The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

T HIN REMNANTS OF MOONLIGHT PERMEATED THE WOODS. SWEET fern arced throat-high over the old logging path, cloaking blackberry canes hidden like saw blades in sheaths. Spray of dark sumac. Shafts of birch and aspen, faintly luminescing. Overhead, a pale and narrowing crack divided the forest canopy, marking their way more clearly than any earthly thing. For fear of jutting branches, he held his hands across his face and let the blackberry thorns rip his clothes. Now and then he stopped and clapped for the dogs. They came and snuffled nose and lip against his palm and vanished again, so sure in the dark. He paused. Peered after them. Shadow upon shadow, all of it. He swung his foot forward and began again. All around, fireflies glowed their radium bellies. The voices calling after them had long since faded into the creak of tree trunks flexing in the night breeze like the timbers of a vast ship. They hadn’t circled; he couldn’t have said how he knew. The direction of the wind, perhaps, or the westering cast of the moonlight. When a stand of birches glowed blue where he expected a gap he understood the path had fizzled out or they’d lost it.

After a time he came upon the dogs, bunched and waiting. He counted noses, then moved his hands about in the dark, trying to understand why they’d stopped. His fingers brushed a wire, barbed and rusted, and a weather-split fence post. He slid his hands down the knotted wood until he’d located the bottom strand of wire, then he sidestepped away from the fence post, bent over and tracing the barbs loosely with his fingers. He stopped when there was enough slack to haul the wire up. He clapped twice and the dogs came forward. By touch he moved them under the wire-Essay first, he guessed, then Tinder, then Baboo. They were panting and hot as they went. He rolled under last of all and stood and pointlessly brushed off his clothes, wet and hanging on him like sheets of wax. He looked up. Islands of stars in a lake of black. The forest spectral and pathless all around. He set off in a direction he hoped was west. Hours of the night passed.

He stopped when the woods opened onto a glade. The moon was high and bright, and before him the charcoaled skeletons of trees rose from blue marsh grass. He blinked at the excess moonlight in the clearing and clapped for the dogs. High in the crown of a charred tree, an owl revolved its dished face, and one branch down, three small replicas followed. Baboo came at once. Tinder had begun pushing into the tall grass and he turned and trotted back. Edgar clapped again and waited. When Essay did not appear he led Tinder and Baboo into the trees and touched his hand to the ground. The dogs circled and downed. He paced a few steps away and unzipped his pants. His urine seemed to take with it all the warmth in his body. He peeled off his wet shirt and jeans and hung them on a branch and stood there in the night, clad only in underpants. Clammy as they were, he could not bring himself to take them off. He walked back and lay next to Baboo. Baboo raised his head and looked at Edgar’s arm draped across his chest and laid his head down again. When they were all settled, Essay stepped out of a deer track in the sedge. She sniffed the three of them and walked to the clearing’s edge and peered upward and returned and stood panting until Edgar sat up and set his hand on her croup. She downed and tucked against his back, grunting with what sounded like disapproval. One after another the dogs heaved sighs and pressed their heads tight to their sides.

Edgar lay watching the silhouettes of the owls warp as they scanned the clearing. He wondered if they should have pushed on until they came to water for the dogs, but after so many hours of stilted, cautious movement in the dark, a crashing weariness had come over him. And yet the moment his eyes closed, there lay Doctor Papineau at the bottom of the mow stairs.

Edgar gasped and opened his eyes.

You’re a murderer, he said to himself. You get what you get.

The next instant, he was asleep.

WHEN HE WOKE, the dogs were standing above him like nurses puzzling over a patient, sighting along their muzzles and cocking their heads. The ground beside him was still warm from their bodies. He unclasped his hands from between his knees and pushed himself upright. The dogs bucked and wheeled. Essay planted her back feet and walked out her front until the cords quivered in her sides. Baboo and Tinder yawned out soft creaks from gaping mouths. The owls were gone. Across the glade, the treetops glowed carmine where the rising sun touched them. His head throbbed. He thought they couldn’t have slept more than two hours.

He sat, arms around his knees, until the unfurling weeds began to tickle his nether parts. He fetched his trousers from the branch where they hung. They were as wet as when he’d taken them off, and now cold. He lifted a foot, then stopped and peered down the leg holes. When he’d finished dressing he thought he might as well have clothed himself in wilted lettuce.

Baboo had stayed beside him, but Essay and Tinder had already slipped into the tall grass, hunting each other. Trails of grass shook and they dove into the clear and wheeled and plunged back in. He stroked Baboo’s neck and watched. The dogs had filled out in the last few months. Their chests were thick and deep, their backs broad, and they moved with a powerful, leonine grace. He clapped his hands. The grass stopped moving and Tinder and Essay cantered out. He sat them in a row and paced backward and recalled them one by one. They repeated this three times, then he snapped off a dead tree branch and rolled it between his palms to scent it up and had them each fetch it. They practiced downs and rollovers and crawls while the birds around the edge of the clearing chattered.

They were heated up then, even lackadaisical Baboo. He thought they’d better find water. His nighttime fretting seemed pointless; no creek could be far off in the lower Chequamegon. He looked back along the way they’d come. Then he led them around the perimeter of the clearing and picked a spot and set foot in the forest again.

AFTER HALF AN HOUR they descended a shallow alder-choked ravine that bottomed out in a creek six inches deep and filled with pale green grass laid over in the current like mermaid hair. The dogs began to lap at once. Edgar tossed his shoes and socks across and waded in and scooped up a handful of water that tasted like cold, weak tea. He let the water run over his feet until the dogs climbed out and sprawled near a mossy log, and then they moved on.

The slant of the morning sunlight made it easy to keep his bearings. They were traversing the ridges west of the kennel, ridges he and Almondine had gazed over countless times as they sat on the hill in the south field. He didn’t know how far the ridges went or what they gave onto. They’d seldom traveled that direction; that old life, suddenly so remote, had been oriented along the meridian of Highway 13, with Ashland to the north, and everything else-Wausau, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago-to the south. So he gave himself just two rules: stay off the roads and travel west. Whenever he was forced to detour around an obstacle, he chose the northernmost alternative. Beyond that, he had no specific destination or design, no more than when he’d first begun training the dogs on those odds and ends in the mow. He wanted distance from that prior life. He wanted time, later, to think about what had happened and what to do about it. Until then he wanted to think about the four of them and how they should move. He was already beginning to worry about the dogs. He didn’t know what to do about food. He didn’t even have a pocketknife.

Despite himself, he wondered what was happening at the kennel. He thought about Almondine, how he hadn’t had a chance to make amends with her. He wondered where she’d slept without him in the house. He wondered if his mother was standing behind the silo that morning, signaling him to return. Perhaps they were still walking through the woods shouting his name. The thought gave him twinges of both satisfaction and remorse. The jolt of his mother’s slap kept coming back to him, and her furious expression. And Doctor Papineau’s eyes, the life dimming in them as he watched.

HIS RESOLVE WASN’T TESTED until late that morning, when they came to a road cutting through the forest. It was barely more than a dirt track strewn with gravel and overhung on both sides by trees, so desolate he felt no qualms about standing in the middle of it. The sun was almost at its zenith. He squinted both directions for mailboxes or stop signs. There was nothing, not even telephone poles, just washboards ribbed into the dirt. The long, clear line of the road was a surprisingly welcome sight, for the unceasing effort of reading the tangle of underbrush and choosing a path had begun to wear him down.

Plus, mercifully, there was breeze enough in the open to dissipate the mosquitoes, which had progressed from an annoyance to a torment as he and the dogs traveled. Every fern frond and blade of grass they brushed stirred up another cloud of the hateful things. In self-defense, he’d broken into a trot, swinging his hands around his head and slapping his face and neck, but the moment he stopped they descended again, doubly drawn to his overheated skin.

He sat on the dirt, legs crossed, and gathered the dogs. An approaching car would be visible miles away and he wanted to rest for a minute. If the traveling was hard, he thought, at least there was some consolation in watching the dogs. Back at the kennel, Essay had always been the most delinquent, the hardest to train and the first to grow bored, but in the woods she was at ease, scouting, acting the huntress, forging ahead to challenge any oddity she found: a strangely aromatic stump, a chipmunk skittering through the leaves, a drumming grouse. When she was nearly out of sight, she would turn to look back, though not always; sometimes she charged into the underbrush. It made her a flagrantly inefficient traveler, covering twice as much ground as she needed to, but whenever Edgar tried to keep her nearby she whined and dropped her ears. Baboo was the steadfast one. If Edgar told him to wait, Baboo waited like a stone laid upon the earth by God himself, pleased to know his job. That Baboo was charmingly literal had always been clear, but in the woods he was a pragmatist. He trotted along behind Edgar as he broke trail, sometimes sticking close at Edgar’s heels, sometimes dropping back. But if more than a few yards came between them, Baboo crashed recklessly forward to close the gap. Of the three, Tinder was the hardest to pin down. He always stayed in sight, neither shadowing Edgar nor launching himself into the underbrush, but whenever Essay reappeared from one of her forays, it was Tinder who met her and dropped back to touch muzzles with Baboo, as if carrying news.

Edgar sat in the sun in the road. To the far side was a deep patch of fern so lush it looked primordial. They ought to get out of the open, he knew. He was still persuading himself to brave the mosquitoes when Essay’s ears twitched and she turned her head. He followed her gaze. Far down the road, a tiny cloud of orange dust was rising and a windshield heliographed as it passed in and out of the shade.

He scrambled up into a crouch. The car was far away and at first he felt no rush. If the driver had seen Edgar and the dogs at all he had probably taken them for deer. Edgar clapped his hands, signed come, and waded into the overgrown bracken. The dogs thrashed along behind him. He dropped into the green shadow world of grass and fiddleheads and worked his way along on all fours. At the back of the thicket they came to a dense blackberry bramble, the thorns curved and sharp as scalpels. Even if he forced himself through, the dogs would balk. He chided himself for running toward the unfamiliar. He thought there was still time to cross back the way they’d come, retreat into known terrain, though they wouldn’t get more than twenty yards into the forest before the car passed.

Baboo and Tinder were close behind, but Essay had already turned and begun to nose her way back toward the road. He stayed the two dogs-Baboo dropped into a sit like a soldier-and duck-walked through the ferns and tapped Essay on the hip. She looked at him across her flank. He led her back. When she was sitting again he raised up into a crouch and peered over the fronds.

The car was closer than he expected, a hundred yards away and slowing down. There was no way to cross without being seen. They were maybe fifteen feet into the ferns and they had broken a path wide enough to see the dirt of the road, but he guessed they would be hidden from a moving car. He got the dogs’ attention, then signed down, his hand rising briefly into the clear. The dogs eased themselves to the ground. Essay whined and tucked her hind feet under her hips and elevated her nose in a shaft of sunlight, poking it upward in tiny saccades to take the scent.

He laid one arm over Essay and reached back with the other to touch Tinder, hoping that if he could keep two of them steady, he could count on Baboo to follow their lead. The car’s bumper appeared through the stems of the ferns, moving slowly. There was the pong! of a stone popping from under a tire. Essay quivered beneath his hand. A white front fender passed his line of sight, then a tire. A black-and-white door. Another door. Another tire. The rear bumper. When the car was some distance down the road, he snapped his fingers. The dogs looked at him.

Stay, he signed. He eyeballed Essay and repeated the command.

That’s two stays. You better stick.

He finished with one finger warningly in front of her nose. She broke into a pant and tipped her hips to the side. He raised his head out of the ferns. The car was a sheriff’s cruiser covered with dust as if it had been trolling roads all night. A lone, massive figure sat behind the wheel, arm outstretched along the top of the seat. The brake lights stuttered. Edgar dropped back down into the ferns.

He counted to one hundred. When the only sound was the heat bugs in the noon sun he released the dogs. They looked at him. He released them a second time to no effect. He understood something was wrong then and he cautiously raised his head out of the ferns a second time. The cruiser was parked two hundred yards farther along. Only then could he hear it idling. The driver’s-side door was open and Glen Papineau stood looking down the road, so big he hardly seemed capable of squeezing back in.

Edgar fell down into the ferns.

Stay, stay, he signed.

Essay swiped her tail and tucked her feet and Tinder pressed his muzzle against Edgar’s palm with a questioning stare, but in the end both of them stayed put. It was Baboo who began to rise, half in curiosity, half in confusion. Edgar clapped once, overly loud. The dog froze and looked at him through the stalks of the ferns.

Down, he signed frantically. Stay.

From up the road, he heard Glen Papineau’s voice.

“Edgar?” he called. “Edgar Sawtelle?”

Baboo lowered himself to the ground, eyes wide. They waited. Edgar heard a door slam and then the faint rumble of the engine as the cruiser pulled away. This time they waited until he began to worry that the road was a dead end and that Glen might double back. He left the dogs in stays and crept out to the road.

There was nothing to see, not even a cloud of dust.

He clapped. The dogs bounded out of the ferns and danced about him in a sort of pageant his mother called The End of Down dance. A few yards up the road he found a clear line into the woods, and in another minute the road had disappeared behind them and they passed into the evanescent stipple of the forest at midday.

BY LATE AFTERNOON EDGAR was hungry-had been hungry, in fact, for quite some time. The final vestiges of panic from the night before had been drained by the monotony of breaking trail and he felt light-headed and irritable and his stomach gnawed at him. He wondered if it was the same with the dogs. They didn’t seem uneasy. They’d spent all afternoon tramping through underbrush and fording backwoods streams. So far the dogs had only missed their morning feeding, but he was used to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he didn’t even have a match to light a fire, much less a plan to get food.

He did have something in mind, though it wasn’t exactly a plan, since it depended largely on chance. The woods were dotted with vacation cabins and fishing shacks. What was called the Chequamegon, as if it were a single block of forest, was in fact a Swiss cheese of government-owned forest and private property, particularly around the dozens of lakes. Sooner or later they were bound to find a cabin stocked with supplies or come across a car with some fisherman’s lunch inside. They hadn’t seen one yet. He hoped that meant they were due.

The problem with that idea, he thought as they reached another clearing, was that cabins and cars were located on roads, not in the middle of the woods. And roads were to be avoided at all costs-the encounter with Glen Papineau had removed any doubt from his mind about whether anyone was searching for them. If they were spotted-even by someone driving along who later called the sheriff’s office to report a boy with a bunch of dogs-they would have a good idea where he was. Cutting through the woods, however, meant slow going. He doubted they were covering more than a mile every two or three hours, with all the underbrush and marshes and the dogs to manage and the caution with which he needed to pick his steps. A sprained ankle would be a disaster.

He wondered if someone might try tracking them with dogs. The woods near the kennel would be so soaked with his scent, the fields so crisscrossed with layers of track from his ordinary daily work, that only the purest, most experienced tracking dog had any chance. And every hour that passed, their track blended farther into the general mélange. Then there was the question of where they’d find tracking dogs, anyway. Sawtelle dogs would be useless. Field tracking was an art they didn’t practice. He could hear his mother laugh at the idea; she would tell anyone who suggested it that they might as well track him with cows.

But away from the kennel, everything changed. Their scent would be undisguised and distinctive, and between the four of them they were laying a scent track a mile wide, as obvious to a real tracking dog as if the ground had been lit on fire. The only way to break such a trail would be to get into a vehicle, but hitchhiking with three dogs was as good as walking into the sheriff’s office in Mellen. Which brought him back again to staying off the roads.

He was thinking about this problem, circling it and drawing out the alternatives in his mind, when through the trees he glimpsed sunlight reflecting off water. The late afternoon had grown cooler and the wind had calmed. When they reached the water-it was a lake-they walked out onto a small peninsula of sedge and cattails. The shoreline was irregular and densely forested. He scanned for cabins, but all he saw were pines making a sawtooth pattern against the sky and birds diving over the lake, sweeping up insects. Mosquitoes, he fervently hoped. The dogs walked to the water’s edge. Having spent no time at lakes, they reared and jumped at the small waves that washed up onto their feet.

They would have to go around the lake one way or another. Because he could see most of the shoreline to the north, he chose that direction. In the twilight they came upon a snapping turtle the size of a dinner plate marching toward the water. The dogs gathered around it, rearing as it turned its blunt head, jaws agape and hissing. He rushed over and shooed them away, thinking of the stories he’d heard of turtles’ jaws staying locked onto whatever they’d bitten, even after their heads were cut off. He kept his own feet well back from the thing. He didn’t want to find out if the stories were true.

As soon as the dogs abandoned the turtle, Tinder wheeled and backtracked along its path, then began to whine and dig. In a moment, the other dogs joined in and dirt was flying through the air. They were gobbling the turtle’s eggs, teeth clicking, when Edgar got there. He reached past them and picked up an egg. It was cool and soft in his hand, the size and texture of a leathery Ping-Pong ball. Looking at it, his stomach did a traitorous little flip. Before his mouth could water any more, he took three additional eggs from the rapidly diminishing pile and brushed the dirt off them. When Baboo looked up, he tossed one back. The dog snatched it from the air. Edgar tucked the other three in his shirt pocket.

It bothered him to see them eating like that, but he had nothing better to offer. When they could find no more eggs he slapped his leg and turned to pick a place to sleep while there was still some light. He chose a spot under a stand of ash near the water. The sky overhead was a deep cobalt. Suddenly he was bone tired. He walked the four of them out to the lake and let them drink and slipped off his shoes and rolled up his jeans and waded in. His feet stirred up silt in the water and he had to reach far out, overbalancing himself, to ladle up anything clear. Even then it tasted of algae and muck and left grit between his teeth. He drank again. He led the dogs back, carrying his shoes and socks. They curled up at once. He tried to lie between them, but a rock poked his ribs. His clothes had dried during the day, but they felt greasy and lax and his stomach was bloated with water. He thought he might gag if he dwelt on its taste. Hunger twisted inside him. He got up and found a better position, though he could reach only Essay. Baboo stood, grumbling as if to say, oh all right, and moved over and circled twice and settled with his muzzle near Edgar’s face. Shortly, Tinder followed.

HE WOKE SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT. The dogs lay curled about him in circles of slumber and somewhere a nightingale was calling, “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” Whatever had roused him had been in his dreams. And then he remembered. He was in the air above the workshop stairs. And he was falling, falling…

SUNRISE. CLAMOR AND SCREECH of birds, as if the sunlight had set them afire. The dogs stretched where they lay. Immediately, he was thinking about food-his belly felt curdled and a coppery tang coated his teeth, as if the minerals in the ground had seeped into him. By the time he sat up, the dogs were snooping in the undergrowth. He called them over one at a time and felt for stickers and burrs, starting with their tails and moving toward their heads. They lay chewing their forelegs as if pulling kernels off a corn cob as he worked. Occasionally, they nuzzled his hands, objecting to some pinch or tug. Then he stayed the dogs and walked each of them out and trotted back and signed a release. When they returned, he reached into his shirt pocket and produced a turtle egg. Tinder first, then Baboo. Essay went last-a vain attempt to teach her patience. Having watched the others get their reward, she streaked toward him through the woods the instant he moved his hands.

Then they set out again, keeping the lake to their left. The underbrush was sparse compared to the previous day’s travel and they made good time. The morning air was thick with moisture and the grasses shed water droplets that glistened on the dogs’ coats. When they’d rounded the lake halfway, he could see water stretching away in a jagged meander to the south.

He was fretting over the problem of food when he glimpsed the first cabin. The sight of it did nothing to ease his mind. He stayed the dogs and walked forward until he understood it could not possibly be occupied. They walked out of the brush together to inspect it. The little shack had collapsed inward many years before. If it had ever been painted, the paint had long since washed into the earth, and now only the roofing shingles, bright purple, hadn’t grayed. A scabrous folding chair stood on what remained of the crude front porch, shedding paint flakes the color of dried mustard as rust worked its way underneath. Inside was a calamity of plywood and mossy bedsprings and vast spider webs hanging like spinnakers between the timbers. The whole thing covered no more ground than a good-size tent, ten feet on a side. The dogs circled and poked their noses into crannies and corners until he called them away for fear of rats and snakes.

An hour later they came to a place at the water’s edge where the riotous undergrowth gave way to a small crescent of gravelly sand. Further out, reeds projected through the silver surface. He stripped off his clothes and parted the dogs and waded in. The water was brown with tannin. He was covered with mosquito bites and the cool hug of liquid soothed the itching. He looked down to see a panfish darting between his knees. The dogs stood watching and wagging their tails but wouldn’t come in the water.

He emerged naked and knee-deep, splashing the dogs. They dashed away and back again, ears laid low, crouching and scrambling to dodge the spray, remembering, perhaps, games they’d played in the yard with the garden hose. Part of him was glad he’d found something that pleased them, but he quickly stopped. In himself he felt nothing but gloom, and the play seemed false, a pretense that everything was going to be okay. Besides, he began to worry about working them up. That wasn’t right, not until they got real food. Already they looked thinner to him, though that was probably his imagination. They were acting a little too wild, their hunger making them frantic. They stood panting and watching as he swept beads of water off his legs. In a minute or two the sun had dried him enough to dress. This time he flapped his trousers out and looked down the legs and knocked his shoes against his hand without a second thought.

THE NEXT CABIN LOOKED more promising. It was painted a utilitarian green, but it was sturdy and well maintained. A galvanized smokestack pierced its sloped roof. A pair of small windows were set high off the ground on either side of the door. It was so tidy, in fact, he watched it for a while before he was sure it was unoccupied. Even then his skin tingled as he approached. The door was held shut by a padlock threaded through a heavy metal latch. The padlock had been slathered with grease and wrapped with a plastic bag, presumably to protect it against the elements. He turned the knob and tried a few hard pushes. Then he backed up and took a running start and hit it. He bounced off. He tried again. The structure shook, but the door didn’t budge in its frame. And his shoulder began to hurt.

The dogs stood and cocked their heads.

It works on TV, he signed. Shut up.

He looked at the windows again. They were three-paned, top-hinged transom windows, set about six feet off the ground. Big enough to fit through, he thought, and he could easily break the glass, but it seemed unlikely he could heft himself through without cutting himself to ribbons. And, while he’d been throwing himself at the door, it had occurred to him that it would be best to enter without being obvious.

He searched the surrounds for a log or anything that might serve as a boost-to know whether it was worth breaking the window, and help him climb through if it was-but he found nothing useful. He looked for a likely spot to hide a key. Nothing again.

He walked to the front of the cabin and looked at the dogs.

We’re going back for that chair, he signed, and they set off the way they’d come.

HE DIDN’T REALIZE HOW far they would have to backtrack. It took over an hour before he glimpsed the purple shingles again. He grabbed a stick and swept the cobwebs from the chair and yanked it off the porch. Half a dozen spiders scrambled away like rotted berries on legs. The web straps that had formed the seat hung in brown tatters, but the frame itself seemed solid, if rusty. Baboo nosed it curiously. Essay and Tinder lay down. All three dogs had kept their noses to the ground on their return, no doubt hoping for more turtle eggs. More than once they had bolted after squirrels gibbering in the underbrush before learning it was a waste of time. Now they were acting dispirited and a stab of anxiety entered his chest.

