Snow In Winter 3
The snowstorm had blown itself out overnight and the dark sky was spangled with stars when Annie let the dogs out early the next morning. All five of them crammed themselves simultaneously out the door and plunged happily into the white drifts. The wind had died, too, and she could hear roosters crowing two roads over as she made her way out to feed the horses a short while later. The sun was still below the horizon but was nonetheless painting the east a brilliant orange, the neighboring outbuildings and leafless trees silhouetted blackly in the distance. The frozen grass crunched under her boots. One of the barn cats was loitering by the path as usual, waiting to be scooped up and borne ceremoniously to the warmth of the hay loft. The cat – her name was Flirt – seemed to think her self -appointed position was Warden of the Horses; she escorted them to the watering trough, stood guard over them as they grazed, and folded up beside them to nap in the sun when the weather permitted. She worked diligently, and evidently felt the transportation to the barn that Annie provided twice a day was her due.
Annie lifted the waiting cat automatically and buried her face in the thick, alfalfa-scented tiger fur. Flirt’s white paws kneaded her arm as she purred with pleasure, but Annie’s thoughts were elsewhere. After a restless night, the fresh cold air offered a bracing taste of reality. Annie had long ago realized she was something of a dreamer; she had come to the conclusion that there were some things she believed in because it was far more pleasant to do so than to accept the bleak alternatives. So, for example, each Christmas she set up a battered antique nativity scene on the server in the dining room. Did she truly buy into the notion that the Christian’s so-called savior had been born in a barn and that shepherds and camel-riding strangers had come bearing gifts at the behest of angels and a star to worship him? The imaginative side of her wanted it to be true, so therefore she would believe it happened. It was that simple, and besides, she personally felt a stable was rather a pleasant place to spend time anyhow. It beat the alternative of some overcrowded, bug -infested inn hands down.
But what about last night? Angels at the birth of Christ, maybe, but a tiny…what, a Pegasus?...on her exam room table was a little too….current. Strangers bearing mythical beasts, she decided as she took down a pocket knife from a wooden beam and cut the two strands of baling twine, just did not happen in this day and age. The leaves of hay in the bale sprung apart with a satisfying pop and the summery scent of dry grass filled the frigid air. This…this was all real, ponies in the stalls nickering for their breakfast, cats purring at her feet, dogs rummaging in the aisle for dropped horse treats, patients awaiting her ministrations at the clinic. She decided she had dreamed it, and neatly consigning the memory to some strange midnight misfiring of her subconscious, closed the barn doors and struck out toward the woods for her morning hike.
Following a trail cleared some years before for horseback riding, the path wound its way west to the corner of the property through a stand of hardwood trees whose dead leaves rustled under her feet. It then turned north and ran downhill through some smaller, scrubby vegetation before stretching up again through the tall oak, ash and shagbark hickory trees that made up most of the woods . It looped around a knob which overlooked a small valley. Glaciers melting in the area many thousands of years before had produced watercourses whose runoff knifed the land with small gullies and larger streambeds, and one of those streams had made the valley over which Annie gazed as she paused for breath at the top of the loop. Three small houses had been built along the road that bisected the valley; two had been inhabited for years by the same families, but the third and smallest of the houses had been recently sold after its elderly residents had moved to a local retirement community. The new owners, in late middle age and childless, had immediately begun making repairs to the rundown cottage on the bank of the stream with the result that it sported a newly exterior and landscaping which featured diligently propagated flower and vegetable plots. Outside the windows overlooking the creek a number of bird feeders had been hung from the nearby trees, and Annie could see that the sparrows, juncos, cardinals and blue jays who participated in the daily morning feeding frenzy had already arrived.
