Winter Moon

as it struggled to breathe. Abruptly blood bubbled from its nostrils

and trickled from its ears. After one final spasm that rattled its

claws against the floor again, it lay still, silent.

Dead.

"Dear Jesus," Eduardo said, and put one trembling hand to his brow to

blot away the sudden dew of perspiration that had sprung up along his

hairline.

The dead raccoon didn't seem as large as either of the sentinels he'd

seen outside, and he didn't think that it looked smaller merely because

death had diminished it. He was pretty sure it was a third individual,

perhaps younger than the other two, or maybe they were males, and this

was a female.

He remembered leaving the kitchen door open when he'd walked around the

house to see if the front and back sentries were the same animal. The

screen door had been closed. But it was light, just a narrow pine

frame and screen. The raccoon might have been able to pry it open wide

enough to insinuate its snout, its head, and then its body, sneaking

into the house before he'd returned to close the inner door.

Where had it hidden in the house when he'd been passing the late

afternoon in the rocking chair? What had it been up to while he was

cooking dinner?

He went to the window at the sink. Because he had eaten early and

because the summer sunset was late, twilight had not yet arrived, so he

could clearly see the masked observer. It was in the backyard, sitting

on its hindquarters, dutifully watching the house.

Stepping carefully around the pitiful creature on the floor, Eduardo

went down the hall, unlocked the front door, and stepped outside to see

if the other sentry was still in place. It was not in the front yard,

where he'd left it, but on the porch, a few feet from the door. It was

lying on its side, blood pooled in the one ear that he could see, blood

at its nostrils, eyes wide and glazed.

Eduardo raised his attention from the coon to the lower woods at the

bottom of the meadow. The declining sun, balanced on the peaks of the

mountains in the west, threw slanting orange beams between the trunks

of those trees but was incapable of dispelling the stubborn shadows.

By the time he returned to the kitchen and looked out the window again,

the backyard coon was running frantically in circles. When he went out

onto the porch, he could hear it squealing in pain. Within seconds it

fell, tumbled. It lay with its sides heaving for a moment, and then it

was motionless.

He looked uphill, past the dead raccoon on the grass, to the woods that

flanked the fieldstone house where he had lived when he'd been the

caretaker.

The darkness among those trees was deeper than in the lower forest

because the westering sun illuminated only their highest boughs as it

slid slowly behind the Rockies.

Something was in the woods.

Eduardo didn't think the raccoons' strange behavior resulted from

rabies or, in fact, from an illness of any kind. Something was ...

controlling them.

Maybe the means by which that control was exerted had proved so

physically taxing to the animals that it had resulted in their sudden,

spasmodic deaths.

Or maybe the entity in the woods had purposefully killed them to

exhibit the extent of its control, to impress Eduardo with its power,

and to suggest that it might be able to waste him as easily as it had

destroyed the raccoons.

He felt he was being watched--and not just through the eyes of other

raccoons.

The bare peaks of the highest mountains loomed like a tidal wave of

granite.

The orange sun slowly submerged into that sea of stone.

A steadily inkier darkness rose under the evergreen boughs, but Eduardo

didn't think that even the blackest condition in nature could match the

darkness in the heart of the watcher in the woods--if, in fact, it had

a heart at all.

Although he was convinced that disease had not played a role in the

behavior and death of the raccoons, Eduardo could not be certain of his

diagnosis, so he took precautions when handling the bodies. He tied a

bandanna over his nose and mouth, and wore a pair of rubber gloves. He

didn't handle the carcasses directly but lifted each with a

short-handled shovel and slipped it into its own large plastic trash

bag. He twisted the top of each bag, tied a knot in it, and put it in

the cargo area of the Cherokee station wagon in the garage. After

hosing off the small smears of blood on the front porch, he used

several cotton cloths to scrub the kitchen floor with pure Lysol.

Finally he threw the cleaning rags into a bucket, stripped off the

gloves and dropped them on top of the rags, and set the bucket on the

back porch to be dealt with later.

He also put a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun and the .22 pistol in the

Cherokee.

He took the video camera with him, because he didn't know when he might

need it. Besides, the tape currently in the camera contained the

footage of the raccoons, and he didn't want that to disappear as had

the tape he'd taken of the luminous woods and the black doorway. For

the same reason, he took the yellow tablet that was half filled with

his handwritten account of these recent events.