Invasion

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    1.
        
        The three-hundred-acre Timberlake Farm, which we were renting that year, was as isolated a refuge as you could possibly find in New England. Elsewhere highways had cut open regions once closed to man by dense pine forests and rocky landscapes; and the small towns, previously content with their unsophisticated ways, had begun to build industrial "parks" to lure manufacturers from the choked cities; and the suburbs continued to sprawl, gobbling up the open countryside, macadamizing and concretizing and tract housing the woodlands. Contemptuous of the noise and the grime of civilization, northern Maine shunned highways that went nowhere; and it did not welcome commuters who wanted to move into the snow country with their big cars and snowmobiles and aluminum-redwood houses. Some day, of course, when the population pressure reached an unbearable peak, even Timberlake Farm would be filled with lookalike, two-bed-room ranch houses and condominium apartment buildings; however, the year that we lived there the farmhouse was two miles from the nearest neighbor and eleven miles from the nearest town, Barley,
        Maine.
        Isolated.
        Perhaps too isolated.
        But that realization was not to come to us until December, after we had lived on the farm for more than six months. And then it was definitely too late for second thoughts.
        The farmhouse was a two story flagstone manor with four large bedrooms, three baths, a drawing room, study, pine-panelled library, formal dining room, and modern kitchen. The luxury was greater than one might expect to find in a farmhouse in Maine-but Timberlake had been conceived as a gentleman's retreat and not as an enterprise that must support itself. The land had never been cultivated, and the barn had never contained any animals but riding horses.
        Isolation:
        The house had one telephone, the lines for which had been run in at no little expense by Creighton
        Development, the company that owned and rented the property through Blackstone
        Realty in Barley. It was completely furnished except for a television set-and we had early decided to do without that questionable luxury in favor of books and conversation.
        Isolation:
        Every two weeks the three of us drove in to Barley in our Volkswagen microbus. We might take in a movie at the Victory Theater, and we always had dinner at the Square Restaurant. We picked up new magazines and paperbacks at the cigar store across the street from the restaurant. That was the full extent-aside from rare telephone calls and the occasional letter we received in the weekly maildrop at the end of our lane-of our contact with the outside world.
        Initially, that was all we required. But once the snows came and the trouble began, we damned our isolation a hundred times a day and wished fervently for contact with people outside our family, with anyone at all.. .
        The first major blizzard of the year began on the twelfth day of December, late in the afternoon, when there was already eight inches of early-season snow on the ground. Toby and I were in the woods to the north of the house, tracking the foxes, snow rabbits, weasels, squirrels, and the few cats that kept active until the snow was so deep, even under the trees, that they were forced to remain in their caves, burrows, and nests. Toby's favorite pastime was tracking and spying upon our animal neighbors. I enjoyed the gentle sport as much as he did-perhaps because it was gentle, perhaps because I was proud that my son had never once suggested that we go up to the house and get a rifle and hunt down the animals. We were deep in the forest that afternoon, hot on the trail of a fox, when the snow began to sift heavily between the pine boughs, so heavily that we knew a bad storm must be sweeping across the open land, beyond the shelter of the woods. By the time we had followed our own trail back to the edge of the woods, a new inch of snow lay atop the old eight inches; and the farmhouse at the top of the rise three hundred yards away was all but invisible behind shifting curtains of flakes.
        "Will it be deep?" Toby asked.
        "I'm afraid so," I said.
        "I like it deep."
        "You would."
        "Real deep."
        "It'll be over your head," I told him. For a ten-year-old boy he was somewhat slender and a bit short; therefore, I wasn't exaggerating all that much when I