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Walking Without Footprints, by Connie Delaney

Ray had an absolutely perfect pocket watch that he had received when he retired from the railroad. He’d spent years timing the moon, which was as good a job as any for his retirement watch out on Homestake Creek.

"See Coni," he’d say. We were leaning on our brooms after shoveling the path, watching as the moon rose over the eastern mountains. "Forty three minutes." He would tap his watch knowingly and give me a nod and a smile. Slowly the watch would go back in the pocket, a gift of great pride, and we would go back to sweeping the trails.

At night I used candles for reading more often than I used my fuel oil lamp. Candles gave a whiter, brighter light that better lit the page of a book.

My book supply was an assortment of things that friends in town had lent me. One friend lent me a whole collection, a series of eight books, about a monk from Tibet who could do astral traveling. This monk ended up taking over a body of some guy in England to finish his work in enlightening the world or something like that. The books fascinated me and drew me into a whole new world of Tibetan mysticism, and yet something seemed odd. I couldn’t quite buy the whole storyline.

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I had another book that explained meditation techniques, so I decided to explore that part of reality by myself instead of relying on mythical Tibetan monks. One of the exercises was a meditation where you cover your right nostril with your thumb, breathe in through the left, then cover the left nostril with the big finger, and breathe out through the right. I don’t remember the actual technique now. What I do remember was the warning given with this meditation; that it only be done by adepts under the guidance of a master meditator.

As you can well imagine, there were no master meditators within a thousand miles of my little snowed-in cabin. You can also imagine how much fear I gave to the warning. Humph. I was going to try it any way. There I sat, on my little bunk bed, poking one nostril after the other closed with my fingers: watching for something terrible to happen.

Looking back at these meditation attempts I have to laugh at my good fortune. In every case it might not be true, but in my case the lack of spiritual guidance plunged me into more and more awareness. A guide would have made it too easy, would have given me some sort of a goal to be striving for. As it was, my meditation was both a challenge to whatever ‘terrible thing’ it was that would come and get me if I dared to perform this forbidden technique, and an extreme watchfulness to see this ‘terrible thing’ before it came, so I could duck.

Another book I had in my cabin was Dracula. Some friend had recently read it and told me that I had to read it too. When pinching my nostrils got boring, I snuggled up with my candle and Dracula.

I’m the kind of person who can sit down and read a whole book in a day. I started Dracula around noon and kept going on and on through flickering candles in the night.

Dusk was coming on when I reached the part where Dracula comes in through the girl’s window. Simply leaving a window unlatched is an invitation for Dracula to come in! I took a break from my reading to make sure my one window was shut and latched. Then I double-checked it.

The one window in my cabin was to the right of the door. Under the window was my wooden crate with its flickering candle.

The candle has burnt a quarter of the way down, used wax curling from the sides and dripping onto the crate. Shadows flick on the log walls and cast darkness into the bits of old rag sticking out from the caulking. I get up and add a few more sticks to the fire. A puff of smoke is let into the cabin when I raise the round stovetop lid to insert the long-burning pine.

Levi and Sheila see me move. They raise their heads from their paws and flick their ears. I’m back to reading.

Dracula bites the girl’s neck and things go badly for her. Everyone is being chased and bitten. The characters meet one impossible situation after the other. Dracula is so creepy because he seems nice enough and everyone is fooled. They don’t even know they are in danger! The hair rises on the back of my neck. Terrible things happen in the dark castle, and then we are all running through the dark shadowy woods. Dracula is chasing us to suck out our souls. The forest is nothing but blackness, trees reaching out to grab us as we run, and off in the distance, the wolf pack starts howling.

At that exact moment, the coyotes of Homestake Creek start howling at the moon. The words of Dracula are pouring into my red rimmed eyes by the flickering candle, and coyote howls in my ears. Whoa!!!

I sat up and slammed the book shut. Creepy! Levi and Sheila are sitting up taunt. They see my jolt and start howling with their wild cousins. Levi has a high yip, Sheila a low tuneless yowl. There are howls in my head, howls outside the cabin, howls inside the cabin. Gulp—I check the window latch again. Time to come back to reality. I blink my tired eyes, laugh at the coyotes and shush the dogs.

I have to finish the book that night because there is no way I’m ever going to sleep again. The coyotes have fits of yapping through the night. The candle burned until it was a tiny, flickering stub. I’m very late to sweep the trails the next morning!

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