"Then I'll tell you what."
She grinned.
"What?"
"While I'm out in the barn clubbing the horses unconscious so they can't interrupt us again, why don't you tie Toby in bed? Then, even if he woke up he couldn't interfere with us."
"How clever."
"Aren't I?"
She shook her head in mock exasperation, gave me another of those dazzling smiles, and pushed me through the sun porch door and into the blinding snowfall.
3.
Darkness came early at that time of year, and the dense snow clouds had ushered it in half an hour ahead of schedule. I switched on the flashlight that
I had brought with me-and mumbled some very nasty things about the manufacturer who had foisted it upon an unsuspecting public. It cut through the darkness and a thick rush of snowflakes for all of two or three feet-which was like trying to put out a raging bonfire with a child's toy water pistol. Indeed, the sight of all those wildly jiggling and twisting snowflakes in the wan orange shaft of light made me so dizzy that I turned off the torch and made my way to the barn by sheer instinct; however, since the barn was only two hundred feet from the house, the journey was hardly one that would unduly strain my sense of direction, meager as it was.
Born and raised in upstate New York, I had seen my share of major winter storms, but I had never seen anything to compare with this one. The wind had to be cutting up the curve of the hill at more than forty miles an hour. There was a wicked edge to it like the frayed tip of a bullwhip tearing at bare skin; and it produced a chill factor that must have lowered the temperature to a subjective twenty degrees below zero, or worse. It felt like worse. The snow was falling so heavily now that it appeared to be a horizontal avalanche moving from west to east across the Maine countryside. Already, four inches of the dry, grainy pellets had piled up over the path that I had shoveled along the brow of the hill after the previous snow- and there was considerably more than four inches in those places where the wind had built drifts against some obstacle or other.
And the noise! In sequin-dotted Christmas card art and in quaint landscape paintings, snow scenes always look so pleasant, quiet and gentle and peaceful, a good place to curl up and go to sleep. In reality the worst storms are howling, shrieking beasts that can out-decibel any summer thunder shower in a contest of voices. Even with the flaps of my hat pulled down over my ears, I could hear the horrible keening and moaning of the wind. By the time I was twenty steps from the sun porch door, I had a nagging headache.
Snowflakes swept up my nostrils.
Snowflakes trickled down under my collar.
The wind tore tears from my eyes.
I needed four times as long as usual to reach the barn doors, and I stumbled into them with some shouting and much pain before I realized I had come that far. I fumbled at the lock and slid the bolt back, even though my fingers were so cold that they did not want to curl around the wrought-iron pull. Quickened by the elements, I stepped inside and slammed the door behind me, relieved to be out of the whip of the wind and away from those choruses of banshees that had been intent on blowing out both of my eardrums.
In the warm barn the snow on my eyebrows melted instantly and seeped down my face.
In the truest and strictest sense of the word, the building was not really a barn, for it lacked a loft and animal pens and the traditional machinery found in a barn. Only one story high, it ran straight along the crest of the hill: ten spacious horse stalls on the left and seven on the right, storage bins for grain and meal at the end of the right-hand side, saddles stored on the sawhorses in the corner, grooming instruments and blankets and water buckets racked on the wall just above the saddles.
Many years ago, if the people down at Blackstone Realty were to be believed, some wealthy gentleman farmer had bred several race horses here, mostly for his own amusement; now, however, there were only two sorry mares named Kate and Betty, both of them fat and accustomed to luxuries that they had never earned-plus a pony for Toby, name of Blueberry. All three of the animals were extremely agitated, rolling their eyes and snorting. They kicked at the back walls of their stalls. They slammed their shoulders into the wooden partitions that separated them. They raised their long and elegant necks and cried out, their black nostrils flaring and their brown eyes wide with terror.
"Whoa now, whoa now," I said gently, quietly, trying my best to reassure them. "Calm yourselves, ladies. Everything's all right. Whoa down now. Just you whoa down."
I couldn't see what had them so disturbed. The heating units were all functioning properly. The air in the barn was circulating at a pleasant sixty-nine degrees. I walked the length of the place and looked into the empty stalls. But no stray dog or fox had gotten in through some undiscovered chink in the clapboard walls; the horses were alone.
When I tried to calm Blueberry, she snapped at me and just missed taking a sizeable chunk out of my right hand. I had never seen her behave like this before. She peeled her black lips back from her teeth as if she thought she were a guard dog instead of a horse. We had bought her for Toby because she was so gentle and manageable. What had happened, what had changed her temperament so radically and so quickly?
"Whoa now. Whoa girl."
But she simply wasn't going to calm down. She snorted and whinnied and kicked at the back wall of her stall, kicked so hard that a board splintered with a crisp, dry sound.
Oddly enough
Kate and Betty were more amenable than Blueberry, even though they both had slight mean streaks. They stopped crying out and ceased kicking their stalls apart as I stroked their faces and rubbed behind their ears. But even they would not come completely under control. They whuffled like dogs and rolled their eyes from side to side.
I remembered that horses are especially sensitive to fire: the odor of sparking wood, the distant crackle of the first flames, the initial traces of smoke
Though I sniffed like a bloodhound, I could not sense anything but hay, straw, dust, sweat, and the peculiarly mellow odor of well used leather saddles and reins. I examined the small oil-fed furnace that warmed the stable. I felt the wall around the fuel tank. I studied the heaters a second time. But I could not find any sign of danger or any malfunction.
Yet Blueberry reared up and whinnied.
And the other two were becoming agitated once more.
Having just about concluded that it was nothing more than the wind and the storm that was upsetting them-and now they were all leaping and snorting more furiously than ever, as if they were not three ordinary nags but a trio of high strung thoroughbreds -I turned toward the door and quite accidentally caught sight of the light which glowed eerily just beyond the only window in the entire building. There were two lights, actually, both a warm amber shade and of dim wattage. They appeared to pulse and to shimmer-and then they were gone, as if they had never been: blink!
I hurried to the barn door, slid it open, and stepped into the snow-filled night. The arctic wind struck me like a mallet swung by a blacksmith who was angry with his wife, and it almost blew me back into the stable row. Switching on the nearly useless flashlight, I bent against the wind and pulled the door shut behind me. Laboriously, cautiously, I inched around the side of the barn in the direction of the window, peering anxiously at the ground ahead of me.
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."