Opening the barn door, she called out, but got no answer. A quick sweep of the flashlight showed at once that she had been wrong about the stranger and his need for shelter. The barn was completely empty, if you didn’t count a couple of feral cats asleep curled up in the hay.
Outside the snow was perfectly undisturbed and no tracks led away in any direction. Inside the barn doorway she stopped, rubbed her eyes to make sure she was awake and still seeing things clearly, and heard a noise. Back at the house a huge mass of snow was in the process of falling off the roof. It slid in a large avalanche down the tiles, hung for a moment, then plunged to the ground in a sickening crunch right on the remains of what was her flower garden in the summer.
By now pain was biting through her boot and into her small feet, and she suddenly remembered Fergus left alone in the cold house with no protection. With an angry gesture she closed the barn door yet again and got back to her kitchen as quickly as she could. At the kitchen door she stamped off most of the snow from her feet and thighs then pushed her way indoors, half expecting to find a frozen dog waiting for her. Most dogs are hardy beasts, well capable of surviving in the harshest snow or cold, but Fergus was not one of these. He was a housedog and a pet. He did not like the cold.
But there he was, lying on the tile floor calmly chewing on a fragment of biscuit he had found under the stove. Ellen bent over and picked him up, expecting to hold a shivering dog in her arms, but, to her surprise the pet was not only warm, but perfectly happy to give her an even warmer lick across the face.
That was when she noticed that the room was not cold or even chilly. Tentatively she removed her coat, and rubbed her hands. Yes, the kitchen was definitely warm, perhaps the power had been restored and the heaters had turned on? But a quick flick of the light switch and a check of the fuse box and meter showed that the electrical power was still missing. Nevertheless, the kitchen was comfortably warm and so were the dinning room and small bedroom. The house was definitely heated, but search as she could Ellen could not find a source of the warmth.
Finally she gave up, got herself a slice of cake from the cupboard, sat down at the table and as she munched she looked out of the kitchen window and out over the snow covered fields, towards the woods in the distance. For just a second, she always swore afterwards, she thought she saw a flash of a shooting star make its way across the sky, heading in a northerly direction, but much to slowly to be a regular shooting star, and taking an almost horizontal path.
With nothing better to do, she finally made her way to bed after feeding Fergus properly and refilling his water bowl. Although she was not able to get out of her house for two more days, and although it took almost three days to restore the electrical power, Ellen and her dog did not freeze as did one of her neighbors, or run short of supplies, but stayed mysteriously warm inside the farmhouse-without-heat and almost enjoyed their enforced holiday.
“Odd,” said the power company repair man later that week, “we found the cable that feeds power to your part of the valley completely cut right after Christmas, but way up between two pylons. If I didn’t know better I would swear that a small plane had flown into it and cut it cleanly across. But we had no reports of anything up in the air that night, and certainly nothing flying that low.”
Ellen and Fergus just nodded and didn't say a word, but it was hard not to glance in the direction of the wood and the path of that unusual shooting star. Once the power was restored the electric heaters took up the task of keeping them warm for the rest of the winter, but every evening, when the moonlight shone in their window, Fergus would walk to the back door, raise his head and give a soft triple yelp that Ellen swore sounded just like "'O, 'O, 'O".
They never told anyone about their strange visitors.
About the author. John Hulme is a retired Professor now living and writing in Florida, far away from the snows of Ohio. His daughter is a very competent vet who once performed the operation described in this story before her very impressed father one Fourth of July - not Christmas. Only the animal in question was a horse, not a reindeer!
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