I turned around on a whim after noticing a sleeping pad tied to the woman’s backpack and asked her if she was through-hiking on the Appalachian Trail. She was, and as the conversation resumed with “Miss Sippi,” she said they just had to get to Maine, where they’d “pop on up” to Katahdin in a couple of weeks. Yes, they’d begun at the beginning, a long summer ago in Georgia, with her miniature Dachshund, who never once had asked to be carried.

And that set me to thinking about my latest hiking book. Following Atticus, by Tom Ryan, is the author’s account of hiking the 48 4,000-footers in New Hampshire, once in the summer, once in the winter, and then twice in a winter. The Atticus mentioned here is none other than miniature schnauzer Atticus Maxwell Finch, intrepid explorer, the small and calm Buddha, survivor of hikes and diseases, and best friend to Tom Ryan.

Tom owned and ran The Undertoad, an independent newspaper in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and being something of a renegade, he decided to expose corruption in town, usually among local government and law enforcement individuals. But when a close friend died of cancer, Tom and Atticus chose to pay tribute to her by climbing the 48 peaks in New Hampshire to raise money for the Jimmy Fund. The Undertoad took a decided back seat for a few years and got buried under mountains of snow.

Those are the bare bones of the book, but to flesh out the story, you have to know dogs and determination. Overweight and acrophobic Tom took Atticus, and they bagged the 48 in one summer; he’d be the first to admit that it never got any easier.

If you’re a hiker, you know that bagging three or four peaks on one climb is certainly possible on a long day; did I mention there were no overnights involved? And reaching the tops of all 48 in one season is not impossible, although a certain amount of grit, true grit, is necessary.

What’s remarkable here is the winter climbing. Sometimes, setting out at 3 AM – headlamp ablaze, and Atticus attired in doggy cold weather gear – afforded the two another few hours needed to complete the climbs further into the wilderness. Snows in the dark sometimes frightened Tom, conjuring up the ghosts of mountain spirits and lost opportunities. Those were also the dark nights of his soul when he’d try to make sense of what he felt was a misguided childhood, owing particularly to his often dysfunctional father.

Yet it was Tom’s father who introduced him to the Whites, taking the children on day trips into the mountains. Those were the good days. Most of his siblings left the family as soon as was practical, and Tom was left with a sad and sometimes abusive man.

Oddly, it was through his climbs up Washington and Madison, Adams, Garfield, and the other Presidentials that gave Tom the idea to write a letter to his father, fairly consistently, as a newspaper column. When he tested his limits on the Bonds and the Carters, struggling to overcome Lyme disease, his father figured prominently in the eerie, nighttime chats that kept him in line with Atticus.

Atticus Finch, a heroic Gregory Peck of a dog, has clearly been the best companion Tom has ever had. From the first two months of carrying him everywhere (just Tom) to their eventual move to the peace and serenity of the New Hampshire mountains, the two have achieved the communion of family, man, and dog. They’ll be at the Hopkinton Town Library in late October, where I hope to shake hand and paw.