When they passed the little beach on their return he was so eager he started jogging along. He set the chair frame beneath one of the transom windows and he was about to hoist himself up when he checked the impulse and decided to test the chair first. He planted his rump on the arm. One of the crusty front legs crumpled like a paper soda straw. He looked at it in surprise, then flipped the chair over and pressed both hands onto the joint where the back and the seat came together. Satisfied, he stepped onto the frame and put his fingertips on the windowsill.

During the walk back he had allowed himself to imagine how a fisherman might stock such a neatly kept shack with all sorts of canned goods and tackle, but his view through the window revealed only a bare cot folded against one plywood wall, a prefab fireplace at the base of the galvanized chimney, and a small kerosene stove and a lantern. There was no point trying to get in; it was obvious he’d find no food, and even if the lantern had fuel, which he doubted, it would burn for only a few hours. The camp stove was too unwieldy to carry.

He hopped to the ground. He sat beside the crippled chair and chastised himself. A good fisherman would never leave food to lure animals. He should have known that, but instead he’d talked himself into a fantasy. They’d wasted the better part of the day on a pointless errand. He was so hungry now his insides spasmed. His mouth had watered as soon as the cabin came into view. He’d read somewhere that a person could live for a month without food, but that seemed impossible. Perhaps if the person sat in one place and did nothing, but not if they were crossing miles of unpathed forest.

It was too much. With all that had happened at the kennel, and now the hunger and the worry about the dogs, and suddenly without Almondine there, it felt like some organ had been ripped from his insides. He brought his knees to his chest and lay over on his side. He thought he was going to cry, but instead his mind emptied and he lay staring along the roots and leaves of the forest floor and listened to the far-off sound of the dogs rattling through the underbrush. He stayed like that for a long time. Eventually, the dogs returned-Baboo first, then Tinder and Essay. They panted and licked his face and stretched out around him, grunting and sighing and finally sleeping.

HIS MALAISE DIDN’T ENTIRELY PASS, but it did lighten, and he sat up and looked around. In the distance, a prop plane sputtered. A flock of small, black birds with obsidian beaks cackled warnings at one another from lower branches of the trees. He forced himself to stand and the dogs assembled around him, nuzzling his hands for food. He knelt and stroked their ruffs.

I don’t have anything, he signed. I’m sorry. I don’t even know when I will.

They walked the lakeshore. In a clearing, he spotted a lone ripe blueberry hanging from a bush. Too early in the season, but there it was. He did not think it was nightshade, but he turned over the leaves to check. The blueberry patch covered a circle of thirty feet or so, and from it he harvested a single handful of ripe berries. He tasted one, then squatted and held them out. The dogs sniffed his bounty and walked away. No, try them, he signed. Come back. But they would not. As soon as he swallowed them his stomach began to churn. For a moment he thought he might vomit, but he didn’t.

At dusk he picked a spot to bed down among a grove of maples. They were settled and half asleep when a high, thin whine swelled in the treetops, then hovered downward until it seethed all around them. When he looked at his arm it was covered in undulating gray fur. He swiped a hand from elbow to wrist, leaving behind a mash of blood and crushed mosquitoes. At once, a rapacious new layer appeared in the slime. Mosquitoes began crawling in his nostrils and ears. The dogs leapt up and snapped at the air and Edgar waved his arms and slapped his neck and face, but in the end they ran and ran, the dogs disappearing ahead into the gloom.

After a while he halted, gasping and disoriented. The forest floor was covered with a layer of pine needles thick enough to choke the underbrush. He listened for the mosquitoes, shuddering. A cloud of them had waited in the forest canopy, and he and the dogs had lain willingly beneath. He’d never heard of such a thing. The dogs trotted out of the gloaming and they made their beds on the pine needles. He lay looking into the treetops. He was hungry, tired, dejected, and now humiliated. The stomachs of the dogs gurgled as they lay around him.

They were going to have to find a road after all, he thought, or they would starve.

By the third day, he was doing the math continually: the dogs had eaten nothing but turtle eggs for two days. He’d eaten maybe thirty blueberries. One moment he told himself it wasn’t a disaster to miss six meals. The next moment his stomach pulsed and contracted. Squirrels and birds were everywhere, but he had no idea how to catch one. The lakes were probably brimming with fish, but he didn’t have a single inch of monofilament line, much less a hook.

They heard the moan of tires along the blacktop half an hour before they reached the road. From behind a balsam they watched a ragged procession of cars pass, then snuck to the embankment and bolted into the woods on the far side and began following the highway as they’d followed the shoreline the day before, staying well hidden in the forest. Twice, streams too deep or marshy forced them back to the road to wait and dash across a bridge before they could move on.

In the afternoon they came to a field of sedge and chokecherry about a quarter of a mile wide and several hundred yards deep. Halfway to the back tree line, Edgar stopped and looked at the road. On the one hand, they would be exposed if they crossed there, but on the other he was starting to tire and it was a significant shortcut. The grass was tall enough to hide the dogs. He could duck if a car appeared. They’d crossed halfway when something chittered through the grass and Tinder leapt after it and the other dogs after Tinder. Edgar caught up with them dancing around a burrow entrance. Out on the road, a car was approaching. He dropped to all fours and waited. For some time the faraway burr of a small airplane had been swelling and fading; when it began to swell again he craned his neck and looked up. He saw nothing against the blue sky. The burr grew louder and then louder still. The moment the car passed he clapped the dogs out of their stays and bolted. By the time he dove into the birch on the far side of the clearing, he could almost hear the individual cylinders firing in the airplane engine. The dogs had stuck close by him for once and he huddled them up beneath a dogwood. When the airplane passed over, it was so low he could read the Forest Service insignia.

Idiot, he thought. You were going to stay in the woods.

They kept hidden there for the better part of an hour, tracking the sound of the airplane as it progressed north and south along its search pattern. After he got the dogs moving again he kept them strictly under tree cover, circling even the smallest glades. Mid-afternoon, they came to a gravel road tightly enclosed by pine forest. There were power lines strung along on creosoted poles. A few hundred yards east the road intersected the blacktop. They tracked it in the opposite direction, staying back in the woods. The dogs had begun moving with their tails down, edgy and wild-looking. Seventy hours, said the counting part of his brain. One turtle egg for every four hours. One blueberry an hour for him. Half a blueberry.

They watched a station wagon rumble by with its backwash of brown dust. They walked to the tree line. Ahead, where the road curved, he saw the first cabin and the lake glittering behind it. Then all the other cabins nestled among the trees. Posts with reflectors marking the driveways. Over the lash of waves against the lakeshore he heard a boat motor sputtering and the cry of sandpipers and inland gulls.

The station wagon had rounded the curve and driven on. He led the dogs along until they were across from the nearest cabin. No car in the grassy drive. The dogs knew something was happening and they circled and poked one another with their muzzles and hopped ticklishly.

Down, he signed. They whined but complied, one after another.

Stay, he signed. Stay.

He’d slipped into bad habits already, he thought. Repeating commands was minor. Failing to trust them, far worse. He forced himself not to repeat the stay a third time and walked out to the road and looked back. The dogs lay panting in the forest shade, watching him. He turned and walked up the cabin driveway, trying to look as if he belonged there.

This was no fisherman’s shack. A window sash had been raised. Curtains ruffled in the breeze behind the screen. A Formica table sat beneath the window covered with folded newspaper and a scattering of mail. Ceramic cows labeled S and P curtseyed to one another. Beyond, he saw a kitchen with plain cupboards and an icebox and a stove. The counter was strewn with cellophaned packages. Cookies. Potato chips. Loaves of bread.

His hands were shaking now. He tried the front door but it was locked. He returned to the window. At the back of the cabin was a screen door, latched with a hook and eye. He rattled the door. The hook wouldn’t shake loose.

He turned to look around. No one sunbathed on the beach. No one swam off the dock. He trotted into the nearby woods and came back with a short, blunt stick and he punched a neat line of screening away from the center bar of the door and threaded his arm through and popped the hook and swung the door open. He stepped over the jumble of toys on the living room floor and then he was in the kitchen, throwing open the cupboards. Cans of SpaghettiOs and pork and beans stood in neat rows beside Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Jiffy Pop, hot dog buns, bread. In the icebox he found hot dogs, ketchup, mustard, relish. Two six-packs of beer.

He grabbed all the hot dogs, then, thinking better of it, put one package back. He set out the cans of SpaghettiOs and pork and beans. He rifled the drawers and slipped a can opener into his back pocket. Then he lost patience. He’d gathered up the loot and was heading for the back door when something on the Formica table caught his eye. The pepper cow stood atop a white mimeographed page titled in big blue letters.

He could only see the first half: RUNA.

Awkwardly, he set down the food and slipped the sheet from under the newspaper. The pleasant odor of mimeograph fluid rose off the paper. There was a poorly reproduced photograph from the school yearbook and beneath it a short notice:

RUNAWAY

Edgar Sawtelle, disappeared June 18. Age fourteen, height five feet six inches, black hair. Boy cannot speak, though he may use written notes or sign language. He may be accompanied by one or more dogs. Last seen wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and a brown-and-red-checkered short-sleeved shirt near Mellen…

Before he could finish reading, he heard a bark from the direction of the woods. He stuffed the notice in his pocket and scooped up the canned goods and wieners. Outside, he had to dump everything on the ground again to reach through the ripped screen and set the hook into the eye. Then he smoothed the screen into place as best he could, gathered up the food, and ran across the gravel road.

Essay stood waiting a few feet inside the edge of the woods, Tinder and Baboo not far behind. He put them all in down-stays, sternly, then turned and fumbled with the can opener. He poured SpaghettiOs into three widely separated piles. The dogs moaned. He signed a release and they pounced, and the SpaghettiOs were gone, but he was already ripping open the wieners and stuffing one into his mouth and handing them out to the dogs.

Then he came to his senses. Somewhere he’d read that people who tried to eat after long stretches without food threw it up, though he felt in no danger of that himself, only a comforting sensation in his middle. Probably, that wisdom had been written by the same person who could survive for a month without food. They had lasted three days. But it would be foolish not to wait a few minutes, just to be sure. The dogs scoured the ground where the SpaghettiOs had so briefly lain while Edgar counted out one hundred breaths. The wieners were salty. They made him thirsty, but that was okay. That was just fine.

He picked up the remaining food and retreated to a clearing out of sight of the cabins. It was the friendliest-looking place he’d seen in days. He sat down Indian-style while the dogs gathered around him, transfixed, and like a magician performing sleight-of-hand, he began working the opener over a can of pork and beans.

B Y THEN THEY’D BEEN GOING FOR TEN DAYS, MAYBE MORE-Edgar had started to lose track-and over that time they’d come to a new set of accommodations for how to be together. He had no tackle with him-no leads, no collars, no long lines, no ground rings-none of the means they’d had at the kennel to agree about what mattered: the ways to stop and start, when to stay close and when to explore, how to attend one another. He had few rewards to give, some days not even food, though that happened less often after the first week-after they learned to work the cabins. And so, by necessity, he began to watch the dogs more closely, stop more often, touch them more sweetly and more carefully than he ever had before.

And the dogs, in turn, discovered that if they waited after he’d asked them to stay and disappeared into a cabin, he would always return. Together they practiced new skills he devised. They had long understood what was being asked of them during a stay, whether in the training yard or in town; now he asked if they would stay in a forest glade when they were hungry and the flickers pounded the ground, thumping up millipedes, or squirrels harassed them, or a rock sailed over their heads and rattled the dead leaves. Several times each day he found a likely spot, shielded by sumac or bracken fern, and he placed them in guard over something small-a stick he’d been carrying that morning, say, or a bit of rag. Then he walked off into the forest, careful not to push them past the breaking point since he had no way to correct them. Later, he tied a length of fishing line to the guarded thing and asked them to move only when it moved, keeping it surrounded. When they got that right, he’d sail back into their midst signing, release! and throw himself at them to roll and tickle, toss the thing for them to catch, see to each of them in whatever way he’d learned was the greatest delight for that dog.

He learned, too, the limits of their patience, different for each of them. In a stay, Baboo was as immovable as the hills, and likely to fall asleep. Essay, ever alert, was the most tempted of any of them by the skitter of a rock pitched through the ferns. And Tinder, equally likely to stick or bolt, who twice jumped up when Essay broke her stay and licked her muzzle and coaxed her back into a sit.

They agreed, more slowly, that running away mattered as much as staying. After some time he could ask them to find a spot elsewhere and wait. At first they ventured only a few feet; later, they ran until he couldn’t see them any more. They agreed it was important not to bark when they needed his attention or when they got excited. They practiced these things many times each day, whenever they tired of breaking trail through the underbrush. He began to link the idea of running away and guarding; he put the thing to guard on the ground and walked the dogs away from it, then made them return, watch it, scoot along with it as it jerked through the dead leaves on its string. He spent long evening hours picking through their coats for ticks and burrs. He checked their feet a hundred times each day.

And he compromised his idea of their destiny in order to live. They could make only as much progress as food allowed. What point was there in bolting northward if they starved halfway to wherever he intended to go? They had to pick a route that kept them hidden and let them harvest food. That meant a pace slower and a route more circuitous than he’d imagined.

He became an expert burglar of vacation cottages and fishing shacks. Mornings, while the campers fried bacon and flipped pancakes, he and the dogs lingered in the weeds; later, those same cabins would stand empty, ripe for plundering. He learned to enter without breaking, and always left without taking enough to be noticed. He carried few supplies, and none that would tie him down. A can opener and a jackknife and, later, when their diet made his teeth and gums feel buzzy, a toothbrush. A child’s Zebco spin-casting rod, small enough to carry through the woods. A fisherman’s satchel with a bobber and some hooks set in a piece of cardboard. With a little skill, he provided for them all-panfish, mainly, but sometimes a bass or a bullhead, too. Plenty of nights they went to sleep hungry, but seldom starving. The cabins yielded Twinkies and Suzie-Q’s and Ho Hos by the armful, deviled ham and custard pies and corn chips and peanut butter to eat straight from the jar, handfuls of Wheaties and Cap’n Crunch washed down with soda, and an endless procession of wieners and salami and sardines and Hershey bars. Occasionally he even found dog food, which the dogs gobbled from his palm like the most uncommon delicacy.

And he stole Off!, that balm of peace and contentment, that ambrosia of the skin. Heavenly, wonderful, miraculous Off!-above all, the Deep Woods variety, whose bitter flavor and greasy viscosity came to signify something as essential as food or water: a day unmauled by deerflies, a night of refuge from mosquitoes. He stole it from every cabin he tiptoed through-all of it, remorselessly. Wherever they spent more than a day, he hoarded two or three of the white-and-orange aerosols, and a batch of Bactines as well.

Rainy days were hard. Sometimes there was no better shelter than the base of a thick jack pine, and if the wind blew, that could be no shelter at all. Rainy nights were torture: great, racking storms, with lightning exploding all around. If he looked into the strobed rain too long, he ended up curled and oblivious, for if there was no figure to be seen in the falling drops of water, he felt abandoned, and if he saw anything-a shape, a movement, a form-he screamed, silently, despite all resolution to the contrary.

Other dogs were a problem, idiot dogs that, having scented them, loped into the woods, disregarding the cries of their owners to come back, come home, come play…Some trundled along like clowns, others, looking for trouble, like snipers. Baboo, especially, took umbrage, and he led his littermates in savage charges, ignoring Edgar’s protests until the marauders ran howling away.

They drifted from lake to lake, like stepping stones across a creek, moving westward through the Chequamegon. Sometimes Edgar learned the names of the lakes from leaflets inside the cabins-Phoebus, Duck-head, Yellow-but usually it was just The Lake. Without maps, they found themselves hemmed in by marshes and forced to backtrack. The dogs had long since grown expert at finding turtle eggs; one or the other would suddenly track down and run along a tangent and start to dig. The eggs ripened and grew ever more disgusting, apparently in equal proportion to their delicacy. But Edgar helped with the digging and pocketed a few for later, as rewards. He tromped along the rushes at shorelines until frogs leapt toward the waiting dogs, who pounced and munched.

He stole matches whenever he spotted them. During the day he wouldn’t build fires, wary of smoke-watching rangers in towers, but at night he allowed himself small, yellow cook fires, kindling them with papery curls of birch bark. After he tamped them out with dirt, he and the dogs slept listening to the yips and moans of beavers. At daybreak, loons cried.

THE LAKE WAS NAMED SCOTIA, and the Fourth of July holiday had brought campers in such droves that Edgar and the dogs were forced to retreat far from the cabins and campsites. Though he couldn’t be sure exactly which night the Fourth itself would fall on, firecrackers had been popping for three nights running. He’d moved them down near the lake, into the woods across the water from a small campground. He picked a spot well inland and was preparing to light a little pyramid of sticks and birch bark when a barrage of husky whistles came across the water. He turned to see red trailers in the air followed by three loud whomps. He led the dogs to the water and onto a spit of land occupied by a pine grove and they sat. The sky was filled with sculpted clouds, stars blazing in the interstices. A dozen campfires burned in the campground. He heard music and laughter and children’s shrieks. Silhouettes ran between the fires and the lake, whipping hairy sparklers through the air. A fiery beetle skittered across the beach, crackling and sparking.

Another round of rockets lifted over the water. A string of firecrackers crackled. Single and double flowers blossomed, big as moons, and in the aftermath red and blue particles showered down, reflections rising from the water to extinguish them in the meeting. The dogs sat on their haunches watching. Essay walked to the lake’s edge to nose one of the spirit embers, then turned and nuzzled Edgar for an explanation. He only sat and watched and lifted a hand to cup her belly.

Somewhere a song played on a radio. The campers began to sing, voices quavering over water. A dog howled, followed by a peal of laughter. The dog carried on, voice high and keen. After a while Tinder lifted his muzzle and howled in response. Essay was up at once, licking his face. When he wouldn’t stop, she joined in with her own yike-yike-yow! and then Baboo completed the trio. The camper’s dog listened as if considering some proposition and then yodeled again. Edgar knew he should stop them, but he liked the sound. It was lonesome in the woods that night, more than usual, and he couldn’t resist some connection, however tenuous, to those people and their festivities. The dogs chorused in rounds and the campers laughed and joined in until all but Edgar bellowed into the sky.

After a while the dogs fell silent and the campers stopped. For a time it was quiet. Then, from the hillside north of the lake, where no cabins stood and no campfires burned, there came a basso oooooooooohr-ohr-ooooh that ended in a high chatter. Edgar recognized that howl at once, though he’d heard it at the kennel that one night only-a cry of such loneliness it drove the warmth of the July night into the stars. Essay leapt up, hackles raised, then Baboo and Tinder. Edgar set his hands on their backs and guided them down and he walked out on the wind-scoured cobble and waited. A burst of nervous laughter issued from across the lake. Then, slowly, all the sounds of the night crept back: the peepers and the crickets and the swish of the wind in the trees and from farther away the rumble of heat lightning and the eerie calls of owls and nightingales and whippoorwills. But the howl had come only once, and would not again.

HE DREAMED THAT NIGHT of Almondine, her gaze unflinching, seeking the answer to some question. It woke him in the dark. When he returned to sleep she was there again. He woke in the morning desolate and weary, dwelling on the things he missed. He missed the morning chores and the simplicity of breakfast at a table. He missed television-the afternoon movie on WEAU. The softness of their lawn. Second only to Almondine, he missed words-the sound of his mother’s voice and The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language and reading and signing things out to the pups in the whelping pens.

And he woke hungry. He collected the Zebco and the satchel and kicked leaves over the dead coals of the fire and they traced the lakeshore to a spot he’d fished the day before. From the satchel he pulled one tattered leg of a woman’s nylons, rolled up his jeans, and waded barefoot into the lake. He returned with a handful of minnows in his makeshift seine. A few minutes later he popped a sunfish out of the lake, gutted it, set it aside for the dogs, and threaded another minnow onto the hook. He fed the dogs in turns, making sure each of them had their share, scaling and filleting the flesh from the bones and tossing aside the skeletons, and when he finished, he gave them each two heads to take away and crunch. He himself would not eat the fish raw. To the south was a cottage he’d raided once; if he couldn’t get into it now, he would have to wait until he could roast himself fish in the evening.

He left the rod and satchel and led the dogs away. When they were close to the cottage, he stayed them and pushed through the undergrowth for a better look. The cottage sat near the lake at the end of a long dirt drive. It was painted bright red with windows neatly trimmed in white. Two families were toting things to a car. He backtracked to the dogs and waited. He heard the chatter of children’s voices, the slam-slam-slam of car doors, and a motor starting. When all was quiet again he brought the dogs forward and stayed them at the clearing’s edge.

A second car, a brown sedan with a leatherette-covered roof, sat parked in the weedy yard. There was no sound from the cottage except for a pair of gray squirrels bouncing loudly across the roof. He looked in a window, then knocked at the door. When no one answered, he slid the window up and levered himself onto the sill. A few minutes later he slipped out carrying two peanut butter sandwiches, a package of bacon, and a stick of butter. In one back pocket he had a Hershey’s candy bar and in the other a bottle of Off!

He was passing the car again when he remembered the car keys he’d seen glinting on the countertop inside the cottage. He looked through the driver’s-side window at the stick shift on the floor, an H pattern engraved on the knob. He didn’t think he could drive it, but for a moment he let himself imagine it anyway: sitting behind the wheel as they sped along a highway, windows down, Essay up front and Baboo and Tinder in back, their heads out the windows in the streaming summer air.

And then what? How far could he get in a stolen car? How would they buy gas? What would they eat? At least the way things were now, though they moved at a crawl, there was food almost every day. With a car, there would be no waiting outside cottages, no stealth. Worst of all, taking a car would destroy the illusion that he and the dogs were long gone. The Forest Service airplane had stopped flying above the treetops a week ago. He hadn’t seen police cruisers trolling the roads since that first day. Flyers had stopped appearing in cabins. But someone who steals a car exists. He can be chased, tracked, caught. And even if they took back roads (not that he knew which back roads to take) the four of them would be a spectacle. Taking a car meant stepping out of their phantom existence and back into the real world.

He trudged back to where the dogs lay stretched out and panting. He sat and fed them strips of bacon and squeezed the stick of butter into pats they could lick from the platform of his fist. Afterward they hounded him for his peanut butter sandwiches.

Get lost, he signed. He turned around and around, then relented and pinched off a corner for each, requiring each to do some small thing. Lie down. Fetch a stick. Roll over and show their belly to the sky. But he kept the Hershey’s bar for himself, broken and softened and melted to pudding by body heat. When he’d licked his fingers clean he set off for a place he had in mind to sleep.

THE FOUR OF THEM WERE ensconced in a clearing near the fishing spot. Edgar had anointed himself with Off! and begun to doze, the dogs stretched out around him alligator-like. Clouds unfolded and unfolded beyond the treetops. Waves passed through the reeds at the water’s edge, hush, hush, and timbreless voices piped across the water-Mom, where’s that shovel? I thought I told you not to do that! Laughter. A delighted toddler’s long screeeeeeee. Go fill this up from the lake. Car doors slamming; dishes clanking, bottles breaking. Not in the car, you won’t.

