The moon.
They watched its reflection thrashing on the water as the breakers rolled across, under, and around it. It was the same image that men had watched and wondered about and feared—for a half million years. The first creatures that had any semblance of manhood had sat on their haunches on this same shore and watched the same moon and the same water.
And felt the same fears, Jim thought.
He didn't know whether it was fear or not, but there was some sense of awesome mystery that filled him when he looked at the moon. It had been that way all his life. He remembered how it was when he was a boy and he walked through the fields at night on his way home. He had to pass Cramer's Pond, and when the moon was up its light from the sky and its reflection from the pond seemed to fill the whole earth with a cold, silver light. He always hurried past the pond on such nights.
Mary felt it, too. "I wonder why the moon makes people feel the way they do."
"How does it make people feel?"
"Oh, kind of—kind of—you know!"
Jim laughed aloud. This was a typical Mary Cochran explanation. But it told him all he needed to know. What she said was quite true. He did know.
The baying of dogs on a wintery, moonlit night.