Now the two animals sped down the gravel road ahead of him, all the way to the woods, then stopped and came whipping back. While he walked the half-mile to the blacktop and back, they would cover ten times that distance. Hook lit a cigarette. The sky had cleared and the mid-month moon was just a paring short of fullness. Reflecting off the snow, it made the night almost dusklike in its brightness. Under his shoes the snow squeaked wetly, melting. With the morning sun it would disappear. As he passed the feedlot some of the cattle came snorting to their feet, frightened at seeing a man on foot at so late an hour.

He came to the end of the cleared land and started down the road through the trees. Six months before, the woods would have been raucous with insect sound, but this night there were only his footsteps on the snow-covered gravel to break the silence. Yet he knew there was life out there watching him, night creatures crouched and silent, waiting for the great predator to pass on. And especially he knew the owl was out there, a great horned owl that for years had patrolled this strip of woodland dividing his farm, and which Hook saw every now and then in daylight, like a wolf sitting in a tree, its lemon Life Saver eyes glowing furiously at him for one long timeless second before the huge body would abruptly sprout wings and glide off through the trees to some other perch to wait for darkness and a renewal of the hunt.

Hook had reached the blacktop now, but instead of turning back he headed west along the road toward the hill on which the cemetery rested. To him, this strip of blacktop was like the nave of a cathedral, a path running between the great pillars and buttresses of the trees crowding the hills on either side, and indeed there were times in early morning and at sundown when the light filtering through the leaves and branches there created a rage of color not unlike that of a cathedral’s stained-glass windows. Yet now, at night, Hook knew the small valley for what it was, a cathedral of death if anything, a kingdom in which the owl reigned and the only ritual, the only chorus, was the shriek and squeal and rustle of his victims. Hook felt no pity for them. Men were no better off. As far back as he could remember, he had had no illusions about the vulnerability of his kind. He had learned it the first time at the age of four or five, on a tricycle pedaling furiously to catch up with a neighbor boy on another trike, and had been right behind him when an automobile, braking, tires screaming, hit the boy broadside and sent him tumbling down the street like a football. That had been in Wauwatosa, one of the many Midwest suburbs where Hook had lived as his father kept moving from one job to another. Later, as an eighteen-year-old sailor during the last year of the Second World War, Hook had learned about death again, but in a different way and on a different scale. Waiting at Long Beach for his ship, a destroyer, to be refitted, he had been temporarily assigned to shore duty in a warehouse, and for a month had spent ten hours a day seeing to the handling and the storage and the shipment home of dead Marines. He had been a warehouseman of death.