Winter Moon

forward from the edge of the meadow and was again only ten feet from the porch.
        Eduardo picked up the video camera and recorded the critter for a couple of minutes. It wasn't anything amazing enough to convince skeptics that a doorway from beyond had opened in the early-morning hours of May third, however, it was peculiar for a nocturnal animal to pose so long in broad daylight, making such obviously direct eye contact with the operator of the camcorder, and it might prove to be the first small fragment in a mosaic of evidence.
        After he finished with the camera, he sat in the rocker, sipping beer and watching the raccoon as it watched him, waiting to see what would happen next.
        Occasionally the ring-tailed sentinel smoothed its whiskers, combed its face fur, scratched behind its ears, or performed some other small act of grooming.
        Otherwise, there were no new developments.
        At five-thirty he went inside to make dinner, taking his empty beer bottle, camcorder, and shotgun with him. He closed and locked the front door.
        Through the oval, beveled-glass window, he saw the coon still on duty.
        At the kitchen table, Eduardo enjoyed an early dinner of rigatoni and spicy sausage with thick slabs of heavily buttered Italian bread. He kept the yellow legal-size tablet beside his plate and, while he ate, wrote about the intriguing events of the afternoon.
        He had almost brought the account up-to-date when a peculiar clicking noise distracted him. He glanced at the electric stove, then at each of the two windows to see if something was tapping on the glass.
        When he turned in his chair, he saw that a raccoon was in the kitchen behind him. Sitting on its hindquarters. Staring at him.
        He shoved his chair back from the table and got quickly to his feet.
        Evidently the animal had entered the room from the hallway. How it had gotten inside the house in the first place, however, was a mystery.
        The clicking he'd heard had been its claws on the pegged-oak floor.
        They rattled against the wood again, though it didn't move.
        Eduardo realized it was racked by severe shivers. At first he thought it was frightened of being in the house, feeling threatened and cornered.
        He backed away a couple of steps, giving it space..The raccoon made a thin mewling sound that was neither a threat nor an expression of fear, but the unmistakable voice of misery. It was in pain, injured or ill.
        His first reaction was: Rabies.
        The.22 pistol lay on the table, as he always kept a weapon close at hand these days. He picked it up, though he did not want to have to kill the raccoon in the house.
        He saw now that the creature's eyes were protruding unnaturally and that the fur under them was wet and matted with tears. The small paws clawed at the air, and the black-ringed tail swished back and forth furiously across the oak floor. Gagging, the coon dropped off its haunches, flopped on its side. It twitched convulsively, sides heaving as it struggled to breathe. Abruptly blood bubbled from its nostrils and trickled from its ears. After one final spasm that rattled its claws against the floor again, it lay still, silent.
        Dead.
        "Dear Jesus," Eduardo said, and put one trembling hand to his brow to blot away the sudden dew of perspiration that had sprung up along his hairline.
        The dead raccoon didn't seem as large as either of the sentinels he'd seen outside, and he didn't think that it looked smaller merely because death had diminished it. He was pretty sure it was a third individual, perhaps younger than the other two, or maybe they were males, and this was a female.
        He remembered leaving the kitchen door open when he'd walked around the house to see if the front and back sentries were the same animal. The screen door had been closed. But it was light, just a narrow pine frame and screen. The raccoon might have been able to pry it open wide enough to insinuate its snout, its head, and then its body, sneaking into the house before he'd returned to close the inner door.
        Where had it hidden in the house when he'd been passing the late afternoon in the rocking chair? What had it been up to while he was cooking dinner?
        He went to the window at the sink. Because he had eaten early and because the summer sunset was late, twilight had not yet arrived, so he could clearly