yard.
The transition from yard to meadow was hidden under a cloak of snow six
to eight inches deep in some places and knee-high in others, depending
on where the wind had scoured it away or piled it. After thirty years
on the ranch, he was so familiar with the contours of the land and the
ways of the wind that he unthinkingly chose the route that offered the
least resistance.
White plumes of breath steamed from him. The bitter air brought a
pleasant flush to his cheeks. He calmed himself by concentrating
on--and enjoying--the familiar effects of a winter day.
He stood for a while at the end of the meadow, studying the very trees
that, last night, had glowed a smoky amber against the black backdrop
of the deeper woods, as if they had been imbued with a divine presence,
like God in the bush that burned without being consumed. This morning
they looked no more special than a million other sugar and ponderosa
pines, the former somewhat greener than the latter.
The specimens at the edge of the forest were younger than those rising
behind them, only about thirty to thirty-five feet tall, as young as
twenty years.
They had grown from seeds fallen to the earth when he had already been
on the ranch a decade, and he felt as if he knew them more intimately
than he had known most people in his life.
The woods had always seemed like a cathedral to him. The trunks of the
great evergreens were reminiscent of the granite columns of a nave,
soaring high to support a vaulted ceiling of green boughs. The
pine-scented silence was ideal for meditation. Walking the meandering
deer trails, he often had a sense that he was in a sacred place, that
he was not just a man of flesh and bone but an heir to eternity.
He had always felt safe in the woods.
Until now.
Stepping out of the meadow and into the random-patterned mosaic of
shadows and sunlight beneath the interlaced pine branches, Eduardo
found nothing out of the ordinary. Neither the trunks nor the boughs
showed signs of heat damage, no charring, not even a singed curl of
bark or blackened cluster of needles.
The thin layer of snow under the trees had not melted anywhere, and the
only tracks in it were those of deer, raccoon, and smaller animals.
He broke off a piece of bark from a sugar pine and crumbled it between
the thumb and forefinger of his gloved right hand. Nothing unusual
about it.
He moved deeper into the woods, past the place where the trees had
stood in radiant splendor in the night. Some of the older pines were
over two hundred feet tall. The shadows grew more numerous and blacker
than ash buds in the front of March, while the sun found fewer places
to intrude.
His heart would not be still. It thudded hard and fast.
He could find nothing in the woods but what had always been there, yet
his heart would not be still.
His mouth was dry. The full curve of his spine was clad in a chill
