He glanced back toward the trees, squinted his eyes as if he were trying to dispel the shadows under the pine boughs. "Then, whatever it was, it went by here just before we came out of the woods, huh Dad?"
That was true enough, although I hadn't thought about it. "When the storm's finished, maybe we can come out and look for new tracks," I said.
"On snowshoes?"
"Have to use snowshoes if the snow's over your head."
"Great!" he said, dismissing the mystery that suddenly.
If we could all remain small boys in at least one tiny corner of our minds, we would never end up in private, locked rooms in silent hospitals, staring at walls and refusing to speak
"At least we can follow this trail until it turns away from the house," I said.
He gave me his hand, and we bent our heads against the wind, keeping a close watch on the odd prints as we climbed the slope. The holes were repeated in exactly the same pattern until we were halfway up the hill to the house. At the mid-point of the slope, the prints stopped in a much trampled circle of snow. Toby found the place where they struck off once again toward another arm of the pine forest.
"It stood here," Toby said. "It stood right here and watched our house for a long time."
Indeed, the animal, whatever it might be, seemed to have come out of the woods solely to stare at the farmhouse and, once its curiosity was satisfied, had gone away again. But I didn't like to think that was the case. There was some indefinable alien quality about those prints-which were so unlike anything I had ever before encountered that made me at first uneasy and eventually somewhat frightened. That fear, as irrational as it might have been, only increased when I contemplated the thing standing here on this windblown slope, watching the farmhouse where Connie had spent the entire afternoon' alone.
But that was ridiculous.
Wasn't it?
Yes.
What was there to fear?
It was only an animal.
I was being childish.
"Maybe it was a bear," Toby said.
"No. A bear's paws wouldn't leave a trail like this."
"I can't wait to go looking for it on snowshoes."
Well, that's for another day," I said.
"Come on."
He wanted to look at the prints some more.
I kept hold of his hand and started toward the house again, setting a faster pace than we'd been keeping. "Remember that hot chocolate!" But I wasn't thinking about hot chocolate at all.
2.
By the time we reached the sun porch at the rear of the house, the wind had the fury of a bomb blast. It followed us through the door, driving a cloud of snow onto the porch.
We did the traditional things people do when they come in from a cold day: we stamped our feet, slapped our arms against our sides, whooshed! out our breath, and commented on the clouds of steam. By the time we had stripped off our coats, gloves, and boots, Connie really did have cocoa ready for us in the kitchen.
"Great!" Toby said, climbing onto his chair and poking at the half-dissolved marshmallows with his spoon.
"Don't you know any other expletive besides 'Great'?" I asked.
"Expliv-what?" he asked.
"What you say when you're excited. When something really strikes you as good and wonderful, don't you have anything to say except great!"
He frowned into his chocolate, thinking about it for a second or two. Then: "Fabulous!"
"Well, it offers variety," I said.
Fifteen minutes later, fatigued by his long afternoon of stalking the native fauna, Toby nearly fell asleep in his mug of cocoa.
"I'll have to take the scout to bed for a nap," Connie said. She was smiling at him, and she was very pretty.
"I'll do it," I said.
"Sure?"
"Sure," I said. "I'd appreciate having something a bit stronger than hot chocolate once I get him tucked in. Do you think that could be arranged?"
"Possibly."
"Vodka martinis?"
"Just the right medicine for a cold day."
"Especially in large doses."
"I'll mix a pitcherful. I need some medicine myself."
"You were in a toasty warm house all afternoon."
She smiled. "Ah, but I empathize with your frostbite so well. I can feel how chilled you are."
"I think you're just a lush."
"That too."
I lifted Toby in my arms and carried him upstairs to his bedroom at the far end of the main hall. He was not much help undressing himself, for he kept nodding off. I finally got him under the covers and pulled the blankets up to his chin. In seconds his eyelids fluttered shut, and he was sound asleep.
The storm sky was so dark that there was no need for me to draw the drapes at the two large, mullioned windows. The wind moaned softly against the glass: an eerie but effective lullaby.
For a while I stood and watched him, and I thought how he would be after his nap: bouncy, energetic, full of ideas and projects and games. When he woke, he would be fascinated by the accumulation of new snow, as if he had not known a storm was in progress when he went to bed.
Before we could eat dinner, we would have to step outside in our boots and measure the snow with a yardstick. And that would bring full circle one of the routines that I enjoyed so much: put him to bed, wake him, take him out to marvel at the snow. In the summer, there had been other routines, but they had been just as good as this one.
Downstairs, Connie was sitting by the fireplace where she had put a match to some well-dried birch logs. The sight of her warmed me as the fire could never do. She was a slender but shapely blonde who had celebrated her thirtieth birthday the week before but who might have passed for a teenager without makeup. She was not really beautiful in any conventional sense. She did not resemble a fashion model or a movie star. She had too many freckles for that. Her mouth was much too wide and her nose a little too long for classic beauty. Yet every feature was in harmony with every other feature in her gentle face, and the overall effect was immensely sensuous and appealing.
Her best feature was her eyes which were enormous, round, and blue. They were the wide-open, innocent, curious eyes of a fawn. She always looked as if she had just been startled; she was not capable of that sultry, heavy-eyed look that most men found sexy. But that was fine with me. Her beauty was all the better because it was unique and approachable.
I sat down on the couch beside her, put my arm around her, and accepted the drink she had poured for me. It was cold, bitter, very refreshing.
"That's some son you've raised," I said.
"You've raised him too."
