Winter Moon

waiting for him.
        When Eduardo sat in the hickory rocking chair, one of the small beasts.remained in the grass, but the other climbed to the top porch step and kept a watch on him from that angle.
        That night, abed in his barricaded room again, seeking sleep, he heard squirrels scampering on the roof. Small claws scratching at the shingles.
        When he finally slept, he dreamed of rodents.
        The following day, June twenty-second, the squirrels remained with him.
        At windows. In the yard. On the porches. When he went for a walk, they trailed him at a distance.
        The twenty-third was the same, but on the morning of the twenty-fourth, he found a dead squirrel on the back porch. Clots of blood in its ears. Dried blood in its nostrils. Eyes protruding from the sockets.
        He found two more squirrels in the yard and a fourth on the front-porch steps, all in the same condition.
        They had survived control longer than the raccoons.
        Apparently the traveler was learning.
        Eduardo considered calling Dr. Potter. Instead, he gathered up the four bodies and carried them to the center of the eastern meadow. He dropped them in the grass, where scavengers could find and deal with them.
        He thought, also, of the imagined child in the faraway ranch who might have been watching the Cherokee's headlights on the way back from the vet's two weeks earlier. He told himself that he owed it to that child-or to other children, who really existed-to tell Potter the whole story. He should try to involve the authorities in the matter as well, even though getting anyone to believe him would be a frustrating and humiliating ordeal.
        Maybe it was the beer he still drank from morning until bedtime, but he could no longer summon the sense of community he had felt that night.
        He'd spent his whole life avoiding people. He couldn't suddenly find it within himself to embrace them.
        Besides, everything had changed for him when he'd come home and found the evidence of the intruder: the crumbling clumps of soil, the dead beetles, the earthworm, the scrap of blue cloth caught in the frame of the oven door. He was waiting in dread for the next move in that part of the game, yet refusing to speculate about it, instantly blocking every forbidden thought that started to rise in his tortured mind.
        When that fearful confrontation occurred, at last, he could not possibly share it with strangers. The horror was too personal, for him alone to witness and endure..He still maintained the diary of these events, and in that yellow tablet he wrote about the squirrels. He hadn't the will or the energy to record his experiences in as much detail as he had done at first.
        He wrote as succinctly as possible without leaving out any pertinent information. After a lifetime of finding journal-keeping too burdensome, he was now unable to stop keeping this one.
        He was seeking to understand the traveler by writing about it. The traveler… and himself.
        On the last day of June, he decided to drive into Eagle's Roost to buy groceries and other supplies. Considering that he now lived deep in the shadow of the unknown and the fantastic, every mundane act-cooking a meal, making his bed every morning, shopping-seemed to be a pointless waste of time and energy, an absurd attempt to paint a facade of normality over an existence that was now twisted and strange. But life went on.
        As Eduardo backed the Cherokee out of the garage, into the driveway, a large crow sprang off the front-porch railing and flew across the hood of the wagon with a great flapping of wings. He jammed on the brakes and stalled the engine. The bird soared high into a mottled-gray sky.
        Later, in town, when Eduardo walked out of the supermarket, pushing a cart filled with supplies, a crow was perched on the hood ornament of the station wagon. He assumed it was the same creature that had startled him less than two hours before.
        It remained on the hood, watching him through the windshield, as he went around to the back of the Cherokee and opened the cargo hatch. As he loaded the bags into the space behind the rear seat, the crow never looked away from him. It continued to watch him as he pushed the empty cart back to the front of the store, returned, and got in behind the steering wheel. The bird took flight only when he started the engine.
        Across