Baboo lay whimpering and jerking his leg, dreaming of voles running along weedy tunnels. In his dream, he’d shrunken to their size and bounded after them, blades of grass passing swiftly as he gained, but he was full-size, too, inside and outside the tunnel, big and small at the same time. And likewise with the other dogs, drafting the warm afternoon into their chests and exhaling sighs, dreaming and listening to the whoosh and slosh of water and the wind in the trees.

At first the dogs had thought they’d left home on a lark and would soon return. Now it seemed their world had come unmoored and their home traveled with them while the earth turned beneath their feet. Creek. Forest. Marsh edge. Lake. Moon. Wind. The sun presently baking them through the treetops. Back at the kennel they’d slept near Edgar many times-in the mow, in his room in the house, even in the yard-but it had never been like these recent nights, never curled beside him so intimately that his thrashing drove them to their feet, where they stood and watched him struggle against some unseen threat. It raised their hackles. They dropped their heads beneath their shoulders and grumbled and peered around. So vulnerable he was with his blue skin in the moonlight and his arm twisted over his face and blood pulsing beneath his skin. At such times only Essay wandered off, hunting in the dark.

They worried when he walked off for food. They argued among themselves. He’s gone. He’ll come back. What if he doesn’t, what happens then. He will. Ofttimes, in his absence, the trees bent round, carrying their freight of jays and squirrels engrossed in bitter dispute. Sometimes he returned bearing delicacies unknown before. Sometimes he came empty-handed but ready to play.

That afternoon, they’d set their fretting aside. The place was familiar. There was nothing to do but flick away flies and let the sun pass. Edgar half slept, more hypnotized even by the afternoon sun than they. He didn’t catch the scent that drifted into the clearing, nor react to the sounds that, one after another, the dogs heard. It wasn’t until they leapt up-Essay first, then Tinder, and then, in a big scramble of leaves, Baboo-that Edgar finally woke and stood and saw what had happened.

BY THE TIME THE YOUNGER of the two girls reached the glade, she and her companion had long since talked themselves out. They came to a driveway cut into the woods that ended at a red cottage. A car was parked in the weeds, but no one seemed to be home. They picked their way through the woods and along the shoreline looking for a sandy spot until they found the spit of land and there the older girl walked out and sat with her back to a tree and looked across the water at the campgrounds. The younger girl dawdled her way along the reeds and sedge. She came upon a fisherman’s satchel and a child’s fishing rod propped against a tree. She looked around. There was a clearing in the woods penetrated by a shaft of sunlight and she wandered in that direction, hoping to spot the white, three-petaled trillium blossoms that were her favorites.

The boy was already watching her when she looked up. He was standing on the far side of the clearing, tall and limber-looking, with thick shocks of hair hanging across his forehead and over his eyes, all of which suggested youth, though in the bright sun his face seemed lined like an old man’s. A heartbeat later she saw the three animals standing around him, one forward and one at either side. Wolves, she thought, but of course they weren’t. They were dogs-shepherds, maybe, though not any kind she’d seen before. Their coats were chestnut and black and their tails swept down to trace the extension of their hind legs. But what struck her most was the poised stillness of their bodies, and especially their gaze, fixed on her and unwavering.

Then the boy gestured and the dogs were whisking through the clearing. One leapt away into the woods. The other two bounded toward her in an unswerving line, their shoulders rolling lionlike and their backs bowing and stretching. The sight made her gasp. When she looked up, the boy was pointing at her. He pressed an upright finger to his lips, then held the flat of his palm out in a way that clearly meant she should be quiet and stand still.

The two dogs that had crossed the clearing came to a halt in front of her, left and right. They didn’t look unfriendly but they didn’t look completely benevolent either. She took an instinctive step back, and from behind her came a disquieting rumble. She froze and turned her head. The third dog stood with its muzzle at the back of her knee. It nosed her leg and looked at her. When she put her foot back where it had been, the dogs in front of her stepped closer, and that made her sway a little, as if she were pinched in a slowly tightening vise. Yet as soon as she’d regained her balance and stood still, the dogs stepped back again.

She looked across the clearing. The boy was gone.

Now, from behind her she heard the older girl’s voice: “Jess? Let’s go. Jess?” The girl wanted to reply, but she couldn’t tell what the dogs would do if she starting hollering. Besides, there was something fascinating about the way they had lasered in on her. The way they stood just out of arm’s reach. She had the distinct sense that the dogs just wanted to keep her still. And they were beautiful, with furrowed, honey-colored brows over brown eyes that shone with an extraordinary sense of…what? Concern? Serene concern. She wondered what would happen if she talked to them. Would they step forward and touch her?

She was about to test this idea when she heard a sharp double clap. Instantly, the dog to her right dropped away, oozing into motion and disappearing into the bushes. A moment later, the dog behind her wheeled and vanished as well. But the third dog didn’t move. It stood looking at her, then stepped forward and sniffed the hem of her shorts, quivering. She held out her hand. The dog stepped back with a look of something like guilt on its face. Then it, too, bolted. She craned her neck to watch it move, so graceful and surefooted. A dozen yards away the two other dogs waited beside the boy, who was kneeling and gesturing to draw the last dog toward him. When it arrived, the boy’s hands flashed expertly along its sides and down its legs, as if checking out of long habit for injuries. The little fishing rod she’d seen earlier lay on the ground near him, and the satchel was looped over his shoulder. He stood. The dogs looked at her across their flanks one last time and then they were gone and the underbrush had flicked back into place.

She let out her breath.

I should be scared but I’m not, she thought. And, strangely: Nothing like this will ever happen to me again.

She waited another moment, then let out a whoop and raced toward the sound of the older girl’s voice.

HE KEPT THEM MOVING until it had grown so dark he couldn’t see the way. Long ago, on their first night running, the sky had been clear and a full moon had shone directly overhead, but now the moon was a waxing crescent. He chose a spot near a stand of jack pines and scraped together needles, tossing away any resinous clumps. He downed the dogs. They knew it meant no water or food for the night and a chorus of grunts and complaints followed.

Four and a half days at Scotia Lake. They should have been pushing west and north, but instead they’d lingered where the food was easy at the risk of being spotted. He’d known it was a mistake even as they’d done it. The howling had been bad enough the night of the fireworks, but now the little blond girl had gotten a good long look at him and an even better look at the dogs. He’d heard her shout as they were running from the clearing, “Hey, Diane! DIANE! Over here! Oh my God! You’re never going to believe this!”

Whoever Diane was, she’d believe it, all right. She’d believe it, and her parents would believe it, and the county sheriff’s office would believe it, too. There was nothing to do but move as far and as fast as possible and always keep away from the roads-the old plan. The only plan he’d ever had. They’d covered maybe two miles as the light waned. If they pushed hard the next day they could cover another three or four straight through the forest.

There was some good news, at least. The Zebco fishing rig, being a stubby affair, had survived their mad dash. Once they’d crossed the forest road, Edgar had cut off the hook and embedded it in the makeshift cardboard hook-book he kept in his back pocket. Afterward, he’d managed to thread the rod through the underbrush by tucking it under his arm. The other good news was how perfectly the dogs had translated the guarding game. It had been lovely to see them move through the sunlight toward the little girl. Part of Edgar had wanted to stand and watch them. Once they had surrounded her, whenever she moved, whenever she even shifted her weight, one of them pressured her back into place. And when it was time to run, they’d kept close and quiet.

Essay lay with her head beside Edgar’s knee. He listened to her stomach growl and began the arithmetic again: on foot, breaking a trail and having to sidetrack for food and water, they might advance three solid miles a day. Ninety miles in a month. It was early July. He hoped it wasn’t more than one hundred miles to the Canadian border. That put them where he wanted to go by mid-August.

He was going to need a map soon. They were still in the Chequamegon, but if they made steady progress, they wouldn’t be for long.

THE NEXT MORNING A MIST began to fall so fine it coalesced in beads on the dogs’ fur. By noon the mist had turned to rain, and when a high-skirted pine presented itself, they scuttled beneath to wait out the weather. Half an hour later, the pelting rain was deafening. Sheets of water swept across their knee-high vista. Their adopted tree shed water erratically; without warning, a chilly gush would cascade through the core of the tree and onto their backs. When he was willing to take on more water, Edgar poked his head from beneath the tree’s hem to look for a break in the clouds. The dogs alternated between groaned complaints and half-sleep, trotting into the rain to urinate and returning, shaking out at the fringe of the tree, or sometimes-to everyone’s displeasure-beneath it. The air beneath the pine began to reek of wet dog. After a while Edgar could find no position that was both comfortable and dry. His bones began to ache. Only Baboo passed the time with equanimity, head on paws, hypnotized by the sight of falling water, sometimes even rolling on his back to watch the proceedings upside down.

At first Edgar’s thoughts were practical: they needed to keep moving. He measured his own hunger to gauge how the dogs might feel. He’d gained a sense for how long they could go without. Skipping a day, he thought, would leave them distracted but not in danger. They were used to a little hunger now. In fact, except for the discomfort, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with spending a day sitting under a tree. Hadn’t they done pretty much exactly that for the previous three days?

But something in his mind made him fidget as the day passed, something he didn’t want to think about. For the first time since they’d crossed the creek at the back of their land he felt genuinely homesick, and once that began, the litany of memories quickly overwhelmed him. His bed. The sound of the creaky stairs. The smell of the kennel (which their time beneath the tree was reminding him of ever more powerfully). The truck. The apple trees, surely heavy with green fruit by now. His mother, despite the tumult of emotions surrounding her in his mind. And most ferociously, he missed Almondine. Her image appeared accompanied by a spasm of pure wretchedness. The dogs with him were fine dogs, astonishing dogs, but they weren’t Almondine, who bore his soul. Yet he kept making plans to go farther away from her and he didn’t know when he would ever be back. He couldn’t go back. His last image of her was that despondent posture, lying in the kitchen, tracking him with her eyes as he turned away. Her muzzle had grayed so in the last year. Once upon a time, she had bounded down the stairs ahead of him and waited at the bottom; lately, there had been mornings when she’d tried to stand but failed, and he’d lifted her hindquarters and walked alongside as she navigated the steps.

But what she’d lost in agility she’d gained in perception-in her capacity to peer into him. How had he forgotten that? How had he forgotten that in the months after his father’s death, she alone could console him, nosing him at precisely the instant to break some spiral of despair? How had he forgotten that some days she’d saved him simply by leaning against him? She was the only other being in the world who missed his father as much as he did, and he’d walked away from her.

Why hadn’t he understood that? What had he been thinking?

He needed only to close his eyes to feel all over again the sensation of his father’s hands reaching into him, the certainty that his heart was about to stop. The memory was too dazzling, like the memory of being born-something that, if recalled in full, would destroy a person. He couldn’t separate it from the image of his father lying on the kennel floor, mouth agape, and that final exhalation Edgar had pressed from his body. Then he thought of Claude and the look on his face when Essay had trotted up to him with the syringe in her mouth, and of the white dandelion and the patch of white grass that had surrounded it. And he thought of Doctor Papineau, eyes open and head turned at the bottom of the workshop stairs.

He was stumbling through the rain before he knew what he was doing. He didn’t care what direction he traveled, only that he moved. When he looked down, the dogs were bounding alongside. His wet clothes had warmed to the temperature of his body, but the rain flushed away the heat. He flung himself through the brush, bursting through thickets, stumbling and standing and running again. For the first time since they’d left home, true meadows appeared. Twice they crossed gravel roads-strange, unbroken lines of rusty mud. All of it washed through him, washed the thoughts away. The rain became a senseless tapping on his skin, neither warm nor cold, and he welcomed it. A July rain should never have stopped them. The danger had been in staying still so long. They encountered many fences now, some downed and rusty and more dangerous because they were difficult to see. He stripped blueberries from their stems wherever he found them and held them out to the dogs, who rolled them in their mouths and reluctantly swallowed. The cardboard holding the fishhooks dissolved in his pocket and the hooks began to poke his skin. He spent an hour standing naked from the waist down, extracting the hooks and wrapping them in layers of birch bark, and when he finished, his fingertips were puckered and raw.

Near twilight the clouds fractured and the rain let up. Tracts of deep blue appeared in the sky. They were within sight of a small hayfield of perhaps fifty acres at the far end of which stood a lone old barn. He stripped off his sodden clothes and bedded them down inside the edge of the woods. Before any but the brightest stars shone, the four of them lay overlapped and sleeping at the rim of the Chequamegon.

When he woke in the morning he didn’t understand that the dogs were gone, or even how late it was, only that a thousand pounds of sand covered each of his limbs. He lay on his back, arm draped over his face, letting the radiant sun warm his chest and arms. The absence of the dogs’ soft weight against his body meant nothing-there was only the dreamer’s logic, wishing a return to the seadreams from which he’d run aground. When his eyes finally came open, he stared at the flattened weeds where Tinder should have been sleeping and pushed himself upright and looked around. Before him lay a field gone to wild grass and milkweed. It rolled in a long upsweep to the barn he’d seen the evening before. Two hawks glided over the field, hunting and diving.

One of the dogs-Essay?-porpoised out of the weeds in the middle of the field and the others followed, arcing and disappearing into the deep grass. He stood and clapped and they worked their way across the field, zigzagging and leaping, until at last Essay burst into the clear. She carried in her jaws an enormous brown-and-black garter snake, thick in the belly and almost as long as she. She stopped near Edgar and shook it until its lifeless body writhed in the air. Baboo and Tinder whisked past, trying to snatch her prize. She trotted one way then another, until finally Tinder got hold of the snake’s tail. After a struggle, the snake separated into two parts with a string of entrails quivering between. Baboo and Tinder repeated the process with the rear half of the snake until each dog retreated with their portion.

Ugh, God, Edgar thought, turning away, not so much disgusted by the idea of their eating a snake (though garter snakes smelled foul) as their eating it raw. He wondered if the matches in his pocket were still dry; he could cook the snake for them. But by the time he dressed, nothing was going to be left. The dogs had to be ravenous, if his own stomach was any indication. Nothing else felt half as important as finding food.

He dressed in his damp clothes and gathered the dogs and they waded up through quack grass and milkweed and mullein, the dogs skating around him in wild, hooped orbits improvised on the theme of his path. The old barn stood beside a weed-shot blacktop road with no house in sight. It was the first barn they’d seen in their travels and Edgar took it as a sign they’d finally crossed the Chequamegon and were in farmland again. He pressed his eye to one of the thumb-width spaces in the barn’s siding boards. Inside sat a disk harrow and a moldboard plow, each with its spooned metal seat, and a dilapidated hay wagon whose framework back sagged like a frowning thespian mask. At the far end, an antique sower made of rusty knives and funnels. Irregular planes of light striped the machinery and the hay-strewn dirt floor as if he were looking through the ribs of a great bird-picked carcass at whatever had eaten it from within and been trapped.

The dogs ignored the barn and poked along the dilapidated barbed-wire fence bordering the road, nosing the fireweed and morning glory twisting up the fence posts. Edgar walked to the pavement. Not even the shadow of a centerline. The dogs were acting downright gay, he thought, watching them run toward him, as if relieved to have returned to the itinerant life after being pinned down in the rain. They crossed a shallow ditch together and passed through a line of trees, where an orderly two-stranded barbed-wire fence stood. The dogs slipped beneath, hardly breaking stride.

Before them stood an up-sloping field of sunflowers taller than Edgar-row upon row of sage trunks topped by hairy, fluted plates, all pointed off angle to the risen sun. They walked the edge of the sunflowers for easy traveling until a car appeared distantly on the blacktop. Edgar turned for one last look at the desiccated barn, then clapped his leg and they ducked into the gap between two infinitely receding rows of sunflower stalks.

Outside Lute

T HEY WERE HALFWAY DOWN THE FAR SIDE OF THE FIELD BEFORE the sunflowers dwindled into an open patch and Edgar stopped to look around. At the bottom of the slope the field ended at a tree-filled farmyard. The house was simple and square, with attic dormers and plain brown asphalt shingling. A long driveway hooked around behind the house to stop at a freestanding building that looked like a carriage house or shed. In front of the shed sat a battered old car. No one was walking around, no dogs lay on the back porch, no sound emanated from the small barn at the back of the yard. All he could hear was the collective hum of thousands of bees harvesting the sticky nectar glinting on the sunflower heads. The field itself was long and narrow, an alley bounded on one side by a barbed-wire fence and on the other by a solid stretch of woods. Over the treetops rose a water tower, aquamarine and round-bellied. Wide-spaced cumulus clouds languished above it all in shades of white and blue, their shadows tracing the contoured land. The name of a town was painted on the water tower’s barrel in tall white letters: Lute.

He clapped the dogs over and held their muzzles in his hand and ran his fingertips around their gums to see how thirsty they were. It gave him a chance to gauge whether Essay was in the mood to bolt or to stick, whether Tinder or Baboo were fretful. When he was satisfied that they would stay nearby-when the four of them agreed on that-they made their way to the edge of field.

During his thief’s apprenticeship, Edgar had learned not to waste much time speculating on whether a place was unoccupied or just looked that way-it was easiest to just walk up and knock. If someone stirred inside, he could always run off. And, too, his hunger made him reckless. He down-stayed the dogs (Essay walked it down inch by inch-they were going to have to practice that) and strode his most innocent walk to the back door. He heard no voices inside, no television, no radio. The sash on the small, square window beside the door was down and latched.

He knocked. When a minute passed (long enough for someone to get out of bed and start walking across the room; long enough for someone to shout, “Who is it?”; long enough for a dog to bark) he opened the screen door and tested the inside knob. To his surprise, the door swung inward and he stood looking into a neat, linoleumed kitchen with a Christmas floor mat just inside. He leaned in and knocked again, louder this time. The only reply was the click of the refrigerator compressor shutting off.

He took one more look around and then it was a mad dash. He threw open the refrigerator. Cans of beer and bottles of Coca-Cola. He grabbed a Coke and rummaged through the cabinet drawers until he found a bottle opener and upended the cold bottle against his lips. From the counter near the door he grabbed a loaf of bread and a bag of potato chips and stepped outside and tried to stroll along, though he knew, in his excitement, he was heel-walking like a dope. A patch of weeds near the edge of the field began to shake. He dove in, awkwardly signing a release before the dogs broke anyway. They weren’t idiots; they knew food when they saw it coming.

He ripped open the plastic wrapper on the bread and handed out slices all around; he gobbled one down himself, then another, following it with big washes of Coke. In a minute, half the bread was gone. He tore open the bag of chips and shoveled them in, chip after salty, crunchy chip. The dogs tried to jam their snouts into the bag. He clamped it shut, then parceled out the delights, with the dogs following his hand each time it disappeared. He smiled, bits of potato chip and bread showing in his teeth. The true depth of his hunger had only then become evident. The sight of all that food almost panicked him-he’d needed to take something modest or he’d have fainted right there in the kitchen.

He sat watching the house again, half-expecting someone to barge out of the door at last, shouting and shaking a fist. The dogs panted in his face as if to say, what are you waiting for? Then they broke into a sprint. There was no holding back. Whoever lived there might come back at any moment and the opportunity would be lost.

This was not going to be elegant, he thought.

The dogs had not been inside a house-or any building, for that matter-for many weeks. They circled skittishly at the threshold until he shooed them in. They entered slinking. He filled a big plastic bowl with tap water and put it down. They leapt forward and slobbered up the water, spookiness vanished, while he rifled the cupboards, setting food aside as he discovered it. When he opened the refrigerator his gaze fell on a package wrapped in white butcher paper. The purple-inked label read, “Bratwurst.”

They ate like starved kings. They would be gone in a few minutes and never see the place again and he fed them all as much as they could hold. He carried the bratwurst to the back door and tore the paper and spilled the rubbery links across the planks of the stoop. Even before they’d stopped writhing, the dogs were tearing at them. A jar of caramel-colored honey sat on the kitchen table, cloudy with crystallized sugar. Edgar unscrewed the top and ran a finger’s-worth out, then topped a bowl of Wheaties extravagantly with it and splashed milk over the top and stood in the doorway and watched the dogs while he shoveled the concoction into his mouth. The bratwurst was gone almost before he started to eat; the dogs licked their chops and looked at him.

Okay, he signed. Stand back.

He set his cereal down and emptied the water bowl and dumped the contents of a half dozen cans of Campbell’s Chicken Soup into it and several more of creamed corn. When his cereal was gone, their bowl had been licked clean as well. Then he walked onto the stoop with a bag of marshmallows. Three brilliant white cubes sailed through the air. He mashed one into his cheek, grinning evilly, and began another round. Halfway through the marshmallows he was suddenly done. He gestured the dogs back into the kitchen and began to search the kitchen methodically, sorting the food into what he could take and what he should put back. When he finished, he pulled a brown grocery sack from a mass of them behind the refrigerator and stuffed it with their trash. He put the can opener into the silverware drawer and refilled the plastic bowl with water and let the dogs drink. They pushed lethargically to their feet, stomachs belled out. Suddenly he thought it was stupid to have let them eat so much after a long hungry stretch. That risked bloat. But they also risked starving, came the reply. He rinsed the water dish and put it under the cupboard where he’d found it.

There was precious little they could take along. A bag of jellybeans. A flat, frosty package of bacon from the freezer. While he was looking in the freezer he found a package of stew meat, also butcher-wrapped, but too big to carry. He set it in the refrigerator where the brats had been. A jelly jar with pencils and pens and packs of matches stood on the countertop by the door. Out of habit, he grabbed the matches (“The Lute Bar and Grill”) and dropped them into his shirt pocket. Then he searched the small bathroom off the kitchen. The medicine chest contained Bactine (he took it) and iodine and mercurochrome and a scattering of small adhesive bandages in their waxed envelopes (he left them) and gauze, but no Off!

The dogs were milling around the kitchen when he came out. He hustled them out the door and removed his muddy shoes, and then he washed the dishes and rearranged the kitchen and wetted a towel that lay draped over the back of a chair and wiped up the dirt they’d tracked in. When he finished, the kitchen looked reasonably like it had before they’d arrived. The kitchen clock read one-fifteen. He carried the paper bag containing the evidence of their crime to the trash can behind the shed, lifting a fly-strewn bag from on top and jamming his beneath.

They retired to the field. He fetched the Zebco and the satchel and walked along the fence line. Halfway up the slope the Lute water tower was visible again. He heard a rumble and noticed for the first time the railroad tracks at the bottom of the bluff beside the field. A freight train appeared from the south. Out on the road, the crossing bars dropped and the bell clanged. They watched a locomotive and fifteen cars roll along. The tracks appeared to pass by Lute on a tangent. That was good luck, he thought. They might try walking the rails.

