Invasion

around the hilltop and found where the prints continued a few feet away. Though
        I didn't want to use the flashlight and alert my prey, I couldn't follow the trail without it. The December night was perfectly black and empty once you got away from the light that spilled from the house and from the single stable window. Holding the flashlight before me as if it were a sword, I walked westward, after the animal.
        Wind.
        Snow.
        More wind.
        More snow.
        Two minutes later
        I had lost the trail. The wind and snow had conspired to blot out the prints, scouring the land as clean and smooth as a new cotton sheet.
        Yet that didn't seem possible. Certainly, the snow was falling very hard and fast. Equally as certain: the wind was ugly. But the creature could have had no more than a two minute head start on me. The storm couldn't have erased every trace of it so quickly. Unless… Unless it was not moving away from me at the same ponderous pace at which I moved. If, in the instant that it turned away from the stable window, it had run, and if it could run incredibly fast in spite of the bad weather, it might have gotten a five-minute head start and its tracks might easily have filled up and it might be a mile away by now.
        But what sort of animal could move so easily and surely in wind like this, on a night when visibility was near zero?
        Considering that, I had to consider one other thing which I had not wanted to think about just yet. I had seen two amber lights at the window, low lights very much like candle flames muffled by colored glass.
        What kind of animal carried lamps with it.
        A man.
        A man could be a wild animal.
        But why would he carry lamps or lanterns instead of a flashlight?
        A
        madman?
        And even if it were a man who was playing some grotesque hoax, wearing shoes that made those strange prints, he would not have been able to move so fast and put so much distance between us.
        So where did that leave me?
        Nowhere.
        Standing at the end of the trail, staring out at the gray-white curtains of billowing flakes, I began to feel that the animal had circled behind me and now stood in my own footprints, watching me. The feeling grew so strong, so undeniable, that I whirled and cried out and stabbed my flashlight beam into the air behind me. But the night was all there was.
        "You're being ridiculous," I told myself.
        Having turned my back on the direction in which the animal had fled, uncomfortable because of that, I struggled through the ever-mounting drifts toward the rear of the farmhouse. I shone my flashlight ahead of me, even though I didn't need its light and would have been better off without it.
        Several times I thought I heard something out of place, a metallic snickering noise that I could not identify, nearby, above the ululation of the storm. But each time I probed the surrounding darkness with the flashlight, there was nothing to see but snow.
        When I finally reached the house, brushed snow from my coat, and went into the sun porch, Connie was waiting for me. She said, "What was wrong?"
        "I don't know."
        She tilted her head to one side. "You found some thing. I can tell."
        "I think it was that animal."
        "The one whose tracks you found?"
        "Yeah."
        "Bothering the horses?"
        "Yeah."
        "Then you saw it?"
        "No. But I found the tracks outside the stable window."
        "Could you make anything of them this time?" she asked as she took my coat and hung it on the rack by the door.
        The ice-crusted hem and collar began to drip. Beads of bright water splashed on the floor.
        "No," I said wearily. "I still couldn't make heads nor tails of them."
        She took my scarf and shook the snow from it. "Did you follow them?" she asked.
        I sat down on a pine bench and unzipped my boots, pulled them off, massaged my chilled toes. "Yeah, I followed them. For a few yards. Then they just vanished."
        She took the boots and stood them in the corner beside her own and Toby's boots. "Well maybe it is a bird, like you said earlier."
        "How do you figure?"
        "A bird could have just taken off; he could have flown away, and that would explain why the prints vanished."
        I shook my head: no. "This wind would tear his wings off. I