Winter Moon

Eduardo took the telephone handset away from his head long enough to

swallow some beer.

When he put the phone to his ear again, he heard Travis Potter saying,

"--know something you haven't told me?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Eduardo lied.

The veterinarian was silent this time. Maybe he was sucking on a beer

of his own. Then: "If you come across any more animals like this, will

you call me?"

"Yes."

"Not just raccoons."

"All right."

"Any animals at all."

"Sure."

"Don't move them," Potter said.

"I won't."

"I want to see them in situ, just where they fell."

"Whatever you say."

"Well . . ."

"Goodbye, Doctor."

Eduardo hung up and went to the sink. He stared out the window at the

forest at the top of the sloped backyard, west of the house.

He wondered how long he would have to wait. He was sick to death of

waiting.

"Come on," he said softly to the hidden watcher in the woods.

He was ready. Ready for hell or heaven or eternal nothingness,

whatever came.

He wasn't afraid of dying.

What frightened him was the how of dying. What he might have to

endure. What might be done to him in the final minutes or hours of his

life. What he might see.

On the morning of June twenty-first, as he was eating breakfast and

listening to the world news on the radio, he looked up and saw a

squirrel at the window in the north wall of the kitchen. It was

perched on the window stool, gazing through the glass at him. Very

still. Intense. As the raccoons had been.

He watched it for a while, then concentrated on his breakfast again.

Each time he looked up, it was on duty.

After he washed the dishes, he went to the window, crouched, and came

face-to-face with the squirrel. Only the pane of glass was between

them. The animal seemed unfazed by this close inspection.

He snapped one fingernail against the glass directly in front of its

face.

The squirrel didn't flinch.

He rose, twisted the thumb-turn latch, and started to lift the lower

half of the double-hung window.

The squirrel leaped down from the stool and fled to the side yard,

where it turned and regarded him intently once more.

He closed and locked the window and went out to sit on the front

porch.

Two squirrels were already out there on the grass, waiting for him.

When Eduardo sat in the hickory rocking chair, one of the small beasts

remained in the grass, but the other climbed to the top porch step and

kept a watch on him from that angle.

That night, abed in his barricaded room again, seeking sleep, he heard

squirrels scampering on the roof. Small claws scratching at the

shingles.

When he finally slept, he dreamed of rodents.

The following day, June twenty-second, the squirrels remained with

him.

At windows. In the yard. On the porches. When he went for a walk,

they trailed him at a distance.

The twenty-third was the same, but on the morning of the twenty-fourth,

he found a dead squirrel on the back porch. Clots of blood in its

ears. Dried blood in its nostrils. Eyes protruding from the

sockets.

He found two more squirrels in the yard and a fourth on the front-porch

steps, all in the same condition.

They had survived control longer than the raccoons.

Apparently the traveler was learning.

Eduardo considered calling Dr. Potter. Instead, he gathered up the

four bodies and carried them to the center of the eastern meadow. He

dropped them in the grass, where scavengers could find and deal with

them.

He thought, also, of the imagined child in the faraway ranch who might

have been watching the Cherokee's headlights on the way back from the

vet's two weeks earlier. He told himself that he owed it to that

child--or to other children, who really existed--to tell Potter the

whole story. He should try to involve the authorities in the matter as

well, even though getting anyone to believe him would be a frustrating

and humiliating ordeal.

Maybe it was the beer he still drank from morning until bedtime, but he

could no longer summon the sense of community he had felt that night.

He'd spent his whole life avoiding people. He couldn't suddenly find

it within himself to embrace them.

Besides, everything had changed for him when he'd come home and found

the evidence of the intruder: the crumbling clumps of soil, the dead

beetles, the earthworm, the scrap of blue cloth caught in the frame of

the oven door. He was waiting in dread for the next move in that part

of the game, yet refusing to speculate about it, instantly blocking

every forbidden thought that started to rise in his tortured mind.

When that fearful confrontation occurred, at last, he could not

possibly share it with strangers. The horror was too personal, for him

alone to witness and endure.

He still maintained the diary of these events, and in that yellow

tablet he wrote about the squirrels. He hadn't the will or the energy

to record his experiences in as much detail as he had done at first.

He wrote as succinctly as possible without leaving out any pertinent

information. After a lifetime of finding journal-keeping too

burdensome, he was now unable to stop keeping this one.

He was seeking to understand the traveler by writing about it. The