The Only Tracks

The fire is dying and my brother is gone. His truck is in the drive, but the blizzard has erased all footprints. Except for mine.

“Leo!” The wind tore the name from my mouth and threw it into the trees. It didn't feel like a word anymore. Just a sound, swallowed by the static of the blizzard. “Leo!”

Nothing. Of course, nothing. The swirling snow was so thick I couldn’t see the end of the porch from the driveway. My own headlights, cutting through the late afternoon gloom, barely illuminated the front steps. They just made the falling snow look like a frantic, endless swarm of insects.

The door was open. Just a crack. That was the first thing. The thing that made the muscles in my stomach tighten into a cold knot. Leo never left the door open, not even in summer. In a blizzard? Unthinkable. It was a waste of heat, a direct violation of Dad’s old cabin rules. Rule number one: Don’t heat the outdoors.

I pushed it open with my gloved hand. The hinges groaned. Inside, the cabin was dark. Not completely dark. The fireplace on the far wall held a weak, pulsing orange glow, the last breath of a fire that had been fed hours ago. The air was cold. Not as cold as outside, but getting there. The silence was heavy, broken only by the howl of the wind rushing past the eaves and the faint hiss of the dying embers.

“Leo?” I said again, my voice quiet this time. It felt wrong to be loud in here. The sound was absorbed by the thick log walls, the braided rugs, the heavy flannel curtains. I stepped inside, my boots crunching on the welcome mat. I pushed the door shut behind me, and the sound of the storm dropped to a muffled roar. The latch clicked with a final, sealing sound.

My eyes adjusted. Leo’s boots were by the door. His big, insulated Sorels, still caked with a bit of mud and ice. His heavy canvas jacket was slung over the back of the worn armchair nearest the fire. A half-empty mug of coffee sat on the little table beside it, a skin formed over its surface. Everything looked normal. A snapshot of a man who had just stepped into the other room for a moment. But he hadn’t.

I checked the kitchen first. Empty. The small bathroom. Empty. The two tiny bedrooms in the back. Both empty. His bed was unmade, a tangle of wool blankets. My bed was neat, just as I’d left it two months ago. I ran a hand over the cold quilt. My phone buzzed in my pocket, a low-battery warning. I’d forgotten to charge it in the car. One bar of service, flickering in and out. Not enough to hold a call. Maybe a text, if I was lucky.

I went back to the main room. The quiet was starting to get to me. It wasn't just quiet; it was an absence. A hollow space where the sound of my brother should be. His humming, his clomping around in his thick socks, the classic rock radio station he always had on low. There was just nothing.

I walked to the window and wiped the condensation from a pane. Outside, his Ford sat where he always parked it, a monolithic shape already half-buried in a drift. The snow was coming down harder now. I scanned the property, what I could see of it. The woodshed, the outhouse, the dense wall of pine trees that surrounded the clearing. There were no tracks. None. Only the deep trench my own boots had made from my car to the front door. It was impossible. He couldn’t have walked away. The snow was thigh-deep in places, and falling fast enough to cover any trail within minutes. But there should have been *something*. A disturbance. A path leading from the door. There was nothing but a smooth, undisturbed blanket of white.

He didn't take the truck. His boots and jacket were here. He hadn't just walked off. So where was he? The cold knot in my stomach was a fist now. A cold, hard fist of panic. My breath hitched. Get it together, Sloane. Think. There’s a reason. There’s always a reason.

My eyes landed on the small nightstand next to his bed. On it was his journal. A simple, black Moleskine he carried everywhere. He said it was for work notes, for logging repairs on the cabin, but I knew he wrote other things in there too. He’d been doing it for years. I picked it up. The cover was worn smooth at the corners. I hesitated. It felt like a violation. But the empty cabin, the silence, the snow… they gave me permission.

