"Aaron Wolfe - Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Aaron)

And the other two were becoming agitated once more.

Having just about concluded that it was nothing more than the wind
and the storm that was upsetting themтАФand now they were all leaping
and snorting more furiously than ever, as if they were not three ordinary
nags but a trio of high-strung thoroughbreds тАФI turned toward the door
and quite accidentally caught sight of the light which glowed eerily just
beyond the only window in the entire building. There were two lights,
actually, both a warm amber shade and of dim wattage. They appeared to
pulse and to shimmerтАФand then they were gone, as if they had never
been: blink!

I hurried to the barn door, slid it open, and stepped into the snow-filled
night. The arctic wind struck me like a mallet swung by a blacksmith who
was angry with his wife, and it almost blew me back into the stable row.
Switching on the nearly useless flashlight, I bent against the wind and
pulled the door shut behind me. Laboriously, cautiously, I inched around
the side of the barn in the direction of the window, peering anxiously at
the ground ahead of me.

I stopped before I reached the window, for I found precisely what I had
been afraid that I would find: those odd, eight-pointed tracks which Toby
and I had seen on the slope earlier in the day. There were a great many of
them, as if the animal had been standing there, moving back and forth as
it searched for better vantage points, for a long whileтАФat least all of the
time that I had been inside with the horses. It had been watching me.

Suddenly I felt as if I were back in Southeast Asia тАФin a jungle rather
than in a snowstormтАФwhere an enemy was relentlessly stalking me.
Ridiculous, of course. It was only some animal. A dumb animal.

I swept the flashlight beam around the hilltop and found where the
prints continued a few feet away. Though I didn't want to use the
flashlight and alert my prey, I couldn't follow the trail without it. The
December night was perfectly black and empty once you got away from
the light that spilled from the house and from the single stable window.
Holding the flashlight before me as if it were a sword, I walked westward,
after the animal.

Wind.

Snow.

More wind.

More snow.

Two minutes later I had lost the trail. The wind and snow had
conspired to blot out the prints, scouring the land as clean and smooth as
a new cotton sheet.