Invasion

conclusion a split second before I did.
        "What did you call for?" he asked in that brisk, short, but not impolite manner of his.
        "You hunt quite a lot."
        "That's true."
        "Do you know the spore of the animals most likely to be roaming through these woods?"
        "Sure do."
        "All of them?"
        "I've hunted nearly all of them."
        "Well, I've come across something pretty unusual. I never saw prints like these-and I can't seem to find them in any of the books I have out here."
        "You can't learn a wildcraft from a book."
        "That's precisely why I called you."
        "Shoot, then."
        I gave him a detailed description of the prints. I started to tell him about the amber eyes, about the creature that had been at the stable window and at our living room window-but I was cut off when the lights went out and the phone went dead at the same instant.
        "Sam?" I said, although I knew that the connection had been broken.
        The only response was silence.
        "Don!" Connie shouted.
        I put the receiver in the cradle and felt my way out of the den into the living room. The darkness seemed total at first and was only gradually mitigated by the phosphorescent glow of the snow fields which lay beyond the window and shone against the glass. "Are you all right?" I called to her.
        "The lights are out," she said. Before I could respond to that she said, "Well, isn't that silly of me?" She laughed nervously.
        "You know the lights are out."
        I could tell that, like me, she had been frightened by the sudden darkness. And, also like me, she had connected initially and irrationally-the power failure with the yellow-eyed animal that had terrified the horses.
        "The phone went dead too," I said.
        "Did Sam have any idea what-"
        "He didn't get a chance to say."
        After a brief hesitation she said,
        "I'm going to get Toby bundled up in a robe and bring him downstairs."
        "Don't try to get down the steps without a light," I said. "I'll find the candles in the kitchen and bring one up to you."
        That was considerably easier said than done. We had lived in the house only a little longer than half a year, and I was not so familiar with its layout that I could find my way easily in the dark.
        Crossing the living room was not so bad; but the kitchen was a battleground, for it had only one window to let in the snow glare. I barked my shins on three of the four chairs that stood around the small breakfast table, cracked my hip on the heavy chrome handle of the oven door, and nearly fell over Toby's box of tempra paints which he had left on the floor in front of the cabinet where they were supposed to be kept. I tried four drawers before I finally found the candles and matches. I lit two candles, at the expense of a charred thumb, and went back to the stairs in the living room, feeling rather foolish.
        When he saw me Toby called down from the second-floor landing: "Hey, we're roughing it."
        "Until we get the house's generator going," I said, climbing up toward them. "Maybe half an hour."
        "Great!"
        I led them down the steps in the dancing candlelight, and we went back into the kitchen where Connie found two brass holders to relieve me of the candles which had begun to melt and drip hotly on my hands.
        "What happened?" she asked.
        She was not taking the inconvenience with
        Toby's kind of high spirits.
        Neither was I.
        "The wind's just awful tonight," I said. "It probably brought down a tree somewhere along the line. Power and telephone cables are on the same poles- so one good-sized oak or maple or pine could do the whole job."
        "Great!" Toby said. He looked at us, misinterpreted our glum expressions, and corrected himself. "I mean-fabulous!"
        "I better go see about the generator," I said.
        "What about fuel?" Connie asked.
        "There's plenty of oil in the ground tank. We could run the house on our own power for a week or ten days without any problem."
        "Swiss Family Robinson," Toby said.
        "Well," I told him, "we have a few technological advantages that weren't available to the
        Swiss Family Robinson."
        "You think it might be a week or ten days before the lines are restored?" Connie asked.
        "No, no. I was on the phone with Sam when it