'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?'
