Winter Moon

yeah, I'll perform an autopsy on one of them."
        "Let me know what you find?"
        Potter gave him that penetrating stare again. "You sure you weren't bitten or scratched? Because if you were, and if there's any reason at all to suspect rabies, you should get to a doctor now and start the vaccine right away, tonight-"
        "I'm no fool," Eduardo said. "I'd tell you if there was any chance I'd been infected."
        Potter continued to stare at him.
        Looking around the surgery, Eduardo said, "You really modernized the place from the way it was."."Come on," the veterinarian said, turning to the door. "I have something I want to give you."
        Eduardo followed him into the hall and through another door into Potter's private office. The vet rummaged in the drawers of a white, enameled-metal storage cabinet and handed him a pair of pamphlets- one on rabies, one on bubonic plague.
        "Read up on the symptoms for both," Potter said. "You notice anything similar in yourself, even similar, get to your doctor."
        "Don't like doctors much."
        "That's not the point. You have a doctor?"
        "Never need one."
        "Then you call me, and I'll get a doctor to you, one way or the other.
        Understand?"
        "All right."
        "You'll do it?"
        "Sure will."
        Potter said, "You have a telephone out there?"
        "Of course. Who doesn't have a phone these days?"
        The question seemed to confirm that he had an image as a hermit and an eccentric. Which maybe he deserved. Because now that he thought about it, he hadn't used the phone to receive or place a call in at least five or six months. He doubted if it'd rung more than three times in the past year, and one of those was a wrong number.
        Potter went to his desk, picked up a pen, pulled a notepad in front of him, and wrote the number down as Eduardo recited it. He tore off another sheet of notepaper and gave it to Eduardo because it was imprinted with his office address and his own phone numbers.
        Eduardo folded the paper into his wallet. "What do I owe you?"
        "Nothing," Potter said. "These weren't your pet raccoons, so why should you pay? Rabies is a community problem."
        Potter accompanied him out to the Cherokee.
        The larches rustled in the warm breeze, crickets chirruped, and a frog croaked like a dead man trying to talk.
        As he opened the driver's door, Eduardo turned to the vet and said,
        "When you do that autopsy…"
        "Yes?"."Will you look just for signs of known diseases?"
        "Disease pathologies, trauma."
        "That's all?"
        "What else would I look for?"
        Eduardo hesitated, shrugged, and said, "Anything… strange."
        That stare again. "Well, sir," Potter said, "I will now."
        All the way home through that dark and forlorn land, Eduardo wondered if he had done the right thing. As far as he could see, there were only two alternatives to the course of action he'd taken, and both were problematic.
        He could have disposed of the raccoons on the ranch and waited to see what would happen next. But he might have been destroying important evidence that something not of this earth was hiding in the Montana woods.
        Or he could have explained to Travis Potter about the luminous trees, throbbing sounds, waves of pressure, and black doorway. He could have told him about the raccoons keeping him under surveillance-and the sense he'd had that they were serving as surrogate eyes for the unknown watcher in the woods. If he was generally regarded as the old hermit of Quartermass Ranch, however, he wouldn't be taken seriously.
        Worse, once the veterinarian had spread the story, some busybody public official might get it in his head that poor old Ed Fernandez was senile or even flat-out deranged, a danger to himself and others. With all the compassion in the world, sorrowful-eyed and softvoiced, shaking their heads sadly and telling themselves they were doing it for his own good, they might commit him against his will for medical examinations and a psychiatric review.
        He was loath to be carted away to a hospital, poked and prodded and spoken to as if he had reverted to infancy. He wouldn't react well.
        He knew himself. He would respond to them with stubbornness and contempt, irritating the do-gooders to such an extent that they might induce a court to take charge