But not just then. A postprandial lethargy had taken hold of Edgar and he stumbled to where the dogs lay stretched out in the shade of the lone tree overhanging the fence. Tinder lay on his back, feet raised in a posture of surrender. Baboo and Essay faced the fence, chins on paws, gazes dreamily fixed on the horizon. As Edgar reached them, Essay heaved a roaring burp, licked her lips, and rolled onto her side. Edgar felt just the same. The sunflowers hid them nicely from the house. He sat down beside Baboo and stroked his ruff until the dog’s eyes drooped shut. Then Edgar lay back on the grass.

WHEN HE WOKE, enormous cuneiform clouds had rolled across the sky, and between them great slant columns of afternoon sunlight tilted onto the earth. He yawned and sat up. He looked around. Though evening was well along, an hour or two of good light remained, he guessed. If they started at once and the traveling went easily, they might make several miles’ progress before bedding down again. His head throbbed from sleep or feast or both. The dogs, too, seemed dazed. They stood and yawned and shook themselves out and somehow slid down to the ground again. He let them lie and snuck downfield for another look at the house.

Someone had recently arrived. A plain-looking sedan sat parked next to the stoop and the trunk was hinged open and a tall, lean man, maybe thirty years old, was hefting grocery bags out of its depths. The man had already been inside the house, for the back door stood open, but he seemed unalarmed. Edgar smiled to himself. He’d begun to take pride in his skill as a burglar. He had turned it into a kind of game-how much could he take before they noticed? How could he rearrange things to hide what was missing? People didn’t expect someone to break into their houses to steal a little food; they expected to be ransacked-to lose televisions, money, cars, to find their dresser drawers dumped, their mattresses overturned. No one in the cabins (as far as he could tell) had ever done more than scratch their heads at their depleted larder. Who stole half a loaf of bread and then cleaned up after himself? Edgar and the dogs had feasted where this man now unpacked his groceries, and there was a chance he wouldn’t even notice.

When he returned, Edgar found the dogs sniffing with great interest the package of bacon he’d taken from the kitchen of the little farmhouse. He looked at them and shook his head in disbelief. Edgar himself felt like one of those snakes that swallowed pigs whole; he didn’t actually slosh as he walked but the idea of putting more food inside his belly was laughable. He shooed them away and they pranced backward and watched him while he stuffed their loot into the satchel. Then he grabbed the Zebco and led the dogs down the bluff.

The railroad tracks veered to the northwest. A person could judge whether a train was coming, he’d read, by pressing an ear to one of the rails, and he tried it: the scored silver bar was warm but silent. The four of them trotted up the track far enough that a passing motorist wouldn’t make much of them-a boy and some dogs-and then, as the night came on, he ambled along, tie to tie, feeling content and even swaggering a bit at the thought of their success raiding the farm. Scrub wood paralleled the tracks left and right. Far ahead, a low uncovered bridge waited in the gloaming. Stories came back to him of people struck by trains as they walked the rails, and he wondered how that was possible-wouldn’t anyone hear a train thundering toward him long before it arrived? He hoped one would come by just so he could count off the seconds between the first sound of it and when it passed.

These were his thoughts when Tinder first cried out, a yike of surprise and pain that made Edgar’s stomach instantly knot in fear. He knew where each of the dogs was-Essay and Baboo had been poking along beside him on the ties, as content and lost in thought as he, but Tinder had trotted down the grade to investigate something in a stand of cattails. Probably frogs, Edgar had thought. He even recalled seeing, from the corner of his eye, Tinder stiffen and pounce. But his attention had been directed up the tracks, imagining onrushing trains. Tinder’s motion had looked unexceptional-the dogs pounced dozens of times each day, on toads, frogs, field mice, grasshoppers, who knew what.

But this time Tinder let out a shrill ai-ai and leapt back. Edgar stood watching, unable at first to move, as the dog tried to set his foot down. Tinder shrieked and threw himself down amidst the cattails, holding his right paw in the air and striking at it with his left.

Snake bite, was Edgar’s first coherent thought. Somehow that finally broke his paralysis. He crashed through the weeds below the embankment and dropped to his knees beside Tinder, but even before he touched the dog he saw the blue-green shard of glass, muddy and jagged, impaled in the bottom of the dog’s foot, and the thin spear protruding from the top. Out of reflex, Edgar grabbed Tinder’s muzzle. In days to come he would remember that instinctive motion and think he had at least done one thing right, because Tinder was about to bite the glass and would have gashed his mouth as badly as his foot.

Tinder shook off his grip and tried to scramble up. Edgar threw a leg over the dog and rolled him. Tinder lashed his body side to side, kicking a fine crimson spray over them. Then Edgar felt Tinder’s teeth on his forearm, but there was no time to see if he’d been bitten, or how badly. Somehow, he got himself kneeling over the dog. Essay and Baboo had plunged down the embankment alongside him and they danced at Tinder’s muzzle, worrying and licking his mouth. For a moment Tinder’s body went slack as he looked at the other dogs. Now, Edgar thought, knowing he might not get another chance. He gripped Tinder’s paw tightly and grasped the crudely serrated wedge of glass between his thumb and forefinger and pulled. There was a horrible sawing as the speared point slid back into Tinder’s foot. The glass was slick with blood and mud and Edgar’s thumb slipped along the edge. Had Tinder not jerked his foot back, the tearing sensation in Edgar’s thumb would have made him release the shard before it was out of the dog’s pad. He felt Tinder’s teeth on his forearm, this time harder, but by then it was already done. He dropped the piece of glass and rolled and lay on his side, squeezing his hand and looking at the ragged incision that had appeared in the fleshy front of his thumb. The cut burned like acid and he shook his hand to slake it.

Tinder hobbled away and sank to the ground near the embankment. If the sensation in Edgar’s thumb was any measure, Tinder must have been in agony. Edgar curled his thumb into his fist and ran to the dog, blood dripping from between his fingers. He sat panting. Essay and Baboo were nosing through the cattails, swiping their tails in curiosity. He stood again and ran to them, panicked at the idea of more broken glass, clapping his hands until blood splashed across his shirt. He hustled the dogs back toward Tinder, where they scented the dog along his legs and sides until they were certain they had located his wound.

The shard of glass lay in the weeds. Edgar picked it up. The broad end had three smooth ridges-threads for a jar cap. A fragment of a jelly jar or something like that, pitched into the weeds from a passing train or by another walker of ties. Bloody dirt packed the threads. He flung it angrily into the cattails and forced his thumb out straight and pulled open the gash to look at it. He felt a thump and then he was sitting. Essay was nosing him and licking his face. When his vision stopped tunneling he pushed himself to his feet, wobbled, and sank to his knees.

Wait, he thought, drawing a breath. Try again.

On his next attempt he was able to stand. He staggered over to Tinder, who lay with his paw curled inward before him, as if cradling some orphaned part of his body, sorrowfully drawing his tongue across the pad. His pelt contracted where Edgar lay a hand on it. Tinder turned away from his injury momentarily to look at Edgar. With his good hand, Edgar stroked the dog from the top of his head down along his backbone. He palpated Tinder’s back feet, hoping he would understand what was coming. Then Edgar ran his hand along Tinder’s foreleg again, this time all the way to his pad, without a protest from the dog beyond a short rumble of apprehension and a lick.

A crescent-shaped wound lay in the center of the triangular middle pad, oozing blood and dirt. Edgar didn’t attempt to touch it, but slowly-very slowly-rotated the paw until he could look at the bloodstained fur on top. He delicately touched the tips of Tinder’s claws, one by one, manipulating his toes. When he touched the second toe, Tinder whined and jerked his foot. So that was it. Something in his second toe; maybe not the bone, but there were ligaments, tendons, tiny muscles in there.

He released Tinder’s leg and stroked him and tried to think. He bent his thumb experimentally. It didn’t hurt more bent than straight, which was a good sign, but they could both probably use stitches. He stood, still wobbly, and retreated a few paces, bringing Essay and Baboo around behind him. Tinder lay watching, ears back, as if he knew what Edgar was about to ask of him.

Come, Edgar signed.

Tinder looked at him. He whined, then stood on three legs and held his damaged forefoot in the air, nosing it like a broken thing.

Edgar knelt.

I’m sorry, he signed. We have to do this. Then he recalled Tinder again.

Tinder set his foot on the ground and jerked it up. He hobbled a step, looked at Edgar, and tried again. When he finally reached Edgar, he dropped to the ground, panting, and refusing to meet Edgar’s gaze even when Edgar put his face in front of his.

He might be going into shock, Edgar thought. He ran a fingertip along Tinder’s gums. They were moist, which was good, but it was obvious that the dog couldn’t walk. Edgar got Tinder to his feet by slipping a hand under his belly. He passed one arm behind the dog’s back legs and threaded the other under his chest, careful not to touch his dangling foot. He thought if he did it wrong Tinder might bite him out of panic, and if he dropped the dog, he knew he would not be granted a second try. But Tinder panted in his face and waited and Edgar came smoothly to his feet.

Slowly he made his way up the side of the railroad embankment, digging the toe of each shoe into the gravel before trusting his weight on it. Once on top, he could take only one small step at a time, for fear of tripping on a tie. His thumb throbbed as if it had burst. Tinder hung slack in his arms, as if he’d concluded that this was how things would have to go. And that, if nothing else, made Edgar realize how badly the dog’s paw had been mangled.

Then he remembered the Zebco and the fisherman’s satchel lying beside the tracks. He didn’t turn back for them. It would be impossible to carry them anyway, and the dark was quickly becoming absolute. He would have to go back later. Far in the distance, headlights glowed then faded as a car crossed the railroad tracks beneath the bluff they had descended.

He focused on that point and took another step.

BEFORE THEY REACHED THE blacktop, he’d had to set Tinder down three times to let the knots in his back unkink. The dog was heavy-ninety pounds or more, over half Edgar’s own weight. Each time they stopped, Tinder tried to walk, managing only to hobble a few yards before lying down. The lucky thing (if that was what it could be called) was that they had gone only about a mile down the track. Essay and Baboo had stuck close by-another good thing, since Edgar had no way of signing a recall with his arms full.

He picked up Tinder. They began again.

Then they stood on the deserted blacktop. The only light came from the windows of the little foursquare house beneath the sunflower field. The adrenaline that had first powered Edgar had ebbed, and he staggered along with Tinder in his arms. The asphalt was wonderfully flat and smooth beneath his feet. When they reached the mailbox, Edgar walked up the driveway, under the row of tall trees in the front yard. The air around the house was alight with fireflies. A june bug buzzed past. Essay and Baboo charged ahead and rounded the corner of the house. The moment they disappeared, Tinder began to squirm and Edgar walked faster.

Essay and Baboo were milling about on the unlit stoop when he got there. He knelt and guided Tinder down onto the wooden planks. Then he clapped softly and led Essay and Baboo a few feet onto the grass and downed them as well.

When he turned back, a man’s face had appeared in the window above the kitchen sink. The porch light flared. Edgar checked the dogs. They lay at attention, watching. The inside door swung open and the man he’d watched carrying groceries from his car that evening looked at him through the screen.

“Can I help you?” the man said. His gaze fell on Tinder, panting on the stoop. He looked at Edgar and saw the blood. “You’ve been in an accident?”

Edgar shook his head and signed a response. The man wasn’t going to understand sign, but there was no better way to get started. With luck, he’d understand he was being signed at.

My dog is hurt. We need help.

The man watched Edgar’s hands. Edgar waited while he figured it out.

“You’re deaf,” he said.

He shook his head.

“You can hear me?”

Yes.

Then Edgar gestured toward his throat and shook his head. He made as if to write on his palm. The man looked at him blankly, then said, “Oh! Got it. Right. Just a second,” and disappeared into the house, leaving Edgar to stare into the kitchen he’d ransacked that morning.

His legs trembled as he waited. He knelt by Tinder and stroked his ruff and watched as the dog tongued his wounded paw in long strokes, eyes glassy and unfocused, as if staring into another world. In the yellow porch light his bloody fur gleamed black. Then Edgar went to Essay and Baboo and set his hands intimately under their jaws, touching them the way he would if everything were okay, and together they watched the doorway.

The man returned. He stood behind the screen holding a pencil and a pad. His gaze went to Tinder, then to Edgar squatting beside the two other dogs. Evidently, he hadn’t noticed Essay and Baboo before.

“Whoa,” he said. He put his palm forward and patted the air, as if trying to make everything stay still while he took stock of things.

“Okay. Okay. Definitely…definitely not an ordinary situation,” he said, giving Essay and Baboo a wary gaze. “They’re friendly?”

Edgar nodded. For the man’s benefit, he turned and stayed them. There was something morose about the man, Edgar thought. It was an odd idea to have about someone he’d just met, but an unmistakable aura of resignation enveloped the man, as though he were one of those people depicted in cartoons who walked around with rain clouds over their heads, people whose change fell out of their pockets when they bent down to pick up a penny. The man’s reaction to Essay and Baboo only reinforced this impression-as if he’d somehow been expecting to find a pack of ferocious dogs outside his door one day. He didn’t smile-his expression was guarded, though not unfriendly-but he didn’t frown, either. If anything, his eyes conveyed a look of benign misgiving, the result of some lifelong despondency.

“Right,” he said. “Trained. But friendly? Yes?”

Yes.

He peered into the dark. “Any more out there?”

Edgar shook his head and he’d have smiled if his stomach hadn’t been churning with anxiety. The man opened the screen door and stepped out, fixing the dogs with a doubtful look. Edgar took the pencil and the pad.

My dog cut his foot. I need water to clean it and a pan or bucket.

They looked down at Tinder.

“Are any people hurt?”

No.

“I should call a doctor,” the man said.

Edgar shook his head vehemently.

“What’s wrong with your voice? Did you hurt your throat somehow?”

No.

“You’ve always been that way?”

Yes.

The man thought for a second.

“Okay, wait, I’ll be right back,” he said.

He walked inside. Edgar heard some clanking and rattling and then water running in the kitchen sink. In a moment, the man emerged carrying a white enamel pot, water sloshing over the sides. A ratty blue towel was tucked under his arm.

“Here,” he said, setting the pot down on the planks of the stoop. “It’s warm. You can get started with this. I’ll get you a bucket and see what else I’ve got.”

Edgar carried the pot to Tinder and ladled up a handful of water and held it out for the dog to smell. Tinder was panting hard, and he licked the water from his fingers. Edgar dipped the rag into the water and ran his hand down Tinder’s foreleg. The dog whined and poked his nose at Edgar anxiously but let him dab at the dirt on his foot. Edgar rinsed the rag. The water clouded and turned brown. He pressed his face to Tinder’s muzzle while he soaked the cloth against Tinder’s pad again and again. Each time the rag came away covered with a mixture of blood and muck.

The man emerged carrying a metal bucket and walked to a spigot that projected from the house’s foundation. It squeaked when he turned it. Fresh water sprayed out. While the bucket was filled, he turned to Edgar.

“If I bring this over, will it spook your dog?”

Edgar had his arm over Tinder’s back. He didn’t think a stranger’s approach would scare him, but it was a good question to ask, and his opinion of the man went up a notch.

No.

The man toted the bucket over and set it a cautious distance away and sat. The water in the small enamel pot was gritty and brown. The man reached over and tipped the dirty water out and dipped it into the bucket and returned it.

Essay and Baboo groaned behind Edgar. It had been a mistake to place them where his back would be turned, making them more likely to break their stays out of curiosity. He sat up straight, keeping one hand on Tinder’s withers, and gestured at the man to stay still. The man nodded. Edgar turned and looked at the two dogs, who tucked their feet and locked gazes with him.

Come, he signed.

They bounded forward. Edgar worried that Tinder would forget his wound and rise to meet them but the pressure of his hand between the dog’s shoulder blades kept him steady. Essay and Baboo charged around them, heads reared back to get close with their chests while taking the stranger in widely.

“I hope you meant it when you said they were friendly,” the man said. He was sitting very straight, trying to look at them both at once. Then he gave up and just looked at whichever dog happened to be in front of him.

“Whoa buddy,” he muttered. “Okay. Okay.”

When they’d discharged enough of their curiosity, Edgar clapped and gestured to a spot in the grass nearby. At first they refused. Edgar clapped again, and they trotted over, grumbling. He’d selected a spot where they could watch what was going on, and he felt them relax now that they could make eye contact with him. He turned back to cleaning Tinder’s paw. The fresh water had dirtied again, though now more bloody than brown.

“You’re hurt, too,” the man said. Edgar nodded. His thumb blazed each time he dipped it into the wash water, but it reminded him how Tinder felt when he dabbed the cold cloth across his paw.

“What happened?”

Edgar stopped washing Tinder’s paw long enough to pantomime spiking the flat of one hand on two fingers of another.

“Uh. Ouch,” the man said. He watched in silence for a while.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Tell you what. I’m going back inside to see what I’ve got in my medicine cabinet. Here, let me get that-” He reached over and dumped the pan and refilled it from the bucket again. “I might have mercurochrome or hydrogen peroxide.”

Edgar concentrated entirely on Tinder now. He’d cleaned most of the dirt away and he needed to swab between Tinder’s toes and around the pad. He maneuvered the dog’s paw so that he could submerge it in the small pan entirely. The water turned brown. Tinder yelped and jerked, but Edgar slowly worked his fingers between Tinder’s toes again, dumping the water several times while the man was gone.

Then the man was squatting down in front of them. He set down a metal pan wrapped with tin foil, on top of which lay a collection of bottles retrieved from his medicine chest. One of them was Tylenol. He opened the bottle and held out two capsules.

“Maybe you should take a couple of these,” he said.

Edgar popped them into the back of Tinder’s mouth at once and pointed the dog’s muzzle upward and stroked his throat until his tongue swiped his nose. Then he scooped up a handful of clear water from the bucket and let Tinder lap it. The man nodded. He held out two more capsules, which Edgar quickly swallowed.

“Right,” the man said. “Also, I’ve got something these guys might be interested in.” He folded back the foil and lifted a hunk of browned stew meat between his thumb and forefinger-the meat Edgar had taken from the freezer that morning to replace the stolen bratwurst. “I just made this tonight. It’s even a little warm yet.”

Edgar nodded and released the two watchers. There was a time, he thought, when the dogs would have checked with him before accepting food from a stranger; they’d been drilled on it in town. But that was a remnant of a life long gone, cast aside by animals who hunted frogs and snakes and ate ripe turtle eggs. Essay and Baboo arranged themselves around the man, ears up, waiting their turn as he flicked hunks of glistening beef onto the grass. The man acted almost bashful under their combined gaze. With trepidation, he allowed Tinder to take the meat directly from his hands. But Edgar was grateful for any distraction that allowed him to more thoroughly wash Tinder’s wound. When the meat was gone, the man let Tinder lick the gravy off his fingers and pushed the pan out with his foot for the other dogs to clean up. He had a wry expression on his face. Edgar got the feeling this might be the happiest the man could look.

“Call it what you will,” the man said, “but this is definitely not ordinary.”

Henry

W ITH EDGAR’S HANDS OCCUPIED, THE CONVERSATION REMAINED lopsided. Essay and Baboo lay in the grass, sated, observing the proceedings by the glow of the moth-crossed porch light. Edgar lifted Tinder’s paw and examined the flayed wound in the center of his swollen, heart-shaped pad.

“Jeez, that’s gruesome,” the man said, as Edgar dabbed Tinder’s foot. “He’ll be lucky ever to use that thing again.” After another moment’s thought, he added, “Your thumb doesn’t look so great, either.”

Edgar replaced the water in the enamel pan and went back to washing Tinder’s paw. Threads of blood diffused into the water. The outside tap water was icy, but that was okay-he wanted it as cold as possible. If he could barely feel his hands, maybe Tinder would barely feel his injury.

He worked the bones of Tinder’s foot, lifting and pressing the toes like piano keys, tracing Tinder’s nails with his own, pressing his fingertips into the soft caves between the pads. Gently, gently, he opened the incision, letting the dog tell him where the pain was. When Tinder snatched his paw away, Edgar closed his eyes and pressed his face into Tinder’s ruff, stroking his chest and jaw, listening to the rush of blood through the dog’s neck, making Tinder realize how important the water was, asking over and over if they could try just once more. After a time Tinder let Edgar lift his foot back into the pan. Edgar waited until his fingers numbed, then began to rock the wound open, let the water flush it clean again.

When he opened his eyes, the pan had been refilled with fresh, cold water.

“That’s really something,” the man said. “Sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s you or the dog moving his foot.”

Edgar nodded.

“You know him real well, huh?”

Yes.

“Same with the other dogs?”

Yes.

“It’s okay that he’s got his teeth on your arm like that?”

Edgar nodded. Yes, yes.

He continued to work Tinder’s foot. When the water stayed clear, he sorted through the medicines on the stoop. He dumped the hydrogen peroxide into the pan, pouring it over Tinder’s paw. It fizzed at Tinder’s pad and the pursed white flesh on Edgar’s thumb. When the fizzing stopped, he propped Tinder’s paw over his leg and padded it dry. The man went inside and returned with a towel and a rag and some scissors.

“I don’t have gauze, but if you want you can wrap it in this,” he said.

Edgar nodded and took the pencil and paper.

Do you have a sock? he wrote.

“Right,” the man said, and disappeared into the house again.

He cut the rag into strips and wrapped Tinder’s foot and tied off the ends of the bandages so they wouldn’t come loose. The man returned with a white sock in his hand. Edgar secured it with the last strip.

“Okay, look,” the man said. “I need sleep. Work tomorrow.” He looked doubtfully at the dogs. “I’m guessing you won’t go inside without them?”

No.

The man nodded as if accepting another in a long series of humiliations.

“Tell me they’re housebroken. Lie if you have to.”

Edgar nodded.

“All right, come on. We’ll figure out what’s next in the morning.”

Edgar called Baboo and Essay and hastily washed their feet. The man held the door, bleakly ceremonious, as the dogs trotted over, raising their noses at the threshold to scent the air, and walked into the kitchen. Edgar knelt and arranged Tinder in his arms and staggered sideways through the doorway.

“Left,” the man said.

Edgar sidestepped along a short hall. Tinder sniffed at the coats hanging from the hooks as they passed. Then he was standing in a living room with a sofa, an overstuffed chair, bookcases, and a television with a phonograph on top. The floors were beat-up hardwood, deeply grooved and darkened with age. He lowered Tinder to a throw rug in front of the sofa. The dog tried to stand, but Edgar lifted his front feet from under him and set him down again. By the time the man appeared with a pillow and a pair of blankets, he had all the dogs downed and stayed.

“Here,” the man said. “I’d appreciate it if you slept with one of those blankets under you, what with the mud and everything.”

Edgar looked down at himself and realized that, though he had cleaned up the dogs, he was covered with a mixture of dried blood and dirt.

“Get some sleep-not that I think you need me to tell you. You’re swaying, you know that, right? The bad news is, I have to be up early tomorrow for work. There’s a bathroom off the kitchen. I put some Band-Aids and some antibiotic goop on the end table, if you want to take care of that thumb.”

Edgar nodded.

The man took another long look at the dogs.

