And then, as he stood there in the doorway, he heard something else. A crack. Flat and sharp and loud enough to come through the wind from a hundred yards away. Like a rifle shot.
Fly was gone off the porch before he could grab her.
He did not think. For the rest of his life he would try to remember what he had thought in that moment, and there was nothing there. He had the coat on and the rifle in his hand and the lantern lit and the big Rayovac clipped to his coveralls, and he was into the yard with the snow past his knees and the wind nearly putting him down. The lantern lit a circle of white chaos three feet across. He knew his yard. He put his left shoulder to the wind and walked, counting steps, and when the corner of the machine shed came up out of the white at his right hand he put his palm flat against its tin and followed it.
Fly met him at the end of the machine shed. She came at him out of the snow like a thrown thing and hit his legs and he went down on one knee, his bad knee, and something in it went white-hot, and he heard himself shout. She did not stop. She was in front of him, crouched, the way she would face down a ram, and every time he tried to get up she came at his legs again, and she was barking the whole time, not at the barn, at him, at him, and when he finally got up on his good leg and lurched past her she took his coat sleeve in her teeth and hung on with all her weight and her feet braced in the snow.
"Leave it!" He did not know his voice could be that loud. "Leave it, God damn you! Fly! Leave it!"
She would not leave it. And he did something then that he would think about for a long time afterward. He brought his knee up, hard, into her side, and shoved, and she let go of his sleeve with a yelp and went sideways into the snow.
He did not look back. He reached the barn. He found the big sliding door by feel, the cold iron handle, the edge of the frame, the place under the frost where the word was, and he set the rifle against the wall long enough to get both hands on the handle, and he leaned back and hauled the door along its track, and it went screeching and grinding through the drifted snow in the track a foot, two feet, three, and the wind came around the corner of the barn and went in through the gap and put the lantern out like someone pinching a wick.
He grabbed for the flashlight on his chest. He got it unclipped and his thumb found the switch and the beam jumped out yellow into the gap of the door, and in that instant something black and white came out of the snow behind him and went past his legs and into the barn so hard that it knocked his hand sideways, and the flashlight flew out of his glove and turned once in the air with its beam wheeling, and went into the drift by the door and was gone. He saw the place where it had gone in glow for half a second under the snow. Then it did not glow.
He stood in the doorway of his barn in total darkness.