'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.'
I kissed her.
She kissed back-and smiled when Toby called for us from the living room. 'Later.'
I released her, turned back to the sun porch door, and slid the bolt latch in place, although we usually left it unlocked. When we went through the kitchen door, I closed and locked that too.
4
After dinner I went into the den and took from the shelves all the volumes that might conceivably help me to identify our mysterious new neighbor.
Sitting behind the heavy, dark oak desk, a short brandy at hand, the empty gun cabinet at my back, I spent more than an hour paging through eight thick books, studying descriptions, drawings, and photographs of wildlife prints and spoors.
With those animals whose marks I found altogether unfamiliar, I turned the examples on their sides and upside down, hoping to come across the prints that I was looking for simply by viewing these at odd angles. In some four hundred samples, however, there was nothing vaguely similar to what I had seen in the snow, regardless of the view that I took of them.
I was putting the books back on the shelves when Connie came into the den.
She said, 'Any luck?'
'None.'
'Why don't you come keep us company? Toby's working with his tempra paints, and I'm reading. I've got a pretty good FM station with lots of gutsy Rimsky-Korsakov mixed in with Beethoven.'
I caught her up in my arms and lifted her off the floor and kissed her, tasting the minty tang of the after- dinner liqueur she had been drinking. She was the kind of woman a man wants to hold a great deal: feminine and yet not soft in any way, sensual yet not forbidding. Her father and her father's father had been bricklayers, yet there was a certain undeniable nobility in her face; she had the presence and the grace of one born to high position. It was inconceivable to me, just then, as I held her, that I had ever retreated from this part of reality, from Connie.
'Don, Toby is in the next room-'
I shushed her. 'Dr. Cohen who is a psychiatrist and who ought to know all about these things, says that we should kiss and cuddle in front of Toby so that he knows we really love each other and so he doesn't think that I was away all that time because I wanted to be away.' I kissed her again. 'Therefore, this is not merely a bit of hot necking-it's psychiatric therapy for our entire family.
Can you argue with that?'
She grinned. 'I guess not.'
Just then Toby knocked on the half-open den door and stepped cautiously across the threshold.
We broke apart, though not with haste, Connie's hand still on my arm. 'Yes, Toby?'
He had been standing there, apparently, for long seconds, trying to decide how best to attract our attention without embarrassing us. He was strangely stiff, as if he were taking part in a good posture demonstration in school. His face was pale, his eyes very wide, and his mouth loose-lipped as if he were about to be ill.
Connie saw his condition even as I did, and we hurried over to him. She put a hand on his forehead and evidently decided there was no temperature. 'What's the matter, Toby?'
He looked at me and then at her and then back at me again.
Fat tears swelled at the corners of his eyes, but he made a valiant effort to keep from spilling them.
'Toby?' I said, kneeling beside him, caging him between
Connie and me, caging him in love.
He said, 'I can't?' He spoke in a whisper, and his voice trailed away into confusion.
She said, 'What? Can't what, darling?'
He bit his lip. He was trembling.
To Connie I said, 'He's scared to death.'
'Toby?'
'I can't tell,' he said.
'Why not?' Connie asked, smoothing his dark hair back from his forehead.
'I don't want to-to upset Dad,' he said.
('There will be times,' Dr. Cohen had said, that last day in his office before I was turned loose from the sanitarium, 'when people-even those you love and who love you-will say things both intentionally and unintentionally, but most often the latter, that will remind you of your illness. They will hurt you, hurt you very badly. You'll be guilt-stricken for having abandoned your family.
You'll want to crawl away somewhere and be by yourself, as if you're a wounded animal. However, being by yourself is unquestionably the worst medicine, Donald.
Stay there. Face it. Push ahead with it. Do your best to conceal your wounds and try to salvage the situation.' The doctor had known his business, all right.)
'You won't upset me, Toby,' I said. The words were difficult to form and even more difficult to speak. 'I'm perfectly all right now. I don't get upset very easily any more.'
He stared at me, unblinkingly, trying to assess the degree of truth in what I said. He had stopped trembling; he was utterly still.
'Go on,' Connie said, holding him against her. He could no longer restrain the tears. They slid down his round cheeks, glistening brightly, dripping from the soft line of his chin. He began to shudder- just as he shuddered when he tried to eat something that he didn't like in order to impress us with his manly fortitude.
'Toby?'
'Come on, Toby. Tell us.'
'At the window,' he said. It came out of him in a rush now, the words running together, expelled in gasping breaths. 'At the window, right at the window, in the other room, I saw it at the living room window and it had yellow eyes.'
Frowning, Connie said,
'What had yellow eyes?'
'Big yellow eyes,' he said, frightening himself even more as he recalled them. 'It had big yellow eyes as big around as my whole hand, really big, looking straight at me.' He held up his hand to show how big the eyes had been.
Connie looked at me, raised her eyebrows.
