Invasion

held my hand over his head so that he could look up and see how far it would be to the surface if he should become buried in new snow.
        "Great!" he said, as if the notion of being buried alive in a drift were too close to paradise to be borne. He ran off to the right and scooped up a handful of new snow and threw it at me. But it was too dry to pack into a ball, and it only flew apart and blew back on him when he tossed it.
        "Come on, Toby. We better get back to the house before we're stranded down here." I held out my hand to him, hoping that he would take it. Ten-year old boys usually insist on proving their self-reliance; but thirty-year-old fathers would much rather have them dependent, just a little bit, just for a few more years, just enough to need a hand to negotiate a slippery hillside.
        He grinned broadly and started back towards me -then stopped a dozen feet away and stared at the ground. From the way he was bent over, and from the intensity of his gaze, I knew that he had come across a set of tracks and was puzzling out the nature of the animal that had made them.
        We had been tramping through the forest for more than three hours, and I was ready for a warm fireplace and a vodka martini and a pair of felt-lined slippers. The wind was sharp; snowflakes found their way under my coat collar and down by back. "There'll be hot chocolate up at the house," I told him.
        He didn't say anything or look up at me.
        "And a plate of doughnuts."
        He said nothing.
        "Doughnuts, Toby."
        "This is something new," he said, pointing to the tracks in front of him.
        "Marshmallows for the hot chocolate," I said, even though I knew I was losing the battle. No adult can achieve the single-minded determination of a child.
        "Look at this,
        Dad."
        "A game of Monopoly while we eat. How about that?"
        "Dad, look at this," he insisted.
        So I went and looked.
        "What is it?"
        I went around behind him in order to see the tracks from his vantage point.
        He frowned and said, "It's not a fox or a weasel or a squirrel. That's for sure. I can spot one of those right away.
        It kind of looks like the mark a bird would leave, huh Dad? A bird's tracks-but funny."
        These marks certainly were "funny." As I took in the pattern of a single print, I felt the skin on the back of my neck tremble, and the air seemed to be a bit colder than it had been only a moment ago. The print consisted of eight separate indentations. There were three evenly spaced holes in the snow -each of them four inches in front of the other- parallel to a second set of holes two feet to the right of the first line. The marks were all identical, as if they had been stamped in the snow by a man's walking cane. Equidistant from both sets of holes and better than a yard in front of them, there was a pair of similar indentations, although each of these was as large across as the bottom of a standard water glass. It looked like this:
        
        Although I was rather well acquainted with the woods, I had never seen anything remotely like it before. If all of that were indeed a single print, the animal was quite large, certainly not a bird of any kind.
        "What is it, Dad?" Toby asked. He squinted up at me, his eyelashes frosted with snowflakes, his nose like a berry, the bill of his red cap fringed with ice. He was certain that I would have the answer.
        I said, "I don't really know."
        For an instant his disappointment in me was all too evident then he quickly covered his feelings, changed his expression, broke into a tentative smile. That made me sad, for it was an indication that he understood
        Dad was still on shaky psychological ground and needed all the love and affection he could get. Otherwise, Dad might end up in the hospital again, staring at the walls and not talking and not at all like Dad should be.
        "Can we follow it?" Toby asked.
        "We ought to be getting home."
        "Ahh, heck."
        "Your nose is as red as a stoplight."
        "I'm tough," he said,
        "I know you are. I wouldn't argue about that. But your mother is expecting us about now." I pointed to the rapidly vanishing set of prints. "Besides, the wind and snow will have these filled in within a few minutes. We couldn't track them very far."
        He glanced back toward the trees, squinted