“When they start chewing on things, try to steer them over to that chair, would you?” He jerked his thumb at an overstuffed armchair in the corner. It was upholstered in orange and brown. Images of ducks were involved in the pattern. “I hate that chair,” he said.

Edgar looked at him, trying to decide if he was making a joke.

“By the way,” he said. “My name’s Henry Lamb.”

He held out his hand. Edgar shook it and then Henry walked to a doorway off the living room and turned and looked back.

“I don’t suppose you have people you want called? Family? Someone to come get you?”

No.

“Yup,” Henry grunted. “Had to ask.”

Edgar was too tired to wash up. He spread the blanket over the couch and lay down. His head ached with fatigue; his thumb just plain ached. He took the Band-Aids and slathered antibiotic ointment over the raw and puckered wound on his thumb. He was still trying to decide if he had the energy to turn out the light when a wave of exhaustion swept him away, the ointment and the Band-Aid wrappers still lying on his chest.

THE SOFA SHOULD HAVE BEEN a rare pleasure. Instead, his sleep was plagued by absences: Why did the night withhold its panoply of sounds? Where were the bodies of the dogs that warmed him in the dark? He drifted near sleep like a buoy off a shore, until sometime in the night the great rock python Kaa materialized and looped his iridescent coils around Edgar’s legs and chest. It was comforting to meet a figure he recognized, yet how oddly like cotton Kaa’s reptilian skin felt under his fingertips, warm and downy and shot through in places with something almost like a turned hem. The wedge of Kaa’s head swayed before him, lisping nonsense, but even that master hypnotist couldn’t draw him deeper into sleep. Missing dogs. Smothering quiet. Snake’s coils.

When dogs began to bark, Edgar jumped up, electrified by the alarm in their voices. He didn’t bother to disentangle himself from what he knew to be a dream figment, but somehow Kaa had passed into the waking world and taken the form of a blanket wrapped tightly around his legs. Considering how briefly he remained vertical, Edgar gleaned an admirable amount of information about the situation: there was Essay and Baboo and Tinder, hackles raised, fixated on something across the room; there was Henry Lamb, the object of their attention, wrapped in a threadbare checkered bathrobe, standing puffy-faced and startled in his bedroom doorway; and beyond the living room window there was a perfectly nice summer morning pouring itself into the yard. Then all Edgar saw were chair legs and carpeting, because he was busy crashing to the floor. The dogs turned to look at him. Their shoulders drooped and they began to sweep the air with their tails, gulping and panting in postures that said, possibly, they’d overreacted. Baboo pressed his nose into Edgar’s ear and slobbered to make amends.

Henry slumped against the doorway. He attempted speech, but only a grunt came out. He shuffled past and into the kitchen.

“Coffee if you want it,” he croaked after a while.

Edgar settled the dogs and knelt beside Tinder. The bandage was still on his foot, which surprised Edgar and worried him, too. Had Tinder been healthy, he would have chewed it off in the night. With his hand under Tinder’s belly, Edgar coaxed the dog into taking a few steps.

Good, Edgar thought, watching Tinder hold his foot aloft. At least he’s not going to try walking on it.

When Edgar came into the kitchen with the dogs, Henry was sitting at the table cradling a coffee cup. Edgar tipped open the door and Essay and Baboo began trotting around the weedy lawn between the house and barn. Edgar lay his hand on Tinder’s back to guide him outside. The dog hobbled a few steps, urinated, and hobbled back. When he stepped back into the kitchen, the shower was running and Henry’s cup sat empty on the counter. Edgar poured himself some coffee. He found milk in the refrigerator and sugar in a little bowl by the window. The result was bitter and thick but it shocked him awake. He sat on the stoop next to Tinder.

Henry walked outside, car keys jingling in one hand, a lunch bucket in the other.

“Had time to think about what you’re going to do today?” he said, easing down next to them.

Edgar shook his head. This was a lie. What to do that day was exactly what he’d been worrying about, watching Tinder and trying to guess how long his bandage would last if they started walking. Or if Tinder could walk at all.

“How’s your dog?”

Edgar shrugged.

“Right. Probably too soon to tell.”

They sat watching Essay and Baboo.

“Okay, here’s the thing,” Henry said. “While I was showering I tried to figure what most people would do in my place. Like, what’s the ordinary way to handle this? Call the police, I suppose, tell them I’ve got a lost kid and three dogs on my hands. That’s my first instinct, so I don’t trust it-it doesn’t show much imagination, you know?”

Edgar nodded.

“So I’m not going to do that. I mean, I don’t think I’ll do that.”

Henry turned to give Edgar a look-a meaningful look-though Edgar couldn’t be sure exactly what its meaning was. It struck him again how there was something likable about the man’s defeatist sincerity. Henry Lamb saw the world as filled with road blocks and difficulties, or so it seemed. He conveyed, somehow, the impression that no bad news would surprise him, that every situation was a double-bind waiting to be discovered.

“Look,” Henry said, “I’m telling you right now I’m not trustworthy. I was once, but not anymore. No promises. Nowadays I’m reckless and unpredictable.” He said this without a hint of irony in his voice.

Edgar blinked.

“I’m going to leave the house unlocked. You can stay if you want, give your dog’s foot time to heal.”

Edgar nodded his head. They sat on the edge of the stoop and looked at the sunflowers. It was very early in the morning, and the sun was just preparing to slip over the horizon, but already their enormous dished heads were tipped eastward.

“I don’t suppose you’re planning to rob me blind.”

Edgar shook his head.

“Well, what else could you say? But if I kick you out and lock the door, you could just put a rock through the window, so what good would that do? I’ve got to either trust you or call the police and take most of the day off to deal with that.”

He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt and walked to his car.

“Could be, I’m stupid. Just in case, I’ll tell you right now there’s hardly any money in there, and nothing much valuable you could carry on foot-no jewelry, nothing like that. No guns. Kitchen’s stocked up, though. I just went shopping yesterday. Eat anything you like-you look like you’re starving. Stay out of my bedroom. Don’t mess with this car”-he gestured to the wreck on blocks-“and the TV’s busted. Anything else you want to know?”

No.

Henry backed his sedan around. As he pulled up to the house, he leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window. “If you do leave,” he said, “lock the door. But don’t, otherwise, unless you want to wait outside until I come back-the only other set of keys is in my desk at work.”

He idled down the driveway and then there was the sound of tires on blacktop, fading in the direction of Lute.

EDGAR STAYED ON THE STOOP, sipping Henry Lamb’s noxious coffee. The house sat in a pocket of morning shadow behind the sunflower field; the cloudless sky was shot with white rays, as if someone had thrown powdered sugar into the air. A faint turpentine odor drifted off the sunflowers.

Essay and Baboo were snooping along the perimeter of the barn. When Tinder whined, Edgar signed a release and the dog hopped forward. He stopped and solemnly nosed his bandaged foot, then persevered until he reached the other dogs, tapping his foot lightly on the ground as he hitched along. The dogs sniffed one another. Then Tinder limped back to the stoop and lay down, sighing.

Watching the dog move told Edgar it would be two weeks-two, three, even-before they could travel, assuming Tinder’s paw didn’t get infected, and he hadn’t cut a tendon or ligament so vital he would (as Henry had so delicately suggested) be crippled. The irony was that if any of the dogs was going to hurt himself through foolish exploration, it should have been Essay, not Tinder. Tinder had just been unlucky-and hunting frogs, no less, always harmless in the past.

So did they have any choice but to accept Henry’s offer? The man didn’t seem to know the first thing about dogs. Edgar doubted Henry had any idea how long Tinder’s convalescence would last, or what it took to feed three hundred pounds of hungry dog every day. Edgar had no money to pay for food. Without a lake nearby, and no cabins to pilfer, fishing and burglary weren’t options.

Plus, to top it all off, Henry was such a strange character. His warning about not being trustworthy-people didn’t say things like that. At the same time, Henry clearly liked them. He’d even glimpsed the man smiling after the morning’s ruckus. Or maybe that had just been his reaction to the sight of Edgar toppling to the floor. But even if Henry had been sincere in his offer, on his drive to work (wherever that was) he could decide he’d made a mistake-what was he doing, turning his house over to a stranger? The next thing Edgar would know, a squad car would be pulling into the yard. After weeks in Chequamegon woods, Edgar felt sure that, able-bodied, they could evade any single pursuer. But with Tinder lame, and so many open fields around, there would be no ducking anyone. Not unless they had a long, long head start.

Of course, that was an option. They could leave, right that moment. Tinder’s wound would slow them down, but it wouldn’t stop them. He’d carried Tinder a mile the night before-true, his back was still aching like the blazes, but he could do it again if he had to. So what if they could go only a mile a day? A mile up the track from Henry’s house was as good as the next county, for all anyone knew, and once they got to a lake, they could lay up for a long time. Until now, they’d depended on no one. It was the one plan he knew worked.

He clapped Essay and Baboo back and led them all into the house. He started the water running in the shower and stripped. As the small mirror over the sink fogged, he looked at himself: hawk-thin, face dotted with mosquito bites, hair bleached brown and hanging over his blue eyes. The weeks they’d spent fending for themselves had burned away the softness in him, and he looked like a sight hound, edgy and strung up tight.

Also, he was filthy. The dirt on his sunburnt neck stopped somewhere around his shoulders. He fiddled with the temperature of the water, then stepped into the shower and pulled the white plastic curtain and lathered up. He let the steaming water course over his body. Despite his daily doses of Off!, every inch of his skin seemed to have been dinner for some horsefly, chigger, or mosquito. When the hot water was drained, he pushed back the curtain. Essay and Baboo stood peering quizzically through the doorway. He smiled and grabbed a towel and brandished it like a toreador.

After he’d dressed, he filled a bowl with Wheaties, milk, and honey and carried it with him as he looked around the house. The hallway was covered with pictures-an elderly couple posed before a studio backdrop, Henry’s parents, he guessed; some pajama’d children holding up toys beside a glittering Christmas tree; a younger Henry, in the lobby of a large building, next to his parents, a doubtful expression on his face. On the end table he noticed a portrait of a cherubic woman, signed in a loopy swirl, “Love, Belva.” The television remained dark when Edgar switched it on, but there was a record player in working order. On the bookshelves he found a stack of car repair manuals and some Bell System handbooks-it looked like Henry worked for the telephone company.

The bedroom door was closed. He considered opening it, but everything in the house was somehow of a piece, and he could easily imagine the plain bed, the linens rumpled but not too rumpled, the checkered bathrobe flung down. The dresser. The closet. More family pictures on the wall. Staying out of there was the only thing Henry had asked. He hadn’t even asked them not to rob him-which they had already done, gluttonously, and without a shred of remorse.

Edgar walked back to the kitchen and rummaged. He poured four cans of beef stew into one bowl for Essay and Baboo, and two cans of turkey and dumplings into another for Tinder, and set the bowls out. While they ate he peeled the Band-Aid off his thumb and inspected his wound. The cut was deep and ugly, but it was clean. He began rolling the sock off Tinder’s foot. His mind’s eye conjured the sight of Tinder thrashing on his back, spear of glass glinting both above and below. He hoped his imagination had made Tinder’s injury worse than it was-that it might look benign by the light of day.

It did not. A brown stain had formed on the dressings. Tinder licked and pulled at the bandage as Edgar unwound it. With difficulty, he rolled the dog onto his side and turned his foot upward. The pad had swollen to twice its normal size. He forced himself to part the wound and was rewarded with a spine-tingling view of pink and gray meat and a glimpse of a white cord contracting. Then he had to stop, partly because his head was swimming, and partly because Tinder yelped and yanked his foot away, licking it with long, slow swipes and looking reproachfully at Edgar.

The enamel wash pan sat on the counter. He filled it with warm water and metered out four drops of dish soap. Tinder threatened to revolt when Edgar set it on the floor. Edgar wrapped his hand around Tinder’s muzzle and looked him in the eye.

Get used to it, he signed. We’re going to do a lot of this.

FROM THEIR VANTAGE POINT in the field, Edgar watched Henry’s car stop beside the mailbox, then roll along the driveway. It was late afternoon, and he and the dogs had retreated to the spot where they’d slept away the previous afternoon, the best compromise he could think of between staying and going. Although Tinder couldn’t put the slightest weight on his foot, when Edgar had tried to carry him, he’d thrashed so mightily Edgar had set him down at once, afraid he might jump and compound his injury. Reluctantly, he’d let the dog pick his way along the fence line, taking half an hour to complete the journey. But once they were settled, Edgar felt much better. He’d taken a chance that morning and down-stayed the dogs in the house and run up the tracks to fetch the Zebco and the satchel from the railroad embankment. Now the fishing equipment was hidden amidst the sunflowers. In a few seconds they could all be hidden amidst the sunflowers, even Tinder.

Down below, Henry stepped out of his sedan, a bag of groceries under his arm and lunchbox in hand. He called out and opened the back door, then disappeared inside. They had left the house empty and unlocked, without even a note of thanks. It was rude, but he couldn’t leave evidence that he and the dogs had been there, in case Henry arrived accompanied by-well, who knew who might tag along, or follow a few minutes behind?

Henry returned to the stoop, beer in hand. He looked around the yard. Edgar ducked, and when he raised his head again, Henry stood on the road, staring along the blacktop and shaking his head. Then he dragged a round-bellied barbeque grill from the barn to the stoop. He produced a bag of briquettes and a can of lighter fluid and soon flames jumped out of the black hemisphere and heat waves shimmered above.

In short order Henry carried out two kitchen chairs and a card table which he unfolded on the lawn. He set plates on each side of the table and populated the center with a bag of thick brown rolls, bottles of ketchup and mustard, and a dish of something that was either potato or macaroni salad. He used a drinking glass as a weight over a small sheaf of paper and he dropped a pair of yellow pencils into it. Then he unwrapped a package of what could only be fresh bratwurst and arranged them on the grill and opened a can of baked beans and let it heat beside the brats. When everything was cooking to his satisfaction, and a column of smoke rose off the grill, Henry sat in one of the chairs and unfolded a newspaper.

Watching it all made Edgar smile. If they had been spotted, Henry could have just shouted to them without going through this performance. Probably, though, Henry had no idea whether they were nearby, much less watching. It was an interesting act of faith from a man who declared himself reckless and unpredictable. If anything, Henry struck Edgar as wildly dependable-making dinner and acting out this invitation for guests he couldn’t even be sure existed.

And though he hated to admit it, Henry’s plan was working. After the previous day’s orgiastic meal, Edgar had thought he wouldn’t eat for a week, but now his mouth was watering. Every time he looked, something new had appeared on the table. Pickles. Root beer. Something wrapped in butcher paper. What looked like lemon meringue pie. Yet they couldn’t walk into that yard. Short of waiting, there was no way to be positive the man hadn’t told the sheriff’s department to stop by around, say, nine o’clock, when he could be sure the kid would be sitting in his house.

When the bratwurst finished cooking, Henry juggled the hot can of beans with an oven mitt and dumped them into a bowl. He stacked the sausages on a plate and set the plate on the card table and casually helped himself, scooping out a mound of potato salad and a dollop of baked beans. Then he quartered the newspaper in a flapping commotion and plucked a pencil from the empty glass across the table and began to work the crossword. Maybe it was Edgar’s imagination, but he thought he could smell the spicy aroma of cooked bratwurst all the way up in the field. Baboo certainly could. He sidled up to Edgar and panted anxiously in his ear. Edgar smoothed his hand absently along the dog’s topline.

A half-dark had fallen. A handful of stars had emerged in the clear azure sky. He stood and clapped quietly to bring Essay forward. When she didn’t appear at his side, he suddenly understood that Baboo hadn’t been panting over food. He whirled and clapped more loudly. When he turned back, Essay was already trotting into the circle of the porch light, her gait jaunty, her tail slashing prettily through the air, swinging her front legs in wide circles as she ran, as if greeting a long-lost friend. Henry set down his newspaper. Essay finished before him in a perfect sit, perhaps three inches away.

“Hello, you,” Henry said, leaning back. His voice carried up the slope in the still evening air. Even from that distance Edgar could see Essay giving Henry the moocher’s eye, sitting up straight, perking her ears, swishing her tail.

Baboo, standing beside Edgar, began to whine and stomp.

Sit, Edgar signed.

With a bitter groan Baboo sat, then sidled to his left for a better view. Then Tinder hobbled forward. The two of them sat scenting the air, heads bobbing and tilting like marionettes whenever Henry spoke.

There’s no use now, Edgar thought. He walked to Tinder and knelt. You’re not running down there on that foot, he signed. He got the dog up and put his arms underneath him and looked him in the eye. When they understood each other, he released Baboo, then put one arm under Tinder’s belly and the other under his chest and stood. Tinder was heavy, but his weight was becoming familiar, and Edgar took slow, careful steps down the hill.

Henry took a swallow of beer and watched them approach. In the last fifty feet, Baboo discarded any shred of reserve and bolted forward, skidding into a sit beside Essay. The two dogs looked back and forth between Edgar and Henry. Then Essay trotted back to meet Edgar and Tinder, oblivious to the look Edgar gave her and tossing her head as if escorting them to a fête, all of it her idea.

Tinder had been patient on the walk down, but now he began to wriggle in Edgar’s arms. Edgar lowered him to the ground. The dog nuzzled Essay then hopped across the grass. In a moment, Henry was ringed by dogs. Given all his preparations, Edgar expected Henry to issue a cheerful invitation, but he didn’t know Henry very well yet.

“I thought you’d run off,” Henry grunted, looking over the dogs’ heads at him. He gestured toward the food. “Have a brat. I burned them pretty bad, but I guess they’re better than nothing.”

AFTER EDGAR STUFFED A BRAT into a bun and scooped potato salad onto his plate, Henry gestured toward the white parcel on the table. Edgar unwrapped it to find three large soup bones with shreds of raw, red meat attached and plenty of marrow.

“Guy at the meat locker told me those were good ones for dogs,” he said.

Edgar nodded. He offered the package to Henry so that he could hand them out, but Henry shook his head. “Thanks anyway, but I was planning on using all my fingers tomorrow,” he said. By that time the dogs had scented the bones and were waiting when Edgar crouched beside his chair. They trotted off to grind their teeth against the shanks and imagine, with unfocused gazes, the animal from which the bones had come.

Then, as if Edgar’s arrival weren’t of the least interest, Henry returned to his crossword puzzle. Occasionally he sat back and tapped his pencil and looked into the dark, as lost in thought as the dogs.

Finally, he set the pencil down and opened a fresh beer. “Darn it,” he said. “I need a twelve-letter word meaning ‘butterfly-like.’ Starts with L.”

Edgar looked at Henry. He picked up a pencil and wrote, Lepidopteral, and pushed the paper across the table.

Henry turned back to the crossword. “Nice,” he said. “What can you get for a…let’s see…six-letter word for ‘echo.’ Ends with R-B.”

Edgar thought for a moment and, beneath his previous entry, wrote reverb.

“Yep. Yep. That works again,” Henry said. “Aha-lentil!” he cried, and filled in another row. “One left. Eight-letter word for ‘Formed of fire or light.’ Starts with E, ends with L.”

Edgar shook his head.

“All right, forget it. I got close. Thanks for the help.” He set the paper down, divided the pie into six slices, passed a plated slice to Edgar, then took one of his own. He pointed his fork at Tinder, who busily gnawed his soup bone. “How’s that guy’s foot?” he asked.

Bad, Edgar wrote. Swollen.

“His main problem is going to be infection, you know that, right?”

Yes.

“You wash it out again today?”

He held up four fingers.

Henry nodded. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, am I?”

Edgar shrugged, not wanted to seem ungrateful.

Henry ate a forkful of pie and looked at him. “I don’t mean to pry,” he said, “but it would make things a little easier if you told me your name.”

Edgar sat mortified while Henry finished his pie. In all his thinking and planning throughout the day, this was one detail that hadn’t crossed his mind. He couldn’t simply write his real name down. After years of naming pups, he thought, it ought to be simple to come up with a name for himself. But he didn’t have days or weeks to think this over. He tried to cover his confusion by helping himself to a second slice of pie. He looked at the dogs. Then an idea came to him. He scribbled on the paper and pushed it over to Henry.

“Nathoo?” Henry said, doubtfully. “You don’t look much like a ‘Nathoo.’ Is that Indian or what?”

Call me Nat, Edgar wrote.

Henry looked at him.

“What do you call your dogs?”

The words Essay, Baboo, and Tinder appeared on the paper. Henry repeated them, pointing to each of the dogs in turn.

Yes.

Then, to get Henry off the subject of names, Edgar decided it was time to clean Tinder’s foot once more. He filled the enamel pan with soapy water and carried it out to Tinder.

“This going to take as long as it did last night?” Henry asked.

Edgar nodded.

“Then I’m turning in. Make yourself comfortable when you’re done.”

Henry gathered up the remains of dinner, as well as the card table and chairs. By the time Edgar rewrapped Tinder’s foot, Henry had retired to his bedroom. Edgar led the dogs inside and downed them on the rug in the living room.

He hoped the previous night had been a fluke, but as soon as he stretched out on the sofa it became clear he’d lost the ability to sleep on upholstered furniture. This had not previously seemed to be a skill. Just weeks before he had regularly slept in a bed, under sheets and blankets, with a roof overhead and a single small window through which to view the night. Now his body insisted he was in a chamber. The night sounds came through the half-open window as if down a long pipe. The pliability of the sofa cushions felt all wrong; far more comfortable than twigs gouging his side and bugs biting, but in the forest he and the dogs had slept touching one another-if any of them moved, the others knew it at once. Now he was forced to reach down to touch the dogs at all, and even then it was only with his fingertips. And anyone could walk up to the window before he knew it.

Finally, he stood, blanket wrapped around him, and led the dogs through the kitchen and onto the flat expanse of the stoop. They bedded down in a tangle of canine and human limbs with the house comfortably at their flanks, eight eyes and eight ears facing into the night. One by one the dogs exhaled deep sighs. Overhead, cool white stars arced in the black sky. The moon and the thin corona around the moon shone. It looked to him empyreal-formed of light or fire-the word that would have completed the crossword puzzle. Why hadn’t he wanted to tell Henry? He pondered that question while the night sounds eddied around them, but before an answer came, he’d fallen asleep.

Ordinary

B IRDSONG. SCENT OF PERCOLATING COFFEE. HENRY PUSHED open the screen door and looked at Edgar and the dogs lying curled and overlapped and shook his head as if they were the most pitiful sight he’d ever seen. Baboo was the first to rise, splaying his front feet and ambling sleep-drunk to Henry. Edgar tightened his grip on Tinder and Essay, but they were awake and panting. Water rang through the pipes in the house and the shower hissed. Edgar pushed himself up and walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee and brought it back out on the stoop. Essay remembered her soup bone, which reminded the other dogs, and the sky brightened to the sound of three sets of teeth scraping bone. They barely looked up when Henry walked out, lunch bucket in hand. He dropped a pair of canvas work gloves onto the porch beside Edgar.

