The Cabin on the Mountain

Colin Dickey| Longreads | March 2022 | 24 minutes (4,226 words)

Two men are dead in a cabin on the side of a mountain — how did they die?

There is a whole host of questions like this — riddles that get grouped under the category of “lateral thinking puzzles.” Another: A man walks into a restaurant and orders the albatross soup. After finishing the soup, he leaves and commits suicide. Why? Or: There is a dead man, naked in the desert, holding a straw. How did he die? You can only ask yes-or-no questions, and the goal is to figure out the precise story. Many of these involve a dead man in one form or another. There is a dead man with a hole in his suit — how did he die?

Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced…