"But this animal might be dangerous."
"I don't think so," I said. "And even if it is dangerous, it can't get in the house all that easily."
"Well "
"I don't like having a loaded gun lying around."
"I suppose you're right."
"It's not that I'm afraid to load the gun, Connie. If a time comes when I have to use it, I will. I'll be able to use it. I no longer feel that a gun, of itself, is evil. I've spent hundreds of hours with Dr. Cohen, you know. I can use a gun again without going to pieces."
"I know you can." She looked away from the crackling flames that enshrouded the birch logs. Her face was flushed and pretty.
"I think the first thing I should do is call Sam Caldwell and see if he can help me."
"Now?"
"It's as good a time as any."
"I'd better go up and see how Toby's getting along, make sure he brushes his teeth." When she reached the bottom of the stairs she looked back at me and said, "Don, you mustn't worry so much about what we think of you.
We love you. We always will. We love you and trust you to take good care of us."
I nodded, and she smiled at me. I watched her climb the steps until she was out of sight, and I wished that I could trust myself as much as she trusted me.
Would I, could I, load and use the pistol if the time came for that sort of action-or would the weapon remind me of the war, Southeast Asia, all of those things that I had fled into catatonia in order to forget? Would I be able to defend my family — or would I back off from the gun like a man backing off from a rattlesnake? I simply didn't know; and until I did know, I didn't deserve her smile.
In the den I dialed Sam Caldwell's number. It rang four times before he answered.
"Sam? Don Hanlon."
"You ready to be snowbound?" he asked.
"You think it'll come to that?"
"Sure do. Looks to me like we're in for the first big fall of the year."
"Well, I'm kind of looking forward to it."
"That's the proper attitude. Being snowbound is restful, peaceful."
I decided that was enough
Smalltalk. Neither of us cared much for long discussions about the weather, politics, or religion. Sam, especially, was scornful of wasted words; he was very much a taciturn, friendly, but totally self-sufficient and self-contained
New Englander.
He had come to the same conclusion a split second before I did.
"What did you call for?" he asked in that brisk, short, but not impolite manner of his.
"You hunt quite a lot."
"That's true."
"Do you know the spore of the animals most likely to be roaming through these woods?"
"Sure do."
"All of them?"
"I've hunted nearly all of them."
"Well, I've come across something pretty unusual. I never saw prints like these-and I can't seem to find them in any of the books I have out here."
"You can't learn a wildcraft from a book."
"That's precisely why I called you."
"Shoot, then."
I gave him a detailed description of the prints. I started to tell him about the amber eyes, about the creature that had been at the stable window and at our living room window-but I was cut off when the lights went out and the phone went dead at the same instant.
"Sam?" I said, although I knew that the connection had been broken.
The only response was silence.
"Don!" Connie shouted.
I put the receiver in the cradle and felt my way out of the den into the living room. The darkness seemed total at first and was only gradually mitigated by the phosphorescent glow of the snow fields which lay beyond the window and shone against the glass. "Are you all right?" I called to her.
"The lights are out," she said. Before I could respond to that she said, "Well, isn't that silly of me?" She laughed nervously.
"You know the lights are out."
I could tell that, like me, she had been frightened by the sudden darkness. And, also like me, she had connected initially and irrationally-the power failure with the yellow-eyed animal that had terrified the horses.
"The phone went dead too," I said.
"Did Sam have any idea what-"
"He didn't get a chance to say."
After a brief hesitation she said,
"I'm going to get Toby bundled up in a robe and bring him downstairs."
"Don't try to get down the steps without a light," I said. "I'll find the candles in the kitchen and bring one up to you."
That was considerably easier said than done. We had lived in the house only a little longer than half a year, and I was not so familiar with its layout that I could find my way easily in the dark.
Crossing the living room was not so bad; but the kitchen was a battleground, for it had only one window to let in the snow glare. I barked my shins on three of the four chairs that stood around the small breakfast table, cracked my hip on the heavy chrome handle of the oven door, and nearly fell over Toby's box of tempra paints which he had left on the floor in front of the cabinet where they were supposed to be kept. I tried four drawers before I finally found the candles and matches. I lit two candles, at the expense of a charred thumb, and went back to the stairs in the living room, feeling rather foolish.
When he saw me Toby called down from the second-floor landing: "Hey, we're roughing it."
"Until we get the house's generator going," I said, climbing up toward them. "Maybe half an hour."
"Great!"
I led them down the steps in the dancing candlelight, and we went back into the kitchen where Connie found two brass holders to relieve me of the candles which had begun to melt and drip hotly on my hands.
"What happened?" she asked.
She was not taking the inconvenience with
Toby's kind of high spirits.
Neither was I.
"The wind's just awful tonight," I said. "It probably brought down a tree somewhere along the line. Power and telephone cables are on the same poles- so one good-sized oak or maple or pine could do the whole job."
"Great!" Toby said. He looked at us, misinterpreted our glum expressions, and corrected himself. "I mean-fabulous!"
"I better go see about the generator," I said.
"What about fuel?" Connie asked.
"There's plenty of oil in the ground tank. We could run the house on our own power for a week or ten days without any problem."
"Swiss Family Robinson," Toby said.
"Well," I told him, "we have a few technological advantages that weren't available to the
Swiss Family Robinson."
"You think it might be a week or ten days before the lines are restored?" Connie asked.
"No, no. I was on the phone with Sam when it happened. He'll know what's gone wrong. He'll call the telephone and the power companies. As soon as this blizzard lets up a bit, they'll start out to see about it."
Tony grabbed hold of my sleeve and tugged on it. "Hey, Dad! Can I go out to the generator with you?"
"No," Connie said.
"But why, Mom?"
"You just had a bath."
"What's that got to do with it?" Plaintively.
"A hot bath opens your pores," she told him, "and makes you susceptible to colds. You'll stay in here with me."
But we both knew that was not the real reason he would have to stay inside rather than go with me to the barn where the auxiliary generator was stored.
You're being irrational, I told myself.
The yellow-eyed animal had nothing to do with this.
Maybe
Why do you fear it so much? You haven't seen it. It hasn't tried to harm you. Instinct? That's not good enough. Well, it's as if the thing, whatever it is, emanates some sort of radiation that generates fear But that isn't good enough either; in fact, that's downright silly.
It's only an animal.
Nothing more.
Yes. Of course. But what if…