“Follow me,” Henry said. He walked to the shed and jiggled a bent bolt out of a flap latch and threw open the doors. “Here’s the deal. I want to park that car”-he gestured at the rusting monolith on the cinderblocks-“in this shed.”

Viewed from the outside, Henry’s shed was unremarkable if slightly ramshackle. It measured maybe fifteen feet wide and twice that deep, a windowless little structure with a peaked roof and sun-blasted white paint. But inside lay a junkyard in miniature. It took Edgar a moment before he could make his eyes settle on any one thing. The walls were encrusted with hubcaps, spools of wire, license plates, ancient tire irons, hand saws, rakes, hoes, scythes, circular saw blades, and a menagerie of antique iron tools, rusted and strange. Coils of chain link lay heaped around the perimeter like petrified snakes. A length of rain gutter crumpled and folded. An unframed mirror footed by dusty, cracked sheets of plate glass. There was a stack of rusty buckets overflowing with doodads and piece parts. Off to one side, a crumbling pyramid of red bricks topped by a thick rope, shedding fibrous creepers. Plywood sheets, delaminated like picture books fished out of a puddle. There were mounds of tires, stacks of newspaper oatmealing in place, wash pans haphazardly stacked, their enamel crazed like desert mud. A squat brown anvil. Toward the back, a cylindrical wringer washer lurked, and what looked to be either a fire hydrant or part of a truck transmission.

And all that was around the edges. At the center stood-or stooped, rather-an ancient hay wagon. It gave the impression of a broken-backed animal driven to the ground by its burden. Three of its wheels had sprung out to the sides in expressions of shock and exasperation. Its front axle had buckled, tilting the fourth wheel inward, and the whole rotted platform melted diagonally back to front beneath a mountain of timber, shingles, doorframes, rolls of barbed wire, and rust-red stanchions. Had the wagon still been on its wheels, the debris would not have cleared the lintel.

“You see my problem?” Henry said.

Edgar nodded. He looked at the ruined car on its blocks. It definitely belonged in the shed, he thought. Then Henry laid out his plan-what to tackle first, what he wanted Edgar to avoid until both of them were there. It took him a long time to explain-there was a lot to do, and he instructed Edgar in detail. “Carhartts in the closet when you get to the pokey stuff,” he said, gesturing toward a nest of barbed wire. Then he took Edgar to the barn and showed him where he could find wire cutters and a wheelbarrow. When they walked back to the house, Edgar scribbled out a request for bandages and Henry produced an old white bedsheet. They made a list of things he needed from town. And then Henry drove off.

Baboo and Essay had followed them to the shed and now stood peering into the kitchen through the screen door. Tinder had joined them, standing on three legs. He met Edgar’s gaze with a glint of defiance. Unless Edgar wanted to hold him down, his look said, he was going to start moving.

First we clean that foot, Edgar signed.

Tinder’s wound oozed a gray-green pus, odorless but nonetheless frightening. The sight made beads of sweat wick into the hair all over Edgar’s scalp. He pressed the back of his hand to the injured pad. It was not overly hot. He began to work it in the water too roughly and Tinder yelped and jerked his paw away.

I’m sorry, Edgar signed. But we can’t stop yet. He sat with his hand out. In time Tinder offered Edgar his dripping paw and the next time he went slower. Afterward he washed the old bandages in the sink and strung them up to dry on the clothesline. Tinder began to chew the new dressings.

Stop it, Edgar signed. He put the soup bone in front of Tinder and returned to the clothesline. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tinder return to his bandages. He walked back and stopped him again.

We can just do this all day if you want, he signed.

He counted back in his mind: three days since he and the dogs had been through drills. He lined them up in the grass behind the shed. They worked through recalls and come-fors in the morning sun, then fetches, stays, and guarding. It reminded them all of home, he supposed, but back then they’d only been going through motions, answering classroom questions upon which nothing depended. Chasing. Sitting still. Scenting targets. Now the same acts drew up the ties between them, put them back together, as though shaping the world from scratch. As they worked, they put the sky in place above, the trees in the ground. They invented color and air and scent and gravity. Laughter and sadness. They discovered truth and lies and mock-lies-even then, Essay played the oldest joke there was to play, returning a stick past him as if he were invisible, cantering sideways, tossing it about in her mouth as if to ask, it’s all play, really, isn’t it? What else matters when there’s this to do?

THE FIRST PART OF HENRY’S plan was simple-pull everything onto the dirt and grass and sort it into three piles: junk to burn, junk to haul away, and junk to save. The old lumber would be burned, along with the magazines and papers; the old chair and the stanchions would be hauled away. The category of junk to be saved was largely theoretical, Henry had said. Also, while Henry wasn’t aware of anything that called the shed home, it was hard not to imagine a rat nesting inside somewhere. Edgar picked out a whacking stick and before he moved anything big, he whaled on it. A lone garter snake had slithered from behind the plywood, but so far that was it.

In short order he had the stanchions stacked haphazardly on the gravel and a mound of rubbish near the burning barrel. One after another the dogs trotted over to scent what Edgar had pulled out. Baboo and Essay marked the old car seat; when Tinder tried, it turned into a balancing problem, since he had only three good legs. Edgar made as if to stop them, then wondered what the point would be.

At noon he doled out scraps to the dogs and soaked Tinder’s foot again, rewrapping it with dry bandages from the clothesline. There was the sound of a car passing along the road. Out of habit, he glanced up to locate the dogs, but there was no real cause for concern. Baboo and Tinder were sleeping in the shade. Essay had selected a spot in the sun from which she could follow his progress. All of them were concealed behind the house. He briefly reconsidered starting down the railroad tracks, then rejected the idea again. Besides the difficulty of traveling with Tinder, and the hydrogen peroxide and other supplies that Henry would be bringing back that evening, Edgar had made a deal with Henry and he already felt more than a twinge of guilt over having burglarized the man. He didn’t want to renege. Cleaning out his shed seemed like a small repayment.

Edgar walked back to the shed, letting his mind wander as he worked. Each time he salvaged something interesting-a puckered, moldy globe or an apple-masher with a broken wooden handle-he turned it over in his hands, brushing away the dirt and dust and cobwebs. He wondered about whoever had built the place. How many summers had he clamped that contraption to his kitchen table and worked the now-cracked handle, squashing apple after apple, levering the burst pulp out of the cylinder, straining the juice through cheesecloth? Did the house smell like cider the next morning? Did hornets collect on the window screen as he worked?

He couldn’t have pinpointed when, exactly, he knew he wasn’t alone. He’d been working slowly, passing in and out of reverie, when his neck hairs began to prickle, as if a rivulet of sweat had been reduced there to salt by the wind, a sensation that at first meant nothing to him. The second time it happened, he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye, a figure standing in the depths of the shed, and he stumbled backward into the sunshine and stared into the the gray morass of shadow.

He looked at the dogs sprawled about the yard. He walked around the shed, keeping a good distance away from it. There were no windows to look through and all he could do was trace the runs of clapboard with their paint peeling off like thin, irregular patches of birch bark. When he’d come full circle he stood outside the doorway and shielded his eyes and peered inside. He could see the outline of the old wagon and the rubbish mounded over it, but that was all. He’d tipped his whacking stick into the corner just inside the door and he leaned in and snatched it and rapped the wooden doorframe. After a while he walked back inside and beat the pile of stanchions until a cloud of orange rust dust filled the shed. All else lay inert. He stood nodding to himself. When he turned, the dogs were lined up in the doorway looking at him.

Good idea, he signed. Down. Watch me.

After the dogs were settled, he went cautiously back to work. The next time he felt the prickle along the back of his neck, he forced himself to look at the dogs first. Only Baboo was still awake, lying panting and unalarmed in the sun. Edgar let his gaze drift toward the rear of the shed. The figure, seen from the corner of his eye, was there, yet when he turned to face it squarely, it was not.

He compiled an impression bit by bit: a slump-shouldered old fellow with a farmer’s thick arms and a broad belly. He wore blue jeans and a grease-stained T-shirt and a feed store cap rested high on his graying head of hair. When the man finally spoke, his voice was low, almost a whisper, and he pronounced words with an accent Edgar recognized from many hours spent listening to old farmers at the feed store who said “da” for “the” and “dere” for “there.”

It was the wife, the man said. Nothin’ could go to waste. Everything had to be saved.

Edgar, wary of what had happened the last time he’d looked, forced himself to concentrate on wrenching a pair of car wheels free.

She wanted to keep every God-darned thing in case we needed it for parts, the man said. I could of used this shed for better, I’ll tell you that. I ended up having to put all the real machinery over to the neighbor’s.

Edgar stacked the wheels one atop the other and knelt and began sorting through some smaller items to keep his eyes on his hands.

Take that coal furnace there.

Edgar ventured a glance toward a hulking metal form behind the wagon. He didn’t dare examine it too closely, for he could feel his gaze drawn toward the old farmer, but it certainly looked like it had once been a furnace. Until that moment he’d only noticed something round and metal and riveted.

We put that into the basement before we even laid the first floorboards. God, it was big! Took three of us all morning. Rained cats and dogs the whole time. That wasn’t so bad, though. Gettin’ it out was lots worse-had to bust it into pieces with a sledgehammer. “Make sure and save that,” she says. “You never know.”

From the corner of his eye Edgar saw the man shake his head.

I can’t tell you how many ton of coal I shoveled into that thing. Got so I was pretty fond of it. Called it Carl. Gotta go stoke Carl, I’d say, when it got cold. Or, Carl’s going to have a hell of a time tonight, when a blizzard come through.

How long did you live here? Edgar signed. But he let himself look, and once again there was no one there. He carried a steering wheel out to the yard and devoted himself to his work until his neck hairs stood again.

Thirty-seven years, the man said. About fifteen years in, nothing fit in the shed no more, so she let me haul some away. She wrung her hands the whole time. Ah, I shouldn’t be so hard on her. She was a sweet woman, and she loved our kids like crazy. After she died I found a shoebox full of wire twists from bread bags. Thousands of ’em! Probably ever one we ever brought into the house. What was she thinking we would use them for?

Edgar didn’t try to respond. He averted his eyes and selected an old crate filled with broken canning jars to carry to the discard pile. Then he pulled a wire cutter from his back pocket and began cutting a snarl of barbed wire and fence posts, bending lengths of wire straight and tossing them into a pile like the stems of iron roses.

When she died, the old farmer continued, I thought, now I can clean that shed. I come outside, opened the doors and thought, nope, can’t do it. Thirty-seven years of putting in, I can’t start taking out now. Would have been like burying her twice. So I sold it all and moved to town. When we had the auction, I told people they could have everything in the shed for twenty bucks if they emptied it out. Not one person took me up on it.

Then, despite Edgar’s best efforts, his glance slipped toward the man again and he was gone. Edgar worked and waited. The afternoon passed. Then Henry arrived home, bringing the dog food and other supplies Edgar had requested and several cans of paint and brushes. He’d brought something else, too: phonograph records, which he made a point of taking out of the car immediately so they wouldn’t melt in the hot sun.

The dogs sallied excitedly around the yard, letting out creaking yawns to calm themselves until Henry reemerged from the house. Edgar stayed Tinder, who keened quietly. The other two accosted Henry. The man hadn’t been around many dogs, that much was obvious. He stood watching, arms in the air like someone wading in a pool. When Baboo sat in front of him, rather than scratching behind the dog’s ear or stroking his ruff, to everyone’s surprise Henry gripped him by the muzzle and shook it like a hand. The gesture was well meant, and possibly Henry even thought the dog liked it, but Baboo lowered his head tolerantly and cast a sidelong glance Edgar’s way. Essay, having witnessed Baboo’s fate, danced skittishly away when her turn came. Finally Henry walked over and patted Tinder’s head open-handedly, as if tamping down a stubborn cowlick. He sized up the debris piles, which had grown impressively over the course of the day, and walked to the shed and looked in.

“Jesus,” Henry said. “There’s just as much here as when you started.”

This was Edgar’s sentiment exactly and he was relieved to hear Henry confirm it. He started to put the work gloves back on, but Henry interrupted him.

“That’s enough for one day,” he said. “If you keep at it any longer I’ll feel obligated to help.”

Edgar pulled the shed doors closed and dropped the bent bolt back into the rusty latch. They walked together to Henry’s car. Henry fished two sweating six-packs from the floor of the passenger’s side. In the back seat lay a forty-pound sack of dog food. Edgar slung it over his shoulder and carried it to the stoop and he sat and fed the dogs straight from the bag, cupping the kibble in his hands.

THAT NIGHT IT WAS A workingman’s dinner. Henry sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper and ate reheated brats and potato salad. He motioned for Edgar to help himself and eyed the dogs as though expecting them to lunge for the food. He started to ask Edgar to put them outside, then seemed to reconsider. Instead, he folded the paper into quarters and pored over the crossword, tapping his pencil on the table and picking off the easy clues. Then he said, “Oh!” and walked into the living room. There was a warm pop from the phonograph speakers. Piano music began to drift through the house.

“They call this one The Goldberg Variation,” he said when he returned. He was holding a battered album cover in one hand. He looked at it again and, with self-conscious precision, corrected himself: “Variations.” He took up the crossword puzzle again, shifting and fidgeting and touching his forehead as if perturbed by the sound of the piano. He emptied his glass of beer and leaned over to the refrigerator and extracted another, pouring it down the inside curve of the glass while streamers of bubbles tumbled upward.

“Hey, read something, would you?” he said. “When you just sit there it makes it hard to concentrate.” He didn’t sound angry, just a little dejected. “There’s magazines and books in the living room.”

Edgar took the dogs outside and began grooming them using the pin brush Henry had bought. It was a cheap plastic brush, but it was better than he could do with his fingers, which were all he’d had to work with for weeks. The dogs’ undercoats were terribly matted. Twilight had ended but the kitchen window cast enough light. He worked Essay’s tail until she grew impatient, then moved to Tinder and Baboo, and then back to Essay. The piano music drifted out the screen door. When it stopped, scratchily, he listened to Henry’s footsteps pass through the living room. In a minute, a new melody began. Henry walked out onto the porch, paper and pencil in one hand, beer glass in the other, and sat with his back against the white clapboards. Baboo walked over to him. Henry tentatively pressed his fingers into the fur under Baboo’s jaw, attempting to scratch without getting slobber on his fingers. Baboo endured it for a moment, then turned his head so that Henry’s hand slid behind his ear and began to push back against Henry’s fingers.

“Nat,” Henry said, “what’s a ten-letter word for ‘Augments vision.’ Starts and ends with S.”

He slid the paper over to Edgar. “Twenty-three down.”

Edgar glanced at the crossword puzzle and set down the brush and penciled in spectacles and pushed the paper back.

“Right,” Henry said. “Should have got that.” He held his beer up to the porch light and looked through it. “Spectacles,” he repeated pensively, as if the idea of spectacles had just occurred to him. He tipped his head back against the house. When he stopped scratching Baboo, the dog nosed Henry’s hand and laid a paw on his leg.

Watch it, Edgar signed at him.

Baboo withdrew his foot.

“You know,” Henry said, “it’s probably hard to tell, but I’ve never had a dog. Not even when I was a kid. Lots of cats-three, four at a time. My best friend in elementary school had a little spotted dog named Bouncer. Maybe a twenty-pounder or so. Pretty smart. He could balance stuff on his nose. He’d follow us everywhere. But these dogs-these dogs are something else. I mean, the way they look at you and all.”

They sat in silence for a while. The light from the kitchen was skewed across the boards of the stoop.

“You had them all their lives?”

Yes.

“You trained them?”

Yes.

“How’s that one-Tinder. How’s Tinder’s foot?”

Edgar was working the myriad tangles in Essay’s tail and she wasn’t enjoying it. When he set the brush down and released her, she leapt and circled, examining her priceless appendage, then bounded over to Henry and Baboo and nosed them both. Edgar joined them. He unwrapped Tinder’s bandage and held his paw up to the light.

Henry scooted over. “Oof,” he said. “I thought I just imagined that from the other night.”

Edgar fetched the rags and the pan and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

“That’s the biggest bottle I could find. You can probably stretch it if you soak a rag and dab,” Henry said.

Edgar nodded. He reached over to the paper.

Why did you plant sunflowers? he wrote in the margin. He sopped up the hydrogen peroxide as Henry suggested. The edges of Tinder’s wound were red and weeping, and the hydrogen peroxide sizzled under the cloth.

“Aha. Well, interesting question,” Henry said. He sat and looked out at the field. “Call it an experiment. Usually, I plant corn, but I wanted to do something different this year. Something out of the ordinary. So I came up with this idea. Further south sunflower isn’t so uncommon, you know, but you don’t see it here much.”

When Tinder’s foot was as clean as he could get it, Edgar retrieved the tattered bandages from the clothesline.

Does it pay better than corn? he wrote.

“Not really,” Henry said. “But I don’t care. Fifty cents a pound for the seed. I could make more money with corn, but not so much more.” He looked out at the field and frowned. “I’m not sure how you harvest it, though. It’ll take forever to do it by hand. The man who harvested the corn last year thought he could get a special attachment for his combine. Then again, I might just let them sit there if they look nice. It all depends. Of course, nothing’s more depressing than a field full of dead sunflowers.” He drank his beer and looked at the stars. “You haven’t been able to talk for a long time, huh? With the hand signs and everything?”

Edgar shook his head.

“Was there an accident or something? If you don’t mind me asking, I mean.”

I was born this way, he wrote. The doctors don’t know why. Then he shrugged and wrote, Thank you for buying dog food.

Henry looked at the piles of debris. “What a god-awful mess,” he said. He turned his gaze to the car on blocks. “I appreciate the help. I need to get that heap out of the rain before it rusts to pieces. I ought to just sell it, you know.”

He stared at the car and produced another bottle of beer from somewhere. “I just can’t part with it,” he said.

Edgar nodded. He slipped a fresh sock onto Tinder’s foot and tied it up again, using his forefinger to warn the dog from chewing. Tinder broke into a pant, as if amazed Edgar had read his mind.

“Nat,” Henry said. “Have you ever been called ‘ordinary’?”

Edgar looked at him.

“You know-ordinary. Just…ordinary. I bet no one has ever accused you of that.”

No. Edgar looked at him. Not that I remember.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t think so. Running around with trained circus dogs or whatever. Jesus. Want to know something ridiculous? I have. By my own fiancée-ex-fiancée, I mean. We were going to get married in March, and then, from out of nowhere, she called it off. Said she loved me, even, but she’d decided I was too ordinary, and that over the years it would destroy our marriage. ‘Ordinary looking or what?’ I said. ‘No, just all-around ordinary,’ she said. ‘Ordinary in the way you do things, ordinary in what you see and think and say. Just ordinary.’ Once she got that idea in her head, she said she couldn’t shake it. Every time she looked at me she felt love, and she felt ordinariness at the same time.”

He took a big swallow of beer. “Now I ask you, does that make sense?”

Edgar shook his head. The fact was, it didn’t make sense to him. He loved ordinary things, ordinary days, ordinary work. Even as Henry spoke he felt a pang over the routine of the kennel-and if that couldn’t be called ordinary, what could? Besides, while Henry didn’t strike him as being highly unusual, he didn’t see any reason that should be an offense. Or for that matter, what it would even mean to be called ordinary.

“Darn right, it doesn’t,” Henry declared in a sudden burst of indignation. Then he wilted. “She had a point, though. What exactly have I done out of the ordinary? Every day I go down to the central office, and at the end of every day I come home. I have a house like everyone else. I plant a crop in a field and harvest it every fall. I have a car on blocks that I tinker with. I like to fish. What isn’t ordinary about that?”

Is she ordinary? Edgar wrote.

Henry looked at Edgar as if he hadn’t considered the question before.

“Well, I guess you might not pick Belva out of the crowd walking down the street. But she’s pretty unusual once you get to know her. For instance, one of her eyes is blue, the other one is brown, so that puts her out of the ordinary right there. Also, she’s an atheist. She says if there was a God, both her eyes would be the same color. Myself, I believe in God, but I just don’t want to lose an entire morning at church. I figure God doesn’t care whether you worship in the church or on your drive to work. Belva says that doesn’t count as being either an atheist or a believer; that’s just lazy.”

Do you believe in ghosts?

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Henry said, as if this confirmed his darkest suspicions. But he wanted to talk about Belva; it was as though he could picture her right then, in front of them.

“You should see her ankles-gorgeous, delicate ankles, ankles like the ones on statues. We were engaged for two years.” He heaved a sigh. “She’s dating some guy at the bank.”

Hasn’t anything out of the ordinary happened to you?

“Not that I know of,” Henry said. Actually, he moaned this. Then he snapped his fingers. “No, wait. You want to know the most unusual thing that ever happened to me? One time last year I went to the supermarket. Middle of the day, hardly anyone there. I’m going down the aisles, buying milk and soup and potatoes, and I remember I need bread. So I go to the bread aisle. There’s loaves and loaves of bread sitting on the shelves at the far end of the aisle. I start pushing my cart toward the bread. And what do you think happens?”

Edgar shrugged.

“That’s right, you don’t know,” he said. “Because it’s not ordinary. What happens is, before I reach the end of the aisle, one of the loaves sort of unsquashes itself and falls to the floor. Nobody touched it, it just stretched itself out like an accordion and there it went. Plop. I pick up the loaf and put it back on the shelf. Then I push on over to the condiments. Now, here’s the unordinary part: I’m heading to checkout, and I turn down the bread aisle again. And what do I hear from behind me?”

He gave Edgar a significant look.

What? Edgar signed, though he probably could have guessed.

“Plop!” Henry said. “That’s right. I turned around and there was the very same loaf of bread lying on the floor.”

What did you do?

“I’m not an idiot. I bought it, of course. I put my regular brand back.”

Was it better?

“Same difference,” Henry said, shrugging. “I switched back the next week.” He took a long swallow of beer. “So there you have it. That’s the peak. The apex. The apogee. That’s the exotic life that Belva turned down.”

That doesn’t happen to everybody, Edgar wrote.

Henry shrugged. “It would be great to see a UFO, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Then the piano music began to skip and Henry walked inside to fix the record. Baboo went to the door and watched through the screen. Baboo, it seemed, had come to some sort of decision about Henry-Edgar had been noticing it all night. When Henry was seated again, Baboo stood next to him, eye to eye, and waited until Henry discovered that he needed to be scratched under the chin or on the top of the head or across his back just in front of his tail. Even sober, Henry might not have been aware of how deftly Baboo placed Henry’s hand where he wanted to be scratched.

Henry leaned his head back against the house and, after a time, fell asleep, mumbling. Edgar and the dogs were left looking into the summer night. The music reminded Edgar of New Year’s Eve, so long past, when he had danced with his mother; how his father had cut in, how the two them had swayed by the lights of the Christmas tree; how he had stolen curds to give to these same dogs to celebrate. Back then, he’d hardly known them, he thought.