I took it to the armchair by the dying fire and sat down, pulling the chain on the old reading lamp. The bulb threw a weak, yellow circle of light. I opened to the last entry. The handwriting was different. Usually, Leo’s script was neat, almost architectural. This was a spidery, hurried scrawl, the pen digging into the page.

‘*December 12th. Snow started around noon. Generator’s running okay, got enough propane for a week easy. Something’s been making noise on the roof again. Not a squirrel. A heavy scratching. Rhythmic. Stopped when I turned on the porch light.*’

I frowned. I flipped back a page. ‘*December 10th. Clear night. Cold. Saw it again. Not a person. Just a shape in the pines at the edge of the clearing. Tall. Too tall. Stood there for an hour. I watched it from the window. When I blinked, it was gone. I’m not drinking, I know what I saw.*’

My heart started a low, heavy drumming against my ribs. This wasn't Leo. Leo was pragmatic. He was the one who explained away bumps in the night, who laughed at ghost stories. I kept turning pages, going backward. The entries got more and more erratic. Scattered notes about chopping wood and fixing a leaky faucet were interspersed with these… observations.

‘*December 7th. It’s the silence that’s the worst. After the scratching stops. The woods go completely quiet. No wind, no animals. Nothing. Like everything is holding its breath. I feel like I’m in a fishbowl. Being watched.*’

‘*December 4th. Found tracks near the woodshed this morning. Not animal. Not human. Long, narrow prints, deep in the frozen mud. Gone by the afternoon thaw. I should leave. But the truck won’t start. Battery’s dead. Fuses are fine, alternator’s fine. It just won’t turn over. How is that possible? It was fine yesterday.*’

I stopped. His truck started just fine for me last month. He’d just had it serviced. I looked out the window at the snow-covered shape in the driveway. A dead battery? That didn't make sense. I kept reading, a sense of unreality washing over me. The warmth from the fire was gone. I was cold, deep in my bones.

The entries from November were normal. Complaining about the price of lumber, notes on the deer he’d seen, plans to fix the porch steps. The shift happened around the first of December. It was abrupt. The neat handwriting turned tense. The confident tone vanished, replaced by a thread of tightly-wound fear. The watcher in the pines. The scratching. The feeling of being observed.

I closed the journal. My hands were shaking. This was crazy. Leo was stressed. Or sick. Hallucinating. But the open door, the silence… it all felt horribly real. He was scared of something. Scared enough to write it down, page after page. And now he was gone.

I had to do something. I couldn't just sit here. I stood up and paced the small room. My boots felt loud on the floorboards. I needed to look outside. The journal mentioned tracks near the woodshed. Maybe… maybe whatever he saw left a mark.

Putting on my own winter gear felt like armoring up for battle. Hat, gloves, scarf wrapped tight around my face. I grabbed the heavy Maglite from the hook by the door. The beam cut a clean, white circle in the dim cabin. I took a deep breath, my chest tight, and opened the door.

The wind hit me like a physical blow, shoving me back a step. The air was full of ice, stinging my cheeks. The world was gone. Just white noise and motion. I fought my way onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind me. The porch was a shallow cave, protected from the worst of the storm. I swept the flashlight beam across the foundation, the stacked firewood, the dark space underneath the raised cabin floor.

And then I saw them. Tucked away in the deepest shadows under the porch, almost completely hidden behind a pile of old tarps. A pair of snowshoes. They weren't ours. Ours were modern aluminum, hanging on a rack in the shed. These were old. The frames were bent wood, dark with age, and the webbing was made of thick, yellowed rawhide. They were huge, much larger and longer than any I’d ever seen. They looked ancient. And they were caked with fresh snow.

Someone else had been here. Recently.

My mind raced. Was this what made the tracks Leo wrote about? I knelt down, the flashlight beam trembling in my hand. The snow on them was melting slightly from the residual heat leaking from the cabin's foundation. This was it. This was something real. Not a paranoid delusion in a journal. This was a clue.

