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

thirty-year-old fathers would much rather have them dependent, just a
little bit, just for a few more years, just enough to need a hand to negotiate
a slippery hillside.

He grinned broadly and started back towards me тАФthen stopped a
dozen feet away and stared at the ground. From the way he was bent over,
and from the intensity of his gaze, I knew that he had come across a set of
tracks and was puzzling out the nature of the animal that had made them.

We had been tramping through the forest for more than three hours,
and I was ready for a warm fireplace and a vodka martini and a pair of
felt-lined slippers. The wind was sharp; snowflakes found their way under
my coat collar and down by back. "There'll be hot chocolate up at the
house," I told him.

He didn't say anything or look up at me.

"And a plate of doughnuts."

He said nothing.

"Doughnuts, Toby."

"This is something new," he said, pointing to the tracks in front of him.

"Marshmallows for the hot chocolate," I said, even though I knew I was
losing the battle. No adult can achieve the single-minded determination of
a child.

"Look at this, Dad."

"A game of Monopoly while we eat. How about that?"

"Dad, look at this," he insisted.

So I went and looked.

"What is it?"

I went around behind him in order to see the tracks from his vantage
point.

He frowned and said, "It's not a fox or a weasel or a squirrel. That's for
sure. I can spot one of those right away. It kind of looks like the mark a
bird would leave, huh Dad? A bird's tracksтАФbut funny."

These marks certainly were "funny." As I took in the pattern of a single
print, I felt the skin on the back of my neck tremble, and the air seemed to
be a bit colder than it had been only a moment ago. The print consisted of
eight separate indentations. There were three evenly spaced holes in the