"I don't take credit where it isn't due," I said.
After all, I had been in the army for two years, eighteen long months in Southeast Asia. And after that, for more than two years, there had been that gray-walled hospital room where Toby had been allowed to visit only twice, and after that I'd spent another eight months in a private sanitarium
"Don't be so hard on yourself," she said. She leaned her head against my shoulder. Her pale hair spilled like a fan of golden feathers across my chest. I could feel the pulse throbbing in her temple.
We stayed like that for a while: working at our drinks and watching the fire and not saying anything at all. When I first got out of the hospital, we didn't talk much because neither of us knew quite what to say.
I felt terribly guilty about having withdrawn from them and from my responsibilities to them that I was embarrassed about suddenly moving in as an equal member of the family. She hadn't known what to say, for she had been desperately afraid of saying something, anything, that might send me back into my quasicatatonic trance. Hesitantly, fumblingly, we had eventually found our way back to each other. And then there was a time when we could say whatever we chose, a time in which we talked too much and made up for lost years-or perhaps we were afraid that if we didn't say it all now, share it now, immediately, we would have no chance to say it in the future. In the last two months we had settled into a third stage in which we were again sure of each other, as we had been before I went away to war and came back not myself. We didn't feel, as we had, that it was necessary for us to jabber at each other in order to stave off the silences. We were comfortable with long pauses, reveries
So: the fire, the drinks, her hair, her quick heartbeat, her hand curling in mine.
And then for no apparent reason-except, perhaps, that it was all too good; I was still frightened of things being too good and therefore having nowhere to go but down again-I thought of the odd tracks in the snow. I told her about them, but with detachment, as if I were talking about something I had read in a magazine.
She said, "What do you think made them?"
"I haven't any idea."
"Maybe you could find it in one of those books in the den. A drawing or photograph just like what you saw."
"I hadn't thought of that," I said. "I'll check it out after dinner." The den was furnished with a shelf of books on woodlore, hunting, rifle care and other "manly" subjects in addition to its studded leather furniture.
"Whatever it is-could it be dangerous?"
"No, no."
"I don't mean dangerous for us-but maybe for a little guy like Toby."
"I don't think so," I said. "It didn't seem to have claws-though it must be fairly large. Toby mentioned a bird. I can't imagine what kind of bird, but I guess it might be that."
"The largest birds around here are pheasants," she said. "And those tracks sound too big for pheasants."
"Much too big," I said.
"Maybe we shouldn't let Toby go outside by himself until we know what we've got on our hands."
I finished my drink and put the glass on the coffee table. "Well, if the books don't give me a clue, I'll call Sam Caldwell and see if he can put me on the right track. If Sam's never seen anything like them, then they're just figments of our imaginations."
Sam was seventy years old, but he still operated his sporting goods store on the square in Barley. He hunted and fished through every legal season, for every breed of creature natural to New England. The way his face was weathered-cut across with a hundred lines and deeply tanned by sun and wind- he even looked like a piece of the forest.
As happened often lately, our admiration for the crackling fire swiftly metamorphosed into admiration for each other, and we began some playful necking. The playfulness gave way to real interest: the kisses grew longer, the embraces firmer. Certain that Toby would be asleep for another hour or so, I had just begun to get really serious with her when she drew back a bit and cocked her head, listening.
I said, "What is it?"
"Ssshh!
When my heartbeat subsided and my breathing was somewhat less stentorian than it had been, I could hear it too: the whinnying cries of the horses "Just the nags."
"I wonder what's wrong with them?"
"They know that we're sitting in here getting lovey, and they're jealous. That's all it is. They think we ought to be out there grooming them."
"I'm serious."
I sighed. "Horses sometimes get spooked for no good reason at all." I tried to embrace her again.
She was still intent upon listening to the horses, and she shushed me and held me off.
I said, "I know I locked the barn doors-so it can't be that the wind is bothering them."
"What about the heaters?"
"They've been switched on since the last week of October," I said. "I never touch them."
"You're certain?"
"Of course."
"Well
Maybe the heaters have broken down, and the barn's gotten cold."
Reluctantly I let go of her and leaned away from her. "You want me to see about it?"
"Would you?"
"Right away," I said, punctuating it with a well delivered sigh of regret.
"I'm sorry, Don," she said, her gazelle eyes wide and blue and absolutely stunning. "But I can't be happy
I can't feel romantic if those poor horses are out there freezing."
I got up. "Neither can
I," I admitted. Their squeals were really pitiful. "Though I'd have given it a good try."
"I'll get your coat."
"And my scarf and gloves and stocking cap and frostbite medicine," I said.
She gave me one last smile to keep me warm in the snowstorm. It wasn't the sort of smile most men got from their wives: it was much too seductive for that, too smoky and sultry, not in the least bit domestic.
Five minutes later she huddled in the unheated, glass-enclosed sun porch while I pulled on my boots and zipped them up. As I was about to leave she grabbed me by one arm and pulled me down and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.
"When I come back from psychoanalyzing the horses," I warned her, "I'm going to chase you around and around the living room sofa until I catch you."
"In a fair race you won't catch me."
"Then I'll cheat."
"Toby will be waking up in half an hour or so," she said, using one slender hand to push her blond hair behind her right ear. "I'm afraid we've lost the opportunity."
"Oh yeah?"
She gave me a saucy look. "Yeah."
"Well, it's about time that kid learned the facts of life anyway, don't you think?"
"Not by watching Daddy chase Mommy around the sofa," she said.