Winter Moon

his chair and got up from breakfast. The entire time, he had been studying the woods through the window beside the table, trying to decide if he should go down to the foot of the meadow and search for evidence of the enigmatic visitation.
        Now, standing on the front porch in knee-high boots, jeans, sweater, and sheepskin-lined jacket, wearing a cap with fur-lined earflaps tied under his chin, he still hadn't decided what he was going to do.
        Incredibly, fear was still with him. Bizarre as they might have been, the tides of pulsating sound and the luminosity in the trees had not harmed him.
        Whatever threat he perceived was entirely subjective, no doubt more imaginary than real.
        Finally he became sufficiently angry with himself to break the chains of dread. He descended the porch steps and strode across the front yard.
        The transition from yard to meadow was hidden under a cloak of snow six to eight inches deep in some places and knee-high in others, depending on where the wind had scoured it away or piled it. After thirty years on the ranch, he was so familiar with the contours of the land and the ways of the wind that he unthinkingly chose the route that offered the least resistance.
        White plumes of breath steamed from him. The bitter air brought a pleasant flush to his cheeks. He calmed himself by concentrating on-and enjoying-the familiar effects of a winter day.
        He stood for a while at the end of the meadow, studying the very trees that, last night, had glowed a smoky amber against the black backdrop of the deeper woods, as if they had been imbued with a divine presence, like God in the bush that burned without being consumed. This morning they looked no more special than a million other sugar and ponderosa pines, the former somewhat greener than the latter.
        The specimens at the edge of the forest were younger than those rising behind them, only about thirty to thirty-five feet tall, as young as twenty years.
        They had grown from seeds fallen to the earth when he had already been on the ranch a decade, and he felt as if he knew them more intimately than he had known most people in his life.
        The woods had always seemed like a cathedral to him. The trunks of the great evergreens were reminiscent of the granite columns of a nave, soaring high to support a vaulted ceiling of green boughs. The.pine-scented silence was ideal for meditation. Walking the meandering deer trails, he often had a sense that he was in a sacred place, that he was not just a man of flesh and bone but an heir to eternity.
        He had always felt safe in the woods.
        Until now.
        Stepping out of the meadow and into the random-patterned mosaic of shadows and sunlight beneath the interlaced pine branches, Eduardo found nothing out of the ordinary. Neither the trunks nor the boughs showed signs of heat damage, no charring, not even a singed curl of bark or blackened cluster of needles.
        The thin layer of snow under the trees had not melted anywhere, and the only tracks in it were those of deer, raccoon, and smaller animals.
        He broke off a piece of bark from a sugar pine and crumbled it between the thumb and forefinger of his gloved right hand. Nothing unusual about it.
        He moved deeper into the woods, past the place where the trees had stood in radiant splendor in the night. Some of the older pines were over two hundred feet tall. The shadows grew more numerous and blacker than ash buds in the front of March, while the sun found fewer places to intrude.
        His heart would not be still. It thudded hard and fast.
        He could find nothing in the woods but what had always been there, yet his heart would not be still.
        His mouth was dry. The full curve of his spine was clad in a chill that had nothing to do with the wintry air.
        Annoyed with himself, Eduardo turned back toward the meadow, following the tracks he had left in the patches of snow and the thick carpet of dead pine needles. The crunch of his footsteps disturbed a slumbering owl from its secret perch in some high bower.
        He felt a wrongness in the woods. He couldn't put a finer point on it than that. Which sharpened his annoyance. A wrongness. What the hell did that mean? A wrongness.
        The hooting owl.
        Spiny black pine cones on white snow.
        Pale beams of sunlight lancing through the gaps in the gray-green