EIGHT
The noise brought me straight upright in bed.
“What’s the matter?” Rila asked sleepily from her pillow.
“Something’s at the chickens.”
She stirred protestingly. “Don’t you ever get a night’s sleep here? It was Bowser last night and now the chickens.”
“It’s that damn fox,” I said. “He’s got three of them so far. The chicken house isn’t much better than a sieve.”
Through the night came the squalling of the frightened birds.
I swung my feet out of bed, found the slippers on the floor and shoved my feet into them.
Rila sat up. “What are you going to do?”
“This time, I’ll get him,” I said. “Don’t turn on any lights. You’ll scare him off.”
“It’s night,” said Rila. “You won’t be able to see a fox.”
“There’s a full Moon. If he’s there, I’ll see him.”
In the broom closet in the kitchen, I found the shotgun and a box of shells. I clicked two of them into the chambers of the double-barrel. Bowser whined from his corner.
“You stay here,” I told him. “And keep quiet. I don’t want you messing around, scaring off the fox.”
“You be careful, Asa,” Rila cautioned, standing in the doorway of the living room.
“Quit worrying. I’ll be all right.”
“You ought to put something on,” she said. “You shouldn’t be running around out there, just in your slippers and pajama pants.”
“It’s warm,” I said.
“But it might be dewy. You’ll get your feet wet.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I won’t be out long.”
The night was almost as bright as day; a great golden Moon shone directly overhead. In the softness of the moonlight, the yard had the haunting quality of a Japanese print. Lilac scent hung heavy in the night air.
Frantic squawking still came from the hen house. A clump of cabbage roses stood at one corner of the structure, and as I went pussyfooting across the wet, cold grass, heavy with dew, as Rila had said it would be, I got the impression, somehow, that the fox was not in the chicken house at all, but hiding in the rose clump.
I stalked the rose clump, gun at ready. It was silly, I told myself. The fox either was still in the chicken house or had left; he would not be hiding in the roses.
But the feeling persisted that he was in the roses.
Thinking this, almost knowing it, I wondered how I knew, how I could possibly know.
And at the moment I was thinking this, all thought and wonderment were knocked out of me. Out of the rose clump, a face stared fixedly at me — a cat face, the whiskers, the owl eyes, the grin. It stared at me, unblinking, and never before had I seen it so clearly as at that moment — so clearly or for so long a time. Most of my sightings had been no more than fleeting glimpses. But now the face stayed on, hanging in the bush, the softness of the moonlight highlighting the details of the face, making each whisker stand out clearly. And this was the first time, I was sure, that I had actually seen the whiskers. Previously, I had gotten impressions of them, but had never really seen them.
Entranced and frightened, but more entranced than frightened, and with all thoughts of a fox knocked out of my mind, I moved forward slowly, the gun at ready, although now I knew I would not use it. I was close now, closer, something told me, than I should be, but I took another step, and on that step I stumbled or seemed to stumble.
When I recovered from the stumble, the rose bush was no longer there, and neither was the hen house.
I stood on a little slope that was covered with short grass and moss, and up the hill a ways was a clump of birch. It was no longer night; the sun was shining, but with little warmth. The cat face was gone.
From behind me I heard a shuffling, thumping sound, and I pivoted around. The thumping, shuffling thing stood ten feet tall. It had gleaming tusks, and a long trunk hanging down between the tusks was swinging slowly from side to side like a pendulum. The thing was only a matter of a dozen feet away and coming straight toward me.
I ran. I went up that slope like a scared rabbit. If I hadn’t run, sure as hell that mastodon would have run over me. He paid no attention to me; he didn’t flick a glance at me. He just went shuffling along, for all his bulk stepping daintily and with deliberate precision.
A mastodon, I told myself. For the love of Pete, a mastodon!
My mind seemed to catch and stay upon the word — a mastodon, a mastodon, a mastodon— there was room for nothing else, just that one repeating word, Backed against the clump of birch, I stood transfixed, the stuck needle of my mind repeating that one word, while the beast went shuffling across the landscape, turning now to head downhill toward the river.
First, it had been Bowser, I thought, yelping home with a Folsom in his rump, and now it was me. I had somehow traveled, ridiculous as it might seem, the self-same trail as Bowser.
Here I stood, I thought, a ridiculous figure dressed in pajama pants and a pair of worn slippers, clutching a shotgun in my hand.
A time tunnel had brought me here — or a time road or a time path, whatever one might call it — and that damn Catface was mixed up in my predicament somehow, as, undoubtedly, he’d been mixed up in the time traveling that Bowser had done. The funny thing was that there had been no sign of the time path nothing to warn me that I was putting a foot upon it.
What kind of sign, I wondered, would a man look for — a sort of shimmer in the air, perhaps, although I was sure there had been no shimmer.
And while I was thinking of that, I thought of something else. When I had reached this place, I should have marked it so that I’d have at least a fighting chance of getting back into my own time again. Although, I told myself, that probably wasn’t as simple as it sounded — just marking the place where you came out might not mark the path. Nonetheless any chance of marking the spot now was gone. I had run scared, and with reason, when I’d seen the mastodon. Now there was no way I could find the original spot.
I comforted myself by thinking that Bowser had traveled in the past and had come back. So it was not impossible, I told myself, for a person to get back.
If Bowser could get back, so could I. Although the moment that I thought of that, I was not too sure.
Bowser might have a way to smell out a time tunnel that no man could ever have.
Just standing there and worrying about it, however, would not solve the problem, would not give the answer. If I couldn’t find the road back to the present, I might have to stay a while, and I told myself I’d better take a look around.
Looking in the direction the mastodon had gone, I saw a herd of mastodons, a mile or so away, four adults and a calf. The mastodon that had almost run over me clumped steadily to join them.
Pleistocene, I told myself, but how deep into the Pleistocene, I had no way of knowing.
While the lay of the land remained unchanged, it had a vastly different look, for there were no forests.
Instead, there was a stretch of grassland that looked somewhat like a tundra, dotted here and there with clumps of birches and some evergreens, while along the river, I could make out misty yellow willows, The birch trees in the clump next to me were leafed out, but the leaves were small, the immature leaves of spring. On the ground beneath the trees was a carpet of hepaticas, the delicate, many-hued flower that came to bloom shortly after the snow was gone. The hepaticas lent an air of familiarity, almost of identity. In my boyhood, on this very land, I had ranged the woods to bring home in grubby hands great bouquets of the flowers, which my mother would put in a squat brown pitcher, setting it in the middle of the kitchen table.
Even from where I stood, it seemed to me that I could smell the exquisite, distinctive, never-to-be-forgotten odor of the tiny flowers.