Winter Moon

word of the news when he pushed back his chair and got up from

breakfast. The entire time, he had been studying the woods through the

window beside the table, trying to decide if he should go down to the

foot of the meadow and search for evidence of the enigmatic

visitation.

Now, standing on the front porch in knee-high boots, jeans, sweater,

and sheepskin-lined jacket, wearing a cap with fur-lined earflaps tied

under his chin, he still hadn't decided what he was going to do.

Incredibly, fear was still with him. Bizarre as they might have been,

the tides of pulsating sound and the luminosity in the trees had not

harmed him.

Whatever threat he perceived was entirely subjective, no doubt more

imaginary than real.

Finally he became sufficiently angry with himself to break the chains

of dread. He descended the porch steps and strode across the front

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

that had nothing to do with the wintry air.

Annoyed with himself, Eduardo turned back toward the meadow, following

the tracks he had left in the patches of snow and the thick carpet of

dead pine needles. The crunch of his footsteps disturbed a slumbering

owl from its secret perch in some high bower.

He felt a wrongness in the woods. He couldn't put a finer point on it

than that. Which sharpened his annoyance. A wrongness. What the hell

did that mean? A wrongness.

The hooting owl.

Spiny black pine cones on white snow.

Pale beams of sunlight lancing through the gaps in the gray-green

branches.

All of it ordinary. Peaceful. Yet wrong.

As he returned to the perimeter of the forest, with snow-covered fields

visible between the trunks of the trees ahead, he was suddenly certain

that he was not going to reach open ground, that something was rushing

at him from behind, some creature as indefinable as the wrongness that

he sensed around him. He began to move faster. Fear swelled step by

step. The hooting of the owl seemed to sour into a cry as alien as the

shriek of a nemesis in a nightmare. He stumbled on an exposed root,

his heart trip-hammered, and he spun around with a cry of terror to

confront whatever demon was in pursuit of him.

He was, of course, alone.

Shadows and sunlight.

The hoot of an owl. A soft and lonely sound. As ever.