hand to negotiate a slippery hillside.
He grinned broadly and started back towards me — then stopped a dozen feet away and stared at the ground. From the way he was bent over, and from the intensity of his gaze, I knew that he had come across a set of tracks and was puzzling out the nature of the animal that had made them.
We had been tramping through the forest for more than three hours, and I was ready for a warm fireplace and a vodka martini and a pair of felt-lined slippers. The wind was sharp; snowflakes found their way under my coat collar and down by back. 'There'll be hot chocolate up at the house,' I told him.
He didn't say anything or look up at me.
'And a plate of doughnuts.'
He said nothing.
'Doughnuts, Toby.'
'This is something new,' he said, pointing to the tracks in front of him.
'Marshmallows for the hot chocolate,' I said, even though I knew I was losing the battle. No adult can achieve the single-minded determination of a child.
'Look at this,
Dad.'
'A game of Monopoly while we eat. How about that?'
'Dad, look at this,' he insisted.
So I went and looked.
'What is it?'
I went around behind him in order to see the tracks from his vantage point.
He frowned and said, 'It's not a fox or a weasel or a squirrel. That's for sure. I can spot one of those right away.
It kind of looks like the mark a bird would leave, huh Dad? A bird's tracks-but funny.'
These marks certainly were 'funny.' As I took in the pattern of a single print, I felt the skin on the back of my neck tremble, and the air seemed to be a bit colder than it had been only a moment ago. The print consisted of eight separate indentations. There were three evenly spaced holes in the snow — each of them four inches in front of the other- parallel to a second set of holes two feet to the right of the first line. The marks were all identical, as if they had been stamped in the snow by a man's walking cane. Equidistant from both sets of holes and better than a yard in front of them, there was a pair of similar indentations, although each of these was as large across as the bottom of a standard water glass. It looked like this:
Although I was rather well acquainted with the woods, I had never seen anything remotely like it before. If all of that were indeed a single print, the animal was quite large, certainly not a bird of any kind.
'What is it, Dad?' Toby asked. He squinted up at me, his eyelashes frosted with snowflakes, his nose like a berry, the bill of his red cap fringed with ice. He was certain that I would have the answer.
I said, 'I don't really know.'
For an instant his disappointment in me was all too evident then he quickly covered his feelings, changed his expression, broke into a tentative smile. That made me sad, for it was an indication that he understood
Dad was still on shaky psychological ground and needed all the love and affection he could get. Otherwise, Dad might end up in the hospital again, staring at the walls and not talking and not at all like Dad should be.
'Can we follow it?' Toby asked.
'We ought to be getting home.'
'Ahh, heck.'
'Your nose is as red as a stoplight.'
'I'm tough,' he said,
'I know you are. I wouldn't argue about that. But your mother is expecting us about now.' I pointed to the rapidly vanishing set of prints. 'Besides, the wind and snow will have these filled in within a few minutes. We couldn't track them very far.'
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!'
