the chasm, and it offered me a momentary support. Because I was no longer a dead weight, Jack was able to readjust his hold on me, grasping me under my arms. He grunted with pain, a cry so visceral I feared for us both, until I was able to swing a most unladylike leg over the side of what had become an abyss.

We scrambled away from the hole and collapsed in a panting tangle of arms and legs.

“What the hell was that?” Jack asked, clutching at me like I might again be wrenched away.

“Did the earth just open up in front of us?” I asked, hacking up dirt and spilling tears.

Ever the precautionary type, Jack lifted me back farther away from the area. We took many more moments to recover, and he held me as rolls of shock left me shaking uncontrollably.

When I had recuperated enough to sit up, Jack, on all fours, crawled to where his flashlight lay emitting one forlorn shaft of light. He lifted it and swept it over the area, what was left of it, anyway. Midas returned, whimpering and ducking his head submissively.

“I think we just witnessed a sinkhole open up,” Jack said, standing.

“A sinkhole. Is that what it is?” I accepted Jack’s offer of assistance in getting up.

“It has to be,” Jack said. “We’ve studied them in geology.” Again, he trailed his light over the collapsed area. “But this one looks bigger than the slides we looked at.”

As his flashlight shone into the caved-in bowl of land, I noticed its edges were sheared off, as if carved away with a sharp instrument, and the depth was staggering. Especially considering how close I had come to plummeting into it. Seeing apple trees toppled like matchsticks upon its floor and others dotting the bowl’s sides like bent nails made me shiver.

“We should go,” Jack said.

Before we could start back toward the woods, headlights barreling down the interior road came into sight. Lars swung down from the pickup truck and walked briskly toward us.

“I heard a crack out here, and that dog’s howl was probably heard clear down to Iowa,” he said. “What’s going on? Are you kids all right?”

Jack raked his light over the hole. “This is what Midas was fussing about. A sinkhole. He must have sensed some early vibrations and dragged us out here. Crazy dog nearly got us sucked down into that thing. If I hadn’t grabbed Kat at the last moment . . .” He dropped his head, and it was his turn to shudder.

For many moments Lars walked back and forth, mumbling and shining his own light onto the damage. “Let’s get you two back,” he said finally. “Get you cleaned up, and maybe a hot cup of tea or something to settle your nerves. There’s nothing we can do until morning. In the daylight, we’ll get a better look. And I’ll get a geologist out here for an opinion.” He scratched at his chin. “It’s the darnedest thing,” he said.

I didn’t stay long enough for a hot cup of anything. Once I’d cleaned up enough not to frighten my mom, I asked Jack to drive me home. Thoughts were spiraling through my head faster than the earth had shifted below my feet, and I needed some alone time to sort a few things out.

On the ride, Jack apologized for not taking Midas’s warnings seriously. For dragging me out into the dark. I did my best to reassure him that I didn’t hold him responsible and that it was just one of those things. The first part was true, the latter, not quite.

“I don’t think we should share that we were at risk,” I said after a long pause.

“What? Why?”

“Even you have to admit, we have enough I-shouldn’t-be-alive stories to start our own TV show. To say we were there will invite gossip and speculation.”

“I see what you mean,” he said, ten-and-two-o’clocking the wheel.

“Your dad wouldn’t say anything, would he?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Jack said. “He won’t want too much attention over the whole thing, anyway.”

For once, Lars’s taciturn nature came in handy.

While saying good night, Jack had to pause before choking out the words, and his eyes were haunted. He also had a hard time letting go of me. As always, I enjoyed the ferocity of his affection, but I could do without it coming on the heels of a life-threatening situation. We’d had our share of those.