Then the piano music ended and Henry jerked awake. “Now suppose I joined the navy,” he said, vehemently replying to some argument in his dreams. “I sail off somewhere. Burma. After a while I stop being ordinary. Okay. But how’s Belva gonna know? That’s the problem. I have to stop being ordinary right here in Lute.” He leaned forward and looked blearily at Edgar. Then he must have understood what had happened, because he stood and heaved a dramatic yawn. “Okay,” he said. “That’s it. I’m done.”

Edgar and the dogs followed Henry into the house. Henry might have been amused to find them sleeping on the porch one morning, but he didn’t want to try the man’s patience. When he came into the living room the dogs had already curled up on the throw rug. He turned off the light on the end table and hung his arm off the sofa and laid a hand on Tinder. In the dark, he thought about the old man in the shed. He checked the blanket to make sure it wasn’t wrapped around his legs. In all their days of running through the Chequamegon, he had never once forgotten to look down the legs of his pants for spiders, but his first night indoors he’d been flummoxed by a blanket.

Something had changed, he realized. Settled there on the couch, he felt none of the previous night’s trapped sensation, and he thought that part of him had decided to trust Henry, that this was a place they could sleep through the night in peace. Perhaps that had happened only a few minutes before. Perhaps when he was watching Baboo.

Then the counting part of his mind began its litany: Three days in one place. Beginning of August. How much faster would they have to move once Tinder healed? How much longer could they stay? How far could they get before it turned cold? How far away could they get at all? Finally, Edgar eased himself off the sofa, nudging one of the dogs over, and he arranged himself, amidst a chorus of sighs and groans, so that he was touching them all.

Please, he told himself, half warning, half prayer. Don’t get used to this.

Engine No. 6615

FOR SIX DAYS EDGAR HAD BEEN WORKING IN HENRY’S SHED. Mornings he washed and dressed Tinder’s foot. The bandages were no longer stained from weeping, but if Edgar worked too hard at cleaning the wound, the wash water turned pink. Despite Edgar’s attempts to keep Tinder in quiet down-stays, whenever Essay and Baboo wrestled in the yard, Tinder hobbled along, his foot clubbed by a graying sock. Sometimes he yelped and rolled, but he quickly hopped up again. Evenings, they listened to scratchy library records Henry brought home, music composed by Russian generals: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich. During dinner Henry swore at the crossword while Edgar read the liner notes. Afterward, Edgar tended to Tinder’s foot and taught Henry sign.

Henry had departed on Saturday midmorning with a list of errands to run. He expected to return by early afternoon, he said, though with his luck, it could be evening and the day would be shot. After he left, Edgar stood in the shed deciding what to tackle first. The walls had been stripped of rusted tools and saw blades. The disintegrating wagon was half excavated. As Edgar wrestled with an oval wall mirror, miraculously unbroken, he felt the tingle of evaporating sweat on his neck, the sign that the old farmer had appeared in the shed’s farthest recesses.

That mirror, that’s one I hate to let go, he said. That was my daughter’s the whole time she was growing up. It probably seen her more than me-everything from a baby up to twenty years old. Sometimes I wonder if all that might still be inside it. Got to make an impression on a thing, reflecting the same person every day.

Edgar swiped a rag along the glass and peered in. The mirror’s surface was dusty and the silver had been eaten away in islands of black. He waited for ghostly afterimages to form: a baby in its mother’s arms, a girl brushing her hair, a young woman twirling blithely in a prom dress. But all he saw was his own reflection leaning up toward him.

There’s no one there, he replied.

Oh, said the man. Well, I thought maybe.

The best way to keep the man talking, Edgar had learned, was to stay quiet and wait. He leaned the mirror back against the wagon and began collecting the broken china that lay around it and dropping the pieces into a chipped ceramic pan.

Whole years went by I wasn’t so happy here, the old man said. Most of the late 1950s in particular. The Eisenhower years. Bad times.

You were a farmer?

Yup.

Didn’t you like farming?

Oh, gosh, I guess I hated it sometimes. Do you know how early you have to get up to milk cows? You get to ’em late, they try to step on your feet. They see you with the stool and the bucket at ten in the morning and you better be walking directly down the center of the aisle, because sure enough a ten-pound hoof is gonna come striking out. They’ll kick you squarely in the nuts if they think they got a shot at it. I know one fella it happened to. He quit farming and moved to Chicago soon as he could walk again.

Edgar thought about this.

Was his name Schultz, by any chance?

Naw, one of the Krauss boys, the old man said. Anyway, just out of fear, if nothing else, you get up when it’s pitch dark and they’re still a little sleepy. You milk until your hands ache. Then you shovel out the stalls, which is no great treat. I was always amazed at just how much poop come out of a cow. Little hay goes in, huge cowpies come out. How does that happen?

I don’t know much about cows, Edgar signed, after a long pause.

And that’s just the work before breakfast, the man continued. Then there’s planting and harvesting. Things breaking down. Calves birthed in big blue placentas with veins thick as your finger. Mastitis. Worms. You ever seen a cow magnet? Unbelievable. Looks like a giant metal bullet. You shove it right down the cow’s throat and a year or two later it comes out the other end covered with nails, bolts, hunks of wire. I know a man found his watch that way. We cut silage right up to the time snow flew, wondering if we were going to kill everything by putting it up wet. Fences broken, cows wandering in the woods. Some nights I’d come to the house so tired I didn’t know if I could lift a fork to my mouth.

If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you quit?

To do what? Wasn’t anything I knew better than farming. I was cursed, that was the problem. Just because I didn’t like it didn’t mean I wasn’t good at it. I could call the weather, for instance. I’d walk outside one spring day and think, now we can plant. Down at the feed store they’d say, George, you’re going to get frozen out. You put in too early and you’re going to lose three quarters of it. But I had a sense. Always got it right, too; even if snow fell, it was a dusting. Farmers around here started planting as soon as they heard I’d bought seed.

That doesn’t sound like a curse to me.

It’s a curse all right, you’re just too young to know about that sort of thing. To be good at something you don’t care about? It isn’t even unusual. Plenty of doctors hate medicine. Most of your businessmen lose their appetite at the sight of a receipt. It’s a common thing. Old Bert down to town, he despises that grocery store. Says the routine bores him out of his mind: ordering, stocking, worrying about produce going bad. One day he told me he dreams about tomatoes more than he dreams about his own wife.

What would you have done if you could have quit?

I’d’ve been a railroad engineer. Best job in the world. You turn a crank and ten thousand tons of freight starts to move. You ever been inside a locomotive?

No.

I was up in Duluth once and I went to the rail yards just to look at locomotives and I got to talking with a fellow and he knew one of the engineers walking by. He says, Hey Lem, come on over here. And this fellow-he’s dressed in overalls and a conductor’s cap just like you might see on television-he walks over. This man says, here’s a gentleman never seen the inside of a locomotive. Is that right, Lem says, and he walks to a telephone and makes a call to someone. Maybe the trainmaster, I don’t know. Then he hangs up. Well, come on, he says. We start walking down the platform, past all the hopper cars and tankers and cabooses and he says over his shoulder, whatcha wanna see? Steamer or diesel? Steamer, I says. And he leads me to engine number six-six-one-five-the number was painted in big letters on the side. It was one of them big ones, cowcatcher like a bushy mustache, covered with bolts the size of your head, drive rods thick as your leg. Black, like it was carved out of a solid block of ore. He just points and names things. Air reservoir. Cylinder. Sandbox. Steam dome. Injectors. Drive wheel. Then he scrambles up a ladder and motions me up, and we stand inside the cab. He keeps naming things off. Firehole. Reverser. Regulator. Throttle. That engine was cold and dead while we was standing in it-Lem said it was in for repairs-but even like that, a person could feel the power in it.

The man’s voice took on a wistful note.

If there was ever a moment I was tempted to just walk away from it all it was then. Nineteen fifty-five. I was fifty years old. I stood there for a while, soaking it all up. Then Lem tells me to sit in the engineer’s seat and lean out the window. You’d have to wear a cap and goggles if we were really running, he says. There’d be a stream of hot cinders going past the window. You know what happens if you’re dumb enough to lean out uncovered, he says. Then he bends down and points to the right side of his face. It’s all pocked with little burn scars, like old craters there in his skin. That’s what, he says. But he was grinning like anything. I almost expected to see cinders stuck in his teeth. And from the look on his face I could see he was one of the lucky ones, one of those people who like doing what they’re good at. That’s rare. When you see that in a person, you can’t miss it.

Edgar cautiously let his eyes drift over until the old farmer registered in his peripheral vision. He was standing with his chin dropped to his chest, lost in thought.

Now here’s the thing, the man said, after a long time had passed. When I sat in that seat and leaned out the window into the rain and imagined that stream of red-hot cinders going past my face like fireflies, watching a bridge coming up, which was my lifelong dream, do you know what I thought about?

Your farm?

That’s right. There I was, sitting in a steam locomotive, one of the most beautiful engines ever devised. It was magnificent-big and heavy and it made me think of a giant laid over sleeping. Ever since I was a boy I’d thought running a train’d be the most amazing thing ever-especially out in the open countryside, with the throttle screaming wide open, the whole world split by those two rails you’re hurtling down. I could feel it-even in that cold, dead engine-I could feel exactly what that would be like. And when I leaned out into the rain, and the engineer told me about the sparks flying and he showed me his face, all I could think about was all the mud in the pasture, what cranky bitches the cows were going to be in the morning if they didn’t get to pasture. And whether the mow roof was leaking.

Now, if that isn’t a curse, the man said, what is?

Before Edgar could answer, he heard Henry’s car pulling up the drive. Edgar took off his gloves and walked into the sunshine. He had to kneel next to Tinder and put his hand against the dog’s deep chest to restrain him as Henry climbed out of his car, and he and Tinder watched while Essay and Baboo circled and jumped.

THAT NIGHT HENRY OFFERED to drive them into town. Edgar said no. But Henry had long since deduced that Edgar didn’t want to be seen. He pointed out that they could drive around in relative safety after dark. The idea took Edgar by surprise-he was so used to traveling by day and bedding down at night, it hadn’t occurred to him, not even when he’d stood looking at the car back at Scotia Lake. When nightfall came, he relented. They loaded the dogs into Henry’s car, a brown sedan with a capacious but slippery back seat. Edgar made Tinder sit on the floor up front. Baboo and Essay scrabbled to balance themselves on the back seat.

“How long has it been since you’ve been in a car?” Henry asked, as he eased down the driveway. Then he looked alarmed. “Wait a second. When’s the last time these dogs were in a car? Is this going to make them puke?”

Edgar shrugged, grinning.

“Great,” Henry said. “You’re cleaning it up if they do. Deal? Otherwise I’m turning this thing around right now.”

Before he could gripe any more, Baboo leaned forward from the back seat and slobbered in Henry’s ear.

“Aw, god,” Henry said. “I hate it when they do that.” But he didn’t really hate it. Edgar could see that. Anyone could see that.

Out on the blacktop, they headed toward town. The headlights caught dandelions leaking up through the cracks in the asphalt. They passed a culvert over a creek where the moon’s reflection wobbled between the cattails.

Lute was a crossroads town, its one intersection controlled by a stoplight swinging like a lantern from crisscrossed wires. On each corner sat matching two-story brick buildings, like four old-timers crouched around a pan of beans. A Rexall drug, Mike’s Bar and Grill, a True Value hardware, and the Lute grocery.

“Closed up tight after five,” Henry said, waving a hand at the buildings. “Society life begins at six thirty, when Mike’s opens.” On that night, society life consisted of the three cars in the tavern’s small parking lot, lit by the otherworldly glow of the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign (“finest beer served…anywhere!”) hanging over the door.

On the far side of town, the pale chambered heart of the Lute water tower hovered in the night sky, tethered to the earth by four metal legs and the central stalk of its drainpipe. Once in the countryside, they drove without destination, wherever Henry wanted to go, and Henry wanted to go north. Henry liked to drive fast. That surprised Edgar, but it pleased him, too. He’d forgotten the weight of acceleration. They coursed along a maze of back roads. Essay and Baboo slid across the slick back seat when Henry powered around curves. Marshes and forests and lakes flashed by. Tinder craned his neck to see out the window. Headlights approached like balls of white flame. Their speed compressed the scent of the night into a dense, algal perfume that roared through the windows. Henry spun the radio dial, looking for distant AM stations-Chicago, Minneapolis, Little Rock. The signal cracked with the heat lightning over Lake Superior.

At the outskirts of Ashland, with its downtown lights and police cars, Henry swung the car onto the shoulder and shot away from town by an entirely different route, past shanties set back from the road. He paused by a bog that glowed eerily when he shut the headlights off. When they arrived at the railroad tracks, Edgar looked at the bluff to his right, and realized they’d made the round trip. They retired to a pair of lawn chairs. Henry drank a beer and then another and then he walked to the old wreck of a car.

“Tell you a secret,” he said. “This car was here when I moved in. I may have bought the place just to get the car.”

This was certainly news to Edgar. He’d been walking past the vehicle for days without deeming it worthy of a closer look. It sported a broad hood and headlights shaded by exaggerated brow ridges. The front fender sloped toward the rear wheels in a long arc while a compensating ridge developed into a tail fin. But whatever grace of form the car had once possessed was gone. Its body was so thoroughly dented it looked as if someone had beaten it, savagely, with its own tire iron. Rust had consumed major continents from the rear quarter panels. The chrome of the elaborate, two-tiered front bumper was dull as ore. And of course, the vehicle lacked tires-it levitated above the gravel on shadowy cinder blocks. All in all, the car gave the impression of an animal that had crawled to within inches of its lair before expiring.

“The vehicle at which you are now looking, um, at,” Henry said, sweeping his arm as if addressing an awestruck crowd, “is a 1957 Ford Fairlane Skyliner, the first retractable hardtop convertible ever made in America. No car looked like it before or since. Even the fifty-eight looks different-Ford messed up this beautiful bumper and grill for no reason. This is one of a kind.”

Henry patted the car’s side mirror with pride. It fell away and dropped to the ground. “Darn it,” he said. He snatched up the mirror and jiggled the bolts back into the corroded holes.

“It’s a little dinged up,” he said, “but watch this.” He opened the driver’s-side door and pulled a lever and the trunk popped open, hinged backward, near the rear bumper. Henry wrenched the trunk hood up, casually at first, then applying more effort, grunting and scrabbling his feet against the gravel. He circled the car, unsnapping latches. The metal roof separated from the body. It folded halfway into the trunk and then caught. “This is supposed to be electric,” Henry said over his shoulder, “but there’s no battery.” Then he reached into the back seat, withdrew a hammer, and beat unmercifully on a hinge. The roof dropped into the trunk cavity with a final metallic screech that temporarily silenced the night birds. Henry slammed the trunk shut and turned to Edgar, triumphant but panting.

“So you see why I can’t just sell this car. There’s so much potential here. Some guy offered to buy it for parts last summer, but I couldn’t let it be torn apart. I explained all that to Belva, but it made zero impression. She said it was an eyesore-which, I admit, okay, it is, now. But ordinary? I don’t think you can say that.”

Henry had gotten himself wound up talking about the Skyliner, but he stopped and shook off the idea with a shake of his head. “Who am I trying to kid,” he said.

No, Edgar signed. You’re right. It isn’t ordinary.

Henry peered at him, gisting the sign.

“You think?”

Edgar nodded.

“I can never tell anymore,” he said. “When my guard is down, I forget. I slide right back to ordinary, and I don’t even see it.”

He walked to the lawn chairs and together they contemplated the Skyliner.

“I almost took you to the police station tonight, Nat,” he said. “You probably should know that.”

Edgar shook his head and smiled. No you didn’t.

“Oh yes. There was a moment when I thought, ‘All I have to do is turn left at the next stop and we’ll be at the Ashland police station.’”

The shed’s not done.

“Yeah, the shed saved you,” Henry said. “This time. Better figure out how to stretch things out, is my advice.”

They’d reached the limit of Henry’s ability to read sign, and Edgar picked up the newspaper.

You couldn’t have forced us inside, he wrote. We’d have just run.

“How could you run with Tinder?”

Edgar didn’t know what to say to that. He wouldn’t have gotten into the car with Henry if he hadn’t trusted him. There were moments when Edgar understood Henry better than Henry understood himself. What Henry couldn’t see was that, ordinary or not, he was trustworthy. That much was clear as day.

ON SUNDAY THEY WORKED in the shed side by side, tackling the items that took two people to move, like the wringer washer and the old furnace. Henry connected a hose out to the spigot on the house and started a fire in the burning barrel. They fed it old newspapers, gray split fence posts with stringers of barbed wire that glowed red, busted-up wooden chairs. Henry chopped the wagon’s tongue in two with an axe and upended the halves, hardware and all, into the barrel. A gout of orange cinders flew into the air. By the time the fire settled, it was late in the day. They sat on the stoop eating potato chips and looking at the remaining debris.

“I know a trailer we can use to haul this stuff away,” Henry said. “Maybe I can get it next weekend.”

Your car doesn’t have a hitch, Edgar wrote on the newspaper. Before he handed it over, he completed 14-down in the crossword puzzle: a ten-letter word for “a short movement connecting the main parts of a composition.” The second letter was N and it ended with O.

Henry looked at the word Edgar had written: intermezzo. He squinted over at him.

“You ever think about entering a contest or something?”

Edgar shook his head.

“Well, you ought to. And a person can rent hitches.”

Tinder limped over. Henry was a soft touch for treats and as soon as Tinder began crunching a chip, Baboo started working Henry over. Edgar finally told them both to stop. A rapport was developing between Henry, Baboo, and Tinder. Only Essay stayed aloof. She didn’t mind Henry, that was just how she was. With Essay, more than with any other dog Edgar had known, trust was something you had to earn.

THAT WEEK HE SCRAPED flakes of paint from the sides of the shed and caulked the holes. Henry had purchased barn-red paint for the outside. Inside, it was to be whitewashed. Applying whitewash was lonely work-the old farmer had stopped appearing as soon as the last of the junk was out. The days were hot and the skies filled with monumental clouds. Late each afternoon, Henry turned his sedan up the driveway. When he got out of the car, he squatted and let the dogs wash his face, then inspected Edgar’s progress. “It’s a pretty good color,” he said, after Edgar finished painting the exterior. “Makes the house look shabby, though.”

Nights, they went on careening drives, Henry glowering and accelerating through curves while tree trunks strobed past and the dogs slid across the back seat. When they returned, Henry cracked a beer and gravitated to the Skyliner. Often he ended up sitting behind the wheel. Tinder would limp over and scramble onto the seat alongside him.

And somewhere along the line, between the crossword puzzles and the records from the library and the beer, Henry asked Edgar to teach him about the dogs. They went out after dinner and Edgar taught him a few signs. Then he and Essay demonstrated something simple: guided fetches. He put two sticks on the ground and asked Essay to go to them. It was a variation on the shared-gaze exercises, and all of the dogs knew how it worked. When Essay reached the targets, she looked back at Edgar. When he looked at the stick on the left, she snatched it and brought it to him, tail swinging. Edgar took the stick and ran a hand across Essay’s cheek. After another demonstration with Baboo, it was Henry’s turn. He chose to work with Tinder, a good choice. Something about the dog’s injury and enforced convalescence had taught Tinder an extra measure of patience, which he needed, because at first, Henry was hopeless. And yet the dog persevered, as if he had decided to take on Henry as a personal project. At times, Tinder even forgot about his foot and stopped limping for a few steps.

To begin with, Henry’s sign was vague, neither a recall nor a release nor a request to go out, but Tinder got the idea and walked to the sticks. There was no skill involved in the next step, and yet somehow Henry managed to confuse the dog, who patiently did not pick up either target but stood waiting. Then, for some reason, Henry gave the release command again. Tinder’s ears dropped. Henry walked forward. He was about to lift the stick up to Tinder’s mouth in desperation when Edgar stepped in and gave the command correctly and looked at the rightmost stick. Tinder snatched it off the ground at once.

Edgar forked two fingers sternly at Henry’s eyes.

Watch the target. They know the difference.

“Okay, okay.” Henry took the stick from Tinder, forgetting to thank him, and set it on the ground. Edgar let this breach of etiquette slide, and they retreated. When Henry started to sign a release instead of a go-out, Edgar grabbed his hands and moved them until the sign had been correctly formed. Henry blushed. But the next time, he signed the request perfectly. Without hesitation, Tinder limped across the lawn, looked at Henry, and brought him the target.

And at that moment, Henry got it, whatever it was-the difference between commanding Tinder and working with him. When Henry had signed that go-out, he’d looked at Tinder instead of his hands; when Tinder checked back, he’d trusted the dog to read his face. And then the cascade of revelations began, just as it had for Edgar. He could tell by the expression on Henry’s face. Edgar thought of all those letters between Brooks and his grandfather, the endless argument about companionship and work, how his grandfather had argued that there was never a difference, how Brooks, in exasperation, had refused to discuss it further. He thought, too, of the question his mother had posed to him a million years before: what were they selling, if not dogs?

And there stood Henry Lamb, beaming. Until that moment, Edgar had never seen the man smile without some fatalistic reserve that said he knew the joke would ultimately be on him. And though Edgar was no closer to putting it into words, for the first time he was sure he knew the answer to his mother’s question.

“WHERE WERE YOU HEADING, anyway?” Henry said. It was later that night, and they sat at the kitchen table. “I’m not trying to pry. Don’t answer if you don’t want to.”

It’s okay, Edgar signed. He jottted Starchild Colony on a sheet of paper and handed it to Henry. What was interesting was that, before the words had appeared on the paper, he hadn’t been sure himself what his answer would be-at least, not to say it so flatly that way. But he’d always been veering northwest, hadn’t he, to get past the tip of Lake Superior, and then start the walk along the lakeside to sneak past the Canadian border? Then, somehow, find the place? That had been the plan. Alexandra Honeywell had said they needed people, people who were willing to work hard. He was willing to work hard. So that’s where they had been going.

Henry whistled. “The place on the news-Alexandra What’s-Her-Name? Up by Thunder Bay?”

Edgar nodded.

“You know somebody there?”

No.

“Anyone know you’re coming?”

No.

Henry shook his head. “That’s a couple hundred miles. What were you going to do, walk the whole way?”

Edgar shrugged.

“I guess you could. I’m not sure what a person would do for food.”

Edgar scuffled his feet at the memory of looting Henry’s kitchen.

“Can Tinder make it on that foot?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it? Tinder’s foot wasn’t bandaged anymore, but mornings, the dog gimped badly. Edgar didn’t know when Tinder would be ready, if ever.

He shrugged his shoulders. There was no answer except to try.

ON FRIDAY, HENRY ARRIVED home with a trailer hitched to the sedan. He got out and he knelt and, grinning at Edgar, let the dogs accost him. He gestured at the trailer, where four inflated tires lay.

“I had retreads put on the wheels for the Skyliner. Tomorrow, she’s gonna roll for the first time in, oh, fifteen years.” He pulled a bag of groceries from the passenger seat of his car. “Chicken on the spit and potato salad,” he said. “Ordinary or not ordinary?”

Ordinary, Edgar signed. But good.

