I stopped before I reached the window, for I found precisely what I had been afraid that I would find: those odd, eight-pointed tracks which Toby and I had seen on the slope earlier in the day. There were a great many of them, as if the animal had been standing there, moving back and forth as it searched for better vantage points, for a long while-at least all of the time that I had been inside with the horses.
It had been watching me.
Suddenly I felt as if I were back in Southeast Asia — in a jungle rather than in a snowstorm-where an enemy was relentlessly stalking me.
Ridiculous, of course.
It was only some animal.
A dumb animal.
I swept the flashlight beam around the hilltop and found where the prints continued a few feet away. Though
I didn't want to use the flashlight and alert my prey, I couldn't follow the trail without it. The December night was perfectly black and empty once you got away from the light that spilled from the house and from the single stable window. Holding the flashlight before me as if it were a sword, I walked westward, after the animal.
Wind.
Snow.
More wind.
More snow.
Two minutes later
I had lost the trail. The wind and snow had conspired to blot out the prints, scouring the land as clean and smooth as a new cotton sheet.
Yet that didn't seem possible. Certainly, the snow was falling very hard and fast. Equally as certain: the wind was ugly. But the creature could have had no more than a two minute head start on me. The storm couldn't have erased every trace of it so quickly. Unless Unless it was not moving away from me at the same ponderous pace at which I moved. If, in the instant that it turned away from the stable window, it had run, and if it could run incredibly fast in spite of the bad weather, it might have gotten a five-minute head start and its tracks might easily have filled up and it might be a mile away by now.
But what sort of animal could move so easily and surely in wind like this, on a night when visibility was near zero?
Considering that, I had to consider one other thing which I had not wanted to think about just yet. I had seen two amber lights at the window, low lights very much like candle flames muffled by colored glass.
What kind of animal carried lamps with it.
A man.
A man could be a wild animal.
But why would he carry lamps or lanterns instead of a flashlight?
A madman?
And even if it were a man who was playing some grotesque hoax, wearing shoes that made those strange prints, he would not have been able to move so fast and put so much distance between us.
So where did that leave me?
Nowhere.
Standing at the end of the trail, staring out at the gray-white curtains of billowing flakes, I began to feel that the animal had circled behind me and now stood in my own footprints, watching me. The feeling grew so strong, so undeniable, that I whirled and cried out and stabbed my flashlight beam into the air behind me. But the night was all there was.
"You're being ridiculous," I told myself.
Having turned my back on the direction in which the animal had fled, uncomfortable because of that, I struggled through the ever-mounting drifts toward the rear of the farmhouse. I shone my flashlight ahead of me, even though I didn't need its light and would have been better off without it.
Several times I thought I heard something out of place, a metallic snickering noise that I could not identify, nearby, above the ululation of the storm. But each time I probed the surrounding darkness with the flashlight, there was nothing to see but snow.
When I finally reached the house, brushed snow from my coat, and went into the sun porch, Connie was waiting for me. She said, "What was wrong?"
"I don't know."
She tilted her head to one side. "You found some thing. I can tell."
"I think it was that animal."
"The one whose tracks you found?"
"Yeah."
"Bothering the horses?"
"Yeah."
"Then you saw it?"
"No. But I found the tracks outside the stable window."
"Could you make anything of them this time?" she asked as she took my coat and hung it on the rack by the door.
The ice-crusted hem and collar began to drip. Beads of bright water splashed on the floor.
"No," I said wearily. "I still couldn't make heads nor tails of them."
She took my scarf and shook the snow from it. "Did you follow them?" she asked.
I sat down on a pine bench and unzipped my boots, pulled them off, massaged my chilled toes. "Yeah, I followed them. For a few yards. Then they just vanished."
She took the boots and stood them in the corner beside her own and Toby's boots. "Well maybe it is a bird, like you said earlier."
"How do you figure?"
"A bird could have just taken off; he could have flown away, and that would explain why the prints vanished."
I shook my head: no. "This wind would tear his wings off. I don't see how a bird, any kind of bird at all, could be stalking about on a night like this."
"Or any other animal."
"Or any other animal," I agreed.
"Are the horses calmed down?"
"I don't hear them any more," I said.
"Do you think it'll be back-whatever it is?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
We stared at each other. Her perpetually startled eyes seemed even wider than usual. My eyes were probably wide too. We were frightened, and we didn't know why. No one had been hurt-or even threatened. We had seen nothing frightening.
We had heard nothing frightening. It had done nothing more than scare the horses. But our fear was real, vague but indisputable: intuitive.
"Well," she said abruptly, "you were longer than I imagined you'd be. I'd better start dinner."
I drew her to me and hugged her. "Rotten horses."
"There's always later."
I kissed her.
She kissed back-and smiled when Toby called for us from the living room. "Later."
I released her, turned back to the sun porch door, and slid the bolt latch in place, although we usually left it unlocked. When we went through the kitchen door, I closed and locked that too.
4
After dinner I went into the den and took from the shelves all the volumes that might conceivably help me to identify our mysterious new neighbor.
Sitting behind the heavy, dark oak desk, a short brandy at hand, the empty gun cabinet at my back, I spent more than an hour paging through eight thick books, studying descriptions, drawings, and photographs of wildlife prints and spoors.
With those animals whose marks I found altogether unfamiliar, I turned the examples on their sides and upside down, hoping to come across the prints that I was looking for simply by viewing these at odd angles. In some four hundred samples, however, there was nothing vaguely similar to what I had seen in the snow, regardless of the view that I took of them.
I was putting the books back on the shelves when Connie came into the den.
She said, "Any luck?"
"None."
"Why don't you come keep us company? Toby's working with his tempra paints, and I'm reading. I've got a pretty good FM station with lots of gutsy Rimsky-Korsakov mixed in with Beethoven."
I caught her up in my arms and lifted her off the floor and kissed her, tasting the minty tang of the after-dinner liqueur she had been drinking. She was the kind of woman a man wants to hold a great deaclass="underline" feminine and yet not soft in any way, sensual yet not forbidding. Her father and her father's father had been bricklayers, yet there was a certain undeniable nobility in her face; she had the presence and the grace of one born to high position. It was inconceivable to me, just then, as I held her, that I had ever retreated from this part of reality, from Connie.