As she stood watching the placid scene, the door to the cottage opened and the man who lived there stepped outside, moving toward the bird feeders with a bag in one hand and a pan in the other. The birds fluttered around his shoulders as he filled the containers. After a time he seemed to become aware that Annie was watching him, and he turned and raised his hand in greeting. She waved back. Somehow that small acknowledgement was the link with reality that she needed, and she continued on her way back to her house in an easier frame of mind. “ ‘Whether you know it or not, the universe is unfolding as it should,’ “ she said to herself, quoting a piece from the poster-buying days of her youth known as Desiderata. She shrugged and shook her head. “Whatever.”
When the next several days passed with nothing more unusual than the surgical removal of a plastic stegosaurus from the small intestine of a young golden retriever who shared its living quarters with several small children, the strangeness of the snowy evening’s emergency began to fade and blur around the edges. It was only when Annie opened her clinic desk drawer and the softly gleaming pearl caught her eye that that her sense of reality took a step sideways and left her sitting in her office, her mind blank. After several days of this, she put the object in her pocket with the intention of tucking it safely away at home where she might avoid acknowledging its existence altogether. She decided she might put it in with the Christmas decorations and forget about it for the rest of the year. At Christmas you could believe in all sorts of miracles and wonders, she decided, and came to the conclusion that after all she had no intention of forgetting the episode entirely; she just wished it wouldn’t resurface from her subconscious to bother her quite so often. Giving it some consideration, she decided it simply messed with her sense of the balance of the universe, or at any rate of her universe, far too much.
And that was how matters stood for the next week. It remained cold, so the snow continued to bring the hills and valleys of the countryside into sharper focus. The paths through the woods became veritable highways for the animals that lived there, and Annie could identify the hand-like front feet and wide, flat hind feet of raccoons, the Morse Code dots and dashes of running rabbits, and the dainty backwards heartlets made by the hooves of deer. Each morning’s walk yielded new patterns. Occasionally she would encounter an area where the snow was brushed and shoveled and divoted in a disorganized fashion, what transpired there a mystery unless a few drops of blood indicated that a scuffle between a bird of prey and an unfortunate rodent victim had occurred. She often heard owls hunting across the pasture at night. Unsettling, true, but as much a part of the winter darkness as a yowling of packs of coyotes in the distance, greeting the moon.
The long dark of January began to wane, and Annie waited for some break in the weather, but the cold refused to release its hold on the land and clouds gathered and stayed, sometimes spitting more snow, more often hovering sullenly overhead as if they had been snagged in the tops of the trees rocking in the wind. Still she persevered with her walks; it got the blood running and her cleared her mind for a new set of challenges. Occasionally she saw one or more of the neighbors from the spot on the knob where she generally paused for breath, but more often the only sign of their continued existence in the three houses In the valley were the thin tendrils of smoke issuing from each chimney. Firewood was plentiful and fuel oil expensive, so most of the area residents used buck stoves to warm their homes. The cozy crackle and warm glow from Annie’s stove was something that always made the winter nights seem more bearable, even when winter seemed to have moved in to stay and bright spring days were only a distant memory .
One particular morning not long after Annie had deposited the pearl in a box marked “Christmas Home Décor – silk flowers/nativity scene/snowmen”, she stood leaning against a shagbark hickory at the top of the path, catching her breath. She watched as the man in the house next to the creek fed his birds and returned his wave as was now becoming usual. But then- for a change – he motioned for her to come down the hill. It was a steep descent and she made a fair amount of it on her backside, grabbing one sapling and then another for support as she went , so as not to arrive on the man’s doorstep in an undignified heap. She dusted herself off, grinning sheepishly , and offered her hand, which he took and bowed over, gravely. “Dr. Winter,” he said with a faint – she thought northern English – accent “my name is Charles, Anthony Charles, and this –“ he gestured to his wife, a tiny plump woman with a gentle expression who had silently appeared at his side, “this is my wife May.”
“Nice to meet you,” replied Annie “I hope you’re enjoying living here. Your home is looking great – I can’t wait to see how your gardens do this spring.”