I had to follow. I didn't know what else to do. Staying in the cabin felt like waiting in a trap. I grabbed the snowshoes. They were heavier than they looked. I crunched down the porch steps, sinking into the deep snow. The flashlight beam danced wildly, illuminating a chaotic scene of swirling flakes. I looked for a trail. For anything. At first, there was nothing. Just the smooth, windswept drifts.

But then I saw it. A faint depression. A shallow, almost imperceptible indentation leading away from the porch, toward the thickest part of the woods. It wasn't a footprint, not really. It was just a place where the snow was slightly more compressed. The storm had nearly wiped it clean, but it was there. Another one a few feet further on. The stride was impossibly long.

I put on my own snowshoes, my fingers fumbling with the cold bindings. With the wide frames strapped to my boots, I stayed on top of the powder. I followed the indentations, my flashlight beam glued to the ground in front of me. Every gust of wind threatened to erase the path. The cold was a physical pain now, a deep ache in my lungs with every breath.

The trail led me away from the cabin, past the dark shape of the woodshed, and into the trees. Here, the wind was less fierce, but the darkness was deeper. The tall pines groaned under the weight of the snow. My world shrank to the circle of my flashlight beam and the sound of my own ragged breathing. I followed the ghost of a trail for what felt like an eternity, maybe only a hundred yards. It ended at the base of a massive, old-growth pine.

There were no more tracks. It was as if the person who made them had simply vanished into the tree itself. I ran my light up the trunk. And there, about seven feet up, was a carving. It was fresh. The raw wood was pale against the dark bark. It wasn't a word or a picture. It was a symbol. A circle with a vertical line through the center, bisected by three horizontal lines. It was stark and geometric and felt deeply, fundamentally wrong. I had never seen anything like it. It felt ancient and malevolent, like a warning.

A branch high above me cracked, dumping its load of snow. It fell with a soft *whump* right behind me. I spun around, heart hammering, my light cutting a frantic arc through the darkness. Nothing. Just trees and snow. But the feeling of being watched, the one Leo had described, was suddenly all over me. A prickling on my skin. The sense of a fixed, patient gaze from the darkness beyond my light.

That was enough. I turned and fled back the way I came, stumbling in the deep snow, my own trail my only guide. I didn't look back. I just ran. The cabin's single lit window was a beacon of impossible warmth and safety. I fell up the porch steps, ripped the door open, and slammed it shut, throwing the deadbolt. I leaned against it, gasping for air, my whole body shaking uncontrollably, half from cold, half from terror.

The silence in the cabin was worse now. It felt charged. I stripped off my wet outer layers, my fingers numb and clumsy. The fire was almost completely out, just a few red coals in a bed of gray ash. The room was freezing. I had to build the fire back up. I had to get warm. I had to think.

As I knelt at the hearth, stacking kindling with trembling hands, I heard it. A sound from outside, cutting through the howl of the storm. A rhythmic crunching. *Crunch… crunch… crunch…* The sound of heavy footsteps in deep snow. It was slow, deliberate. And it was coming closer. Coming straight for the cabin.

I froze. My breath caught in my throat. Was it Leo? Was he coming back? But the rhythm was wrong. It was too heavy. Too steady. This wasn't the sound of a man struggling through a blizzard. It was the sound of something walking without effort. I scrambled to my feet, backing away from the door. My eyes darted around the room, looking for a weapon. My gaze landed on the fireplace tools. I grabbed the poker. It was heavy, solid iron. I held it in front of me with both hands, my knuckles white.

The crunching got louder. Closer. Just on the other side of the clearing now. I could feel the vibrations through the floorboards. *Crunch… crunch… crunch…* It was the sound from a nightmare. I backed away until I hit the opposite wall, my eyes locked on the heavy oak door. The sound stopped. Right outside. An absolute, profound silence fell, a silence more terrifying than the footsteps. It was here. Whatever it was, it was here. And I was trapped.