Winter Moon

bird.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
        
        They stopped at Mountain High Sporting Goods and purchased two sleds (wide, flat runners, clear pine with polyurethane finish, a red lightning bolt down the center of each), as well as insulated ski suits, boots, and gloves -for all of them.
        Toby saw a big Frisbee specially painted to look like a yellow flying saucer, with portholes along the rim and a low red dome on top, and they bought that too.
        At the Union 76, they filled the fuel tank, and then went on a marathon shopping expedition at the supermarket. When they returned to Quartermass Ranch at one-fifteen, only the eastern third of the sky remained blue. Masses of gray clouds churned across the mountains, driven by a fierce high-altitude wind-though at ground level, only an erratic breeze gently stirred the evergreens and shivered the brown grass. The temperature had fallen below freezing, and the accuracy of the weathermans prediction was manifest in the cold, humid air.
        Toby went immediately to his room, dressed in his new red-and-black ski suit, boots, and gloves. He returned to the kitchen with his Frisbee to announce that he was going out to play and to wait for the snow to start falling.
        Heather and Jack were still unpacking groceries and arranging supplies in the pantry. She said, "Toby, honey, you haven't had lunch yet."
        "I'm not hungry.
        I'll just take a raisin cookie with me." She paused to pull up the hood on Toby's jacket and tie it under his chin. "Well, all right, but don't stay out there too long at a stretch. When you get cold, come in and warm up a little, then go back out. We don't want your nose freezing and falling off." She gave his nose a gentle tweak. He looked so cute. Like a gnome. "Don't throw the Frisbee toward the house," Jack warned him. "Break a window, and we'll show no mercy.
        We'll call the police, have you committed to the Montana Prison for the Criminally Insane."
        As she gave Toby two raisin cookies, Heather said, "And don't go into the woods."
        "All right."
        "Stay in the yard."
        "I will."
        "I mean it." The woods worried her. This was different from her recent irrational spells of paranoia..There were good reasons to be cautious of the forest. Wild animals, for one thing. And city people, like them, could get disoriented and lost only a few hundred feet into the trees.
        "The Montana Prison for the Criminally Insane has no TV, chocolate milk, or cookies."
        "Okay, okay. Sheeeesh, I'm not a baby."
        "No," Jack said, as he fished cans out of a shopping bag. "But to a bear, you are a tasty-looking lunch."
        "There's bears in the woods?" Toby asked. "Are there birds in the sky?" Jack asked. "Fish in the sea so stay in the yard," Heather reminded him. "Where I can find you easy, where I can see you." As he opened the back door, Toby turned to his father and said, "You better be careful too."
        "Me?"
        "That bird might come back and knock you on your 6s again." Jack pretended he was going to throw the can of beans that he was holding, and Toby ran from the house, giggling. The door banged shut behind him.
        Later, after their purchases had been put away, Jack went into the study to examine Eduardo's book collection and select a novel to read, while Heather went upstairs to the guest bedroom where she was setting up -her array of computers.
        They had taken the spare bed out and moved it to the cellar. The two six-foot folding tables, which had been among the goods delivered by the movers, now stood in place of the bed and formed an L-shaped work area. She'd unpacked her three computers, two printers, laser scanner, and associated equipment, but until now she'd had no chance to make connections and plug them in. As of that moment, she really had no use for such a high-tech array of computing power. She had worked on software and program design virtually all of her adult life, however, and she didn't feel complete with her machines disconnected and boxed up, regardless of whether or not she had an immediate project that required them.
        She set to work, positioning the equipment, linking monitors to logic units, logic units to printers, one of the printers and logic units to the scanner, all the while happily humming old Elton John songs.
        Eventually she and Jack would investigate business opportunities and decide what