and four slices of buttered toast. He hadn’t lost his hearty appetite
with age, and a lifelong dedication to the foods that were hardest on
the heart had only left him with the constitution of a man more than
twenty years his junior.
Finished eating, he always liked to linger over several cups of black
coffee, listening to the endless troubles of the world. The news
unfailingly confirmed the wisdom of living in a far place with no
neighbors in view.
This morning, though he had lingered longer than usual with his coffee,
and though the radio had been on, he hadn’t been able to remember a
word of the news when he pushed back 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