The woman beamed with pleasure and the man made another bow, slight but low enough that Annie could see the thinning hair combed carefully across the top of his head. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he continued, “but I know you’re a veterinarian and we’ve got a little bit of a problem. Mazie—“
“that’s our cat” his wife added, and he glanced at her lovingly and continued, “Mazie, as May says, is indeed our cat, and she’s-“
“-disappeared into that hole,” May finished for him in one quick rush of words, pointing across the creek to what appeared to Annie to be a hollowed out den under the gnarled roots of a huge sycamore. The ground leading up to the hole was worn and barren of vegetation; something had definitely made its home there, but the dirt was too scuffed to identify any individual tracks.
“Would you mind taking a look?” Mr. Anthony pleaded. “We thought we heard her scream, but we can’t bear to see what’s might have happened to her. “
Annie studied the hole. It was fairly large, at least two feet across, and possibly dug out for use as a den by coyotes or even a feral dog. There was really nothing terribly dangerous for a human in the area, she knew, except for the occasional poisonous snake, a copperhead or timber rattler, but these of course would pose no threat in winter. What had made the cat cry? A raccoon, or possibly a weasel? Well……..she hated to let the couple down, and she had on plenty of warm, durable clothes that would serve as a protective layer.
“Of course, I’ll have a look, “she agreed and the woman beamed happily. “Just let me get you a flashlight, honey,” she said and disappeared into the house with a speed that seemed incongruous to one of such proportions. In a moment she was back on the porch and handed Annie a long, heavy metal light.
Annie tiptoed carefully across the icy creek rocks to the opposite bank, and scrabbled up the slope to the sycamore roots. Switching on the light, she cautiously peered into the den.
It was a surprisingly large hole, and the portion of Annie’s mind that wasn’t preoccupied looking for danger wondered why the tree above it was still upright. The walls were bare dirt, striped unevenly here and there with roots showing through, but nothing within gave a clue as to the fate of the hapless Mazie except a further tunnel at the back of the den chamber, leading deeper into the hillside. Anchoring her the toe of her left boot against one of the larger roots , she pushed herself towards the hole and shone the light in, but there was nothing for it to illuminate. The beam disappeared down into the darkness. How weird is that, she thought to herself and slithered closer for a better look. “Down the rabbit hole” she sighed and squared her shoulders. Lewis Carroll’s characters had always, to be honest, given her the creeps.
Too late, she felt the vertigo and the sucking gravity as the tunnel pulled her in. Somewhere she dropped the light as she was falling, tumbling, bouncing off the walls of a passage that sloped at an angle just past the point at which she could stop her momentum.. Suddenly there was light, or at least less dark, and a painful stop. Annie’s rounded shoulders and ducked head crashed into what appeared to be two tree trunks, sprouting close together from the dry leaves of the forest floor.
She lay still for a minute against the tree trunks, entirely winded, eyes closed. She wondered if, improbable as it might seem, she had stumbled on some sort of mine shaft that passed through the knob from one valley to the next, but within an instant dismissed the idea, as she had never seen any such entrance. “You never saw that den before either, “she told herself, and after a few shuddering breaths decided to try and stand, uncurling and testing her limbs one at a time, fingers first. She grabbed one of the trunks to brace herself and dimly registered the fact that it was warm. And not bark-covered at all. The truth was, it was hairy. She rolled over and realized she had been leaning against the two sturdy brown forelegs of a rather large horse. Instinctively she rolled away, out of danger of the large hooves planted into the icy loam of the forest floor, and looked up.
Quite high, in fact, a rather familiar face was looking down at her, grinning faintly. The brown hair was longer , true, and the beard was gone, as were the glasses, but the hazel eyes were the same. However the most disconcerting fact was that the creature that was gazing at her with a rather inscrutable expression was actually a centaur.
“You’re…..you’re him, that guy with the horse….Mr..” Annie floundered helplessly in the waves of unreality that threatened to drown her…”Mr. O’Ryan, right?” She was on her hands and knees now, backing away slowly.
“Yes. But no Mister. It’s just Orian, “ the centaur explained conversationally, as if he had this chat every day. He gestured overhead. “You know. Like the constellation.”
