The cold sharpened; the sky, toward evening, glittered like an emerald;
the earth was black, it resembled a ball of iron spinning in the diffused
green radiance of a dayless and glacial void. The stream before the
Makimmon dwelling moved without a sound under banked ledges of ice.
A thread of light appeared against the facade of the house, it widened to
an opening door, a brief glimpse of a bald interior, and then revealed the
figure of a man with a lantern upon the porch. The light descended to the
ground, wavered toward a spot where it disclosed the rigid, dead shape of
a dog. An uncertain hand followed the swell of the ribs to the sunken
side, attempted to free the clotted hair on a crushed skull. The body was
carefully raised and enveloped in a sack, laboriously borne to the edge of
the silent stream.
There it was lost in the dark as the light moved to where it cast a
limited, swinging illumination over the wall of a shed. It returned to the
stiffly distended sack, and there followed the ring of metal on the
iron-like earth. In the pale circle of the lantern a figure stooped and
rose, a figure with an intent, furrowed countenance.
The digging took a long while, the frozen clods of earth fell with a
scattering thud, the shadow of the hole deepened by imperceptible degrees.
Once the labor stopped, the sack was lowered into the ragged grave; but
the opening was too shallow, and the rise and fall of the solitary figure
recommenced.
The sack was finally covered from sight, from the appalling frigidity and
space of the sky, from the frozen surface of the earth wrapped in
stillness, in night. The clods were scraped back into the hole, stamped
into an integral mass; the spade obliterated all trace of what lay hidden
beneath, returned to the clay from which it had been momentarily animated
by the enigmatic, flitting spark of life.
The lantern retraced its path to the shed, to the porch; where, in a brief
thread of light, in the shutting of a door, it disappeared.