They started the grill and put the chicken on and sat in the lawn chairs and looked out at the piles of junk.

“I’ve almost got used to seeing it there,” Henry said. “Putting the Skyliner in the shed: ordinary or not ordinary?”

Not ordinary, Edgar signed.

“Just checking,” Henry said. He was working a crossword puzzle.

“Six-letter word meaning ‘to stamp a coin.’ Starts with Q.”

Edgar looked at him.

I don’t know.

“Gotcha!” he said. “Only joking. It starts with an I.” He handed the newspaper over to Edgar.

Incuse, Edgar wrote on the paper and handed it back.

“Jesus,” Henry said. “That’s just plain scary.”

THE NEXT DAY THEY jacked up the Skyliner, mounted the tires, and dragged the cinder blocks away.

“Oh man,” Henry said. “Oh boy! Hold on, wait a second.” He ran to the barn, returned with a hammer, and folded the car’s top into the trunk again. When he finished, they coaxed all three dogs onto the front seat. It took the better part of an hour, laboriously pushing the car back and forth, to align it in front of the shed. The dogs had long since abandoned ship.

“Come back,” Henry cried as they fled. “That’s an honor!”

Then they pushed the car into the shed. Henry ran around front to keep it from rolling into the wall, since the brakes didn’t work. “Careful,” he said. “Just…a little…more…” And then the Skyliner was inside. They closed the now bright red doors and Henry dropped the bolt through the flap latch.

Henry fetched a beer and began to walk through the piles of junk sitting in the yard, scratching his head. He looked at the mirror and the stanchions. “Jeez, that’s a shame,” he said. Over a broken porcelain sink he moaned, “Whoa. Just imagine what happened to that.”

He walked to the stoop and sat down.

“I can’t do it,” he said.

Can’t do what?

“Haul that stuff away. It was here before I was.” He took a long swallow from the beer and held it up to the light. “Putting that stuff back in the shed: ordinary or not ordinary?”

Edgar looked at him.

I don’t know.

Henry made the decision.

They worked like maniacs. Not everything could go back in, but they rehung the hubcaps and the old tools on the walls. They found space in the rafters to lay the salvageable sheets of plywood. Edgar handed up the old broken sink and the pruning shears and they leaned two of the stanchions in a corner. When they had finished, the mirror graced the front wall of the shed, reflecting the Skyliner’s broad front bumper, and two of the wagon wheels leaned against the outside like wreaths of gray wood. The shed was jammed full. The Skyliner could roll out, but with inches to spare.

“That’s it,” Henry said, stepping back to look at what they’d done. “That feels right.”

It did feel right, Edgar thought. He watched the dogs sniff the wagon wheels as Henry backed the trailer up to the gravel apron. They hefted the old furnace and the transmission and the wringer washer onto its bed.

“What say we celebrate with a little ride?” Henry said.

Edgar shook his head. Not in the daylight.

“Oh, come on. Lighten up. Nothing bad’s going to happen.”

Maybe it was the idea of Henry Lamb telling him to lighten up that made the request seem reasonable.

All right, he signed. Okay.

They unhitched the trailer, piled into the car, and barreled through the waves of heat rising over the blacktop. Henry took them daringly through the middle of Ashland, and Edgar felt, if not entirely carefree, more lighthearted than he had in a long time. They were heading back toward the open highway when the light on the railroad crossing started to flash and the thin striped crossing arms levered down. Henry brought the sedan to a stop and a flush of adrenaline went through Edgar. He slid down until he was hidden from the cars around them. That was safe enough, he thought. A man with three dogs in his car wasn’t that unusual. The train lumbered past. The crossing lights flashed and the bells pounded. Edgar lifted his head to see if the caboose was visible yet, then ventured a look around.

A young woman sat alone in the car next to them.

Edgar tapped Henry’s arm and pointed.

“Holy cow,” Henry said. “That’s Belva. Act natural.”

Edgar wasn’t sure what Henry meant by that. Edgar was acting natural. The dogs were acting natural. Henry, however, had immediately stopped acting natural. He sat ramrod straight and began whistling a little nervous tooty-toot-toot and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as if some pounding rock-and-roll ballad were playing on the radio, though in fact it was the weather forecast-partly cloudy today, the announcer droned, chance of severe thunderstorms tomorrow. Harvest weather, Edgar thought.

The woman must have glanced over and noticed Henry, for when Edgar lifted his head to look again, she too was turned forward, looking intently ahead. The train kept rolling along, car after car. There was plenty of time to read the letters and numbers on the sides. Finally, the woman leaned over and rolled down her passenger-side window and shouted, “Henry!”

Henry turned and looked at her, still whistling. Toot-toot-toot.

“Belva,” he shouted back.

“I’ve been meaning to call you!”

“Is that right?” Henry said. He glanced at Edgar and gave a little wink. “I guess you saw the sunflowers!”

“What?”

“The sunflowers! I guess you saw the sunflowers!”

“What sunflowers?”

“Oh,” he said. “Never mind!”

“I’m moving,” she shouted.

“What?”

“Moving. I’m moving to Madison.”

“How come?”

“Why are all those dogs with you?” she shouted, instead of answering his question.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Henry said, lamely. He pounded a fist on the steering wheel and looked down at Edgar, scootched below the windows.

Ordinary, Edgar signed up at him.

“Right,” Henry muttered. He turned back to Belva. “I just decided to get a dog. Uh. Three dogs.”

“Wow,” she said. “They’re really nice.”

Very ordinary, Edgar signed, rolling his eyes.

“Actually, they belong to my nephew,” he corrected. “I’m just looking after them.”

She laughed again. “You don’t have any nephews, Henry. You’re an only child.”

He looked stricken for a moment. “What’s that? No, no, not ‘nephew.’ Nathoo. They belong to my friend Nathoo. Say hello, Nathoo.” He waved Edgar up from the floorboards.

Edgar shook his head.

“Come on,” he hissed. “Help me out here.”

No.

“Who are you talking to?” Belva shouted.

“Nobody-just the dogs,” he said. “Why are you moving to Madison?”

There was a long pause, and Edgar could hear the clank of the joints between the train cars, and the clang-clang of the crossing gates, and even, faintly, radios playing in the cars around them. The dogs were looking out the windows and panting happily. Baboo, in particular, seemed interested in Belva. He pushed his head out the driver’s-side window to get a better look.

“Well,” she shouted at last, “because Joe is.”

“Joe?”

“My fiancé.”

“Ah,” Henry said. “Aha. Oh.”

“You did know I was engaged, right?”

“Yes, of course!”

“It was in the paper!”

“Yep, that’s where I saw it!” he said. “I bet he’s a moron.”

“What?”

“I said, I bet you’ll love Madison.”

“Really, Henry. Who’s in the car with you?”

Henry looked over at Edgar. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“Come on,” he hissed. “Just this once.”

Then the caboose rattled past and Edgar thought he could probably risk it that one time-the guard arms were already lifting and they were about to drive away. He was being silly, hiding under the dash like that.

He sat up.

He waved hello to Belva.

And that was when he looked through the rear window of Henry’s sedan and noticed the State Patrol cruiser.

Glen Papineau

GLEN PAPINEAU SUPPOSED HE WAS IN MOURNING. HE HAD USED that word before, even thought he understood what it meant, but he really hadn’t. For one thing, mourning sounded like a formality, a stage a person was required to go through-wearing a black suit and attending a funeral-but real mourning didn’t end the day after the funeral, or the week after, or even the month after. His pop had died nearly two months earlier, and sometimes Glen felt like he’d just then gotten the call.

In his mind, he called them the day feeling and the night feeling. The day feeling caught up with him before lunch most days, a hot blanket of lethargy so suffocating it made his temples pound. He dragged himself around work as if facing a high wind. Everything took an eternity, became a laborious detail. And Glen hated details. He was built for broad gestures-all a person had to do was look at his hands to know that. A man with hands like Glen’s would do certain things, and certain other things would never be in the cards. He’d never be a pianist, for example, or a veterinary surgeon. Not that he wanted those things, it was just that he’d found himself looking at his hands a lot lately, and his hands said they weren’t there for detail work.

The day feeling was bad, no question, but the night feeling was the real killer-a bleak sledgehammer to the soul, as if some stranger had whispered a terrible secret in his ear, and that secret was how death was senseless and inevitable. The knowledge made sleep impossible. He sat up watching television, and if he didn’t want to be alone, he went to the taverns-not the smartest move for local law enforcement to drink in public, but people understood. Some even bought him beers and told him stories about his pop.

There were moments of acceptance. After all, his pop had been getting up in years, and Glen had contemplated his death more than once, though he’d imagined something long and slow-a tangle with cancer, an unnameable decline. What he hadn’t expected was that death’s visit would be so sudden. One day he’d been a vigorous sixty-seven-year-old man, running his clinic, flirting with the bakery ladies, blabbering to anyone who would listen about his winter vacation in Florida, and the next he was lying at the bottom of the stairs in the Sawtelles’ barn.

Glen, as an only child, had been responsible for the funeral arragements. There had been a detailed will, specifying that his father be buried alongside Glen’s mother in Park City. At the shop, as his father called the veterinary clinic, Glen had boxed his father’s desk, his books, the jackets hanging on the hooks. Jeannie had called all his father’s clients and referred them to Doctor Howe in Ashland. The will specified that the vet school in Madison be contacted and his practice be sold in toto rather than auctioned off, but no one seemed terribly interested in a practice in the hinterlands and Glen had gotten no serious calls. The shop stood dark and silent now, pharmacy locked down, plastic sheets thrown over everything as if it were a morgue. The place was a break-in waiting to happen, Glen thought; in fact, someone had already put a rock through one of the back windows, though nothing was missing.

So there was the day feeling and the night feeling, and those were bad, and he was drinking a little more than he used to, but Glen thought he was handling things, if not thriving, until Claude called and said he wanted to talk. Glen offered to come out to the Sawtelle place, but Claude suggested the Kettle, a tavern south of town. The Brewers were playing on the television when Glen walked in. Claude hailed him from the end of the bar. The bartender, Adam, drew him a Leinenkugel and Glen sat down next to Claude.

They watched the game and talked about Pop, how Claude remembered him coming out to the kennel back when he was a kid. Claude said some nice things about his pop. He said that, besides Glen, he thought he was probably the closest thing to family Pop had. Said he thought of Glen’s father as an uncle, which meant a lot because the Sawtelles were a small family.

It was much later when they got to Claude’s reason for calling. Doctor Howe was incompetent, Claude said. Until they found another vet, Claude intended to do the workaday medicine himself-worming the pups, treating mastitis, and so on. He’d been a medic in the navy and he knew his way around a medicine chest. Glen knew his father had some sort of arrangement with the Sawtelles, since it wasn’t practical to be running out there five days a week just to prescribe penicillin. So they had set aside a medicine chest in their barn for the supplies Pop usually locked up in his office. And now Claude wondered if Glen would be willing to sell off some of the meds in the shop pharmacy, seeing as no one was beating down the door to take over.

They were four or five beers in at that point, which wasn’t much for someone Glen’s size, but he’d also had a couple before he drove down. They watched the Brewers give up another run. Adam swore at the television as a service to the bar patrons.

“You know what I think about when I think about your dad?” Claude said. “The Hot Mix Duck Massacre.”

Glen chuckled. “Yup. That first rain-remember all those ducks quacking around the shop?”

When Glen was eight years old, the state had come through and repaved Main Street and put up street lights, the first significant improvement that Mellen had seen, on its long glide toward oblivion after its lumbering heyday, since Truman was in office. The streets had been so bad the town kids made a game out of riding bicycles down the street without crossing any pothole patches. It wasn’t easy. In some places, it hadn’t even been possible.

But instead of the pebbly tar-and-gravel asphalt that had once covered the street, the state crew had applied a new formula that went down like black, smoking glue and hardened pudding-smooth. This was called “hot mix,” presumably because they poured it from a huge wheeled furnace. The hot-mix furnace stank to high heaven for the three weeks it took to resurface the street, but it was a small price to pay; afterward, Mellen’s previously pocked Main Street was a pristine strip of smooth, black pavement.

Things were hunky-dory until the first rainy spell. One night, a couple of ducks flew by, looking for a spot to land on the Bad River. With the new street lights shining off the rain-slick hot mix, Main Street must have looked like a placid, fish-filled stream, more inviting than the Bad River had ever been. The first two ducks came in for a water landing, quacking like mad, and broke their necks on impact. Then the main flock came up over the trees, their tiny bird brains unable to figure out why their compatriots looked so odd there in the water. The result had been known ever after as The Hot Mix Duck Massacre.

The luckiest birds tumbled head over heels, shook their bills in confusion, and flapped off, but a half-dozen others became dinner for quick-thinking observers. The rest suffered all manner of injuries. The diner emptied. A strange roundup of the wounded ensued. People herded limping, stunned ducks into boxes, captured them under blankets, even shooed them into cars. A caravan had arrived at Glen’s father’s shop.

“They got so they limped around behind Pop wherever he went,” Glen said.

Claude had forgotten some of the details, but as they’d drank and talked, he’d gone from grinning to laughing out loud at Glen’s recollection.

“Yup. What I remember best is him setting them on the receptionist’s counter,” Claude said, “and talking to people as if he couldn’t see them. ‘What duck?’ he’d say. I used to fall down laughing when he did that.”

Glen remembered that, too. That was back when Claude had worked around the shop doing odd jobs. He remembered thinking back then what a striking figure Claude was-a bit of a hero to Glen, in fact. He’d been athletic. (He still looked good for-what, forty?) And another thing: Claude always seemed to have a girlfriend, which, even back when he was eight, Glen suspected might turn out to be a problem for him.

“Did I ever tell you what he did at the diner?” Glen said.

“What’s that?”

“One time, when the splints were off and he knew those ducks would do just about anything for him, he put one in an old medicine bag and closed it up and we went to the diner for lunch. He set the bag on the seat in the booth and waited. The duck never made a sound. Pop ordered first, and while the waitress was taking my order, he reached over and opened the bag and out popped the duck’s head.”

“No,” Claude said, laughing.

“When I finished, he said, ‘Aren’t you going to take his order?’ and she saw the duck and screamed.”

“No.”

“Yes! Dropped her order pad and everything. And do you know what the duck did?”

“What?”

“It jumped out of the case and chased her back to the kitchen, gabbling at her heels. She hollered the whole way.”

Claude was shaking and holding onto the rim of the bar as if he were about to fall off his stool.

“Pop shouted back that his friend wanted the smelt.”

“Oh, God.”

“He said he wouldn’t put the duck back into the bag until it was done eating, that even ducks had a right to a decent lunch. Especially in Mellen.”

“Stop,” Claude begged. “Please. Stop.” Tears were streaming down his face.

Glen liked being able to make Claude laugh like that. He hadn’t quite realized what a funny story it made, but Claude had really given himself over to mirth, and Glen found it impossible not to laugh along with him. When Claude finally wiped his eyes, he ordered another round and they clanked their glasses.

“To Page.”

“To Pop.”

“What ever happened to those ducks?”

“I don’t remember,” Glen confessed. “They never could fly again. I think Pop gave them to a farmer down by Prentice.”

They watched the game for a bit longer and then Glen bought a six-pack to go and they headed for the shop. Claude followed in his Impala. Glen walked up to the dark side door and pulled out of a set of keys, drunkenly trying one after another. Inside, he flipped a switch and a bank of unearthly fluorescents flickered into service overhead. The pharmacy was nothing more than a neatly organized closet beside his pop’s office. Glen unlocked it, swung the door open, and stepped back.

“What were you looking for?”

Claude stepped inside and carefully examined the shelves of bottles and vials, pausing two or three times to look at labels more closely, almost as if window-shopping rather than just looking for the penicillin. When he had finished his detailed scrutiny of the pharmacy’s contents, he pulled three containers from the rack. “This,” he said, handing one across to Glen. “This. And this.” He stepped out and let Glen shut the door. “If you know where the sales slips are, I’ll write these up,” he said.

“Take ’em. It’d cost more to tell the lawyer than to just give them to you.”

“Well, thanks,” Claude said. “Maybe I can find a way to make it up to you.”

“No need,” he said, waving a broad hand at Claude. “Forget it.”

They walked outside and locked up and walked to the cars. Glen reached into the back seat and pulled out two beers and they stood looking into the night sky. Then the silence turned clumsy. Glen knew Claude had more on his mind than just medication. The fact was, Glen had been in touch with Claude and Trudy quite a lot over the last two months. The night his father had died, Edgar had run off with a couple of the dogs. It was more than the kid could take, seeing two men die in the same room. At first they thought he was hiding in the woods. Then they expected to spot him hitchhiking. That’s what happened to most kids who ran off. Each morning, the Highway Patrol broadcast a list of runaways picked up, but there was never a match. Of course, Glen had worked the grapevine around Mellen: Walt Graves, who delivered RFD mail, made a point to talk to everyone on his route; at the telephone office, Glen had hinted that the switchboard operators might place an anonymous call if they heard something interesting on a party line. The Forest Service had briefly run a search plane. But in the end, Edgar was just another runaway, and there wasn’t much to do except wait for him to turn up, then ship him home.

And so, without being asked, Glen said, “You know I’d call right off if something came through.”

Claude sipped his beer in silence and looked thoughtful.

“Most runaways-the ones that aren’t trying to get away from some sort of bad situation, at least-come home on their own before it gets cold. He’ll either get picked up or show up.”

“Yup,” Claude said. And then, after a while, “Just between you and me, though, I’m not sure that would be such a good thing. Maybe he’s better off run away. You can’t imagine the torment that boy has put Trudy through in the last nine months. He’s got something in him…well, he’s wild.”

“He’s getting to be that age. Plus, he must have been awfully shook up about Gar. When I talked with him, he couldn’t remember much of what happened.”

That got Claude’s attention. “Trudy mentioned that, too,” he said. “How did that work, anyway? Did he recall anything about the day at all? Or was it just a pure blank?”

“Oh, sure. Lots of stuff. What he was doing with the dogs, what he ate for breakfast. But the closer we got to the moment he found Gar, the sketchier things got.”

“Uh-huh,” Claude said. Now he was peering at Glen intently. “I always thought that was strange, the way he just…found him. I haven’t wanted to ask Trudy about it, stir up bad feelings. But are you telling me he didn’t hear anything? Gar calling for help, the dogs barking, anything like that?”

“Not when we talked. That was the next day. Technically, I should have talked with him right away, but Pop got a little mad when I suggested it. He was sure it could wait, and I could see for myself the kid was a wreck.” Glen shrugged and took another swallow of beer. “Could be different now, though. People remember things after a while.”

“I suppose,” Claude said. “But how would you know those memories are for real, you get them months later?”

Glen thought about Claude saying Edgar had something wild in him. He looked over at Claude.

“If I recall the rumors, you were pretty wild yourself once. Maybe it just runs in the family.”

Claude nodded. “I had my moments. Not so much at his age, but I know what you’re saying. I don’t fault him for wildness. But with Edgar, it’s different.”

Glen looked at him. “Different how?”

“Well, I got wild the way most boys get wild-I wanted to shake things up. I thought everything needed shaking up. I never set out to hurt anybody. With Edgar, though…I don’t know. He can’t always control his temper.”

Then Claude stopped. He looked like he was searching for words. He took a long swallow of beer.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, “but on the other hand, I don’t like keeping secrets, either.”

“Tell me what?”

“About your pop.”

“What about him? I suppose you’re going to tell me that he was a hell-raiser, too?” Glen laughed at the idea. If his father hadn’t been a veterinarian, he would have been a school teacher-more likely a principal. He liked being an authority figure, the one who told people what was what.

“No, nothing like that,” Claude said. “You understand everything I’m going to tell you is secondhand-I wasn’t there when it happened, okay? I was in the house, and the first thing I really saw-with my own eyes-was when I walked into the barn and Page was lying there.”

And then, though it was a warm summer night, Glen felt a chill.

“Thing is, after Edgar ran off, I found out from Trudy that Page didn’t just trip. It sounds like he fell down those stairs because Edgar was coming after him.”

There was a long silence during which blood began to pound in Glen’s ears.

“Coming after him.”

“Yeah.”

“You mean, coming after him to hit him?”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Well, that’s the part we don’t understand. After Gar died, he clammed up. And when Edgar wants to clam up, there isn’t a thing anyone can do about it. That night, we were talking to a breeder interested in operating a branch kennel. Had some interesting ideas about approaching the Carruthers catalog people. That really disturbed Edgar. He opened up that big mow door and dragged Trudy over to it and nearly pushed her out. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t stopped. Plus, he was none too happy about me spending so much time out there, which I suppose I can understand. Fact is, most nights he slept out in the mow. Like that was his place instead of in the house.”

“Claude,” Glen said. “For Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t know, Glen. Maybe Trudy got it wrong. It’s not my place to tell you this anyway. I’ve gone over it and over it in my mind, and no matter how you slice it, it was a freak accident. Pick up the Milwaukee Journal tomorrow and check the obituaries; I’d bet you fifty dollars you find someone who died in some sort of freak accident. Remember when Odin Kunkler fell out of his apple tree trying to shake a porcupine off a branch? He could have broke his neck instead of both arms. Who knows what made the difference? Even if Trudy had it right, Edgar didn’t touch your pop. He just ran at him and Page fell.”

“That’s still manslaughter,” Glen said.

“Besides…”

“Besides, what?”

“Well, I didn’t know if you were all that close to your dad. Some people are glad when the old man is gone.”

“Aw, god. Aw, shit. Jesus fucking Christ, Claude! We had some words sometimes, who doesn’t? But he was my father.” Glen looked at Claude to see if he’d meant to provoke him, but Claude looked genuinely sincere. If anything, a little puzzled by the vehemence of Glen’s reaction.

“Aha. Well, it isn’t always that way. Between father and son, I mean. I wasn’t sure.”

“Well, now you know.”

“No offense intended, okay? I’m just telling you to be straight. I think a person needs to keep things aboveboard,” Claude said. “Look, if you wanted to, you could sue us. After all, your dad was on our property, he did fall down our stairs. Whether Edgar scared him into falling or not probably wouldn’t even come into it; the right lawyer would just argue that we didn’t do something we should have, like we didn’t have good enough handrails or whatnot. Though there is a handrail…”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Maybe, but the point is, I was always taught that, in a case like this, where nothing is black and white, we’d have to be the ones to decide what’s right. I’m not talking about courts; I mean, the people themselves decide. But if you want legal justice, there it is. You could shut down the kennel if you wanted. No more Sawtelle dogs, ever again. That’s got to be your decision, and that’s okay. I can’t speak for Trudy, of course. She’s awfully dependent on those dogs now, especially with Edgar run off. I have to argue with her to place every single one.”

“I don’t want that and you know it.”

“Don’t you? Wait and see. Maybe tomorrow you’ll wake up discouraged and depressed. That’s the way these things work. You won’t be angry, not then, just laid out, like all the wind’s been taken out of your sails. But the day after that, or the day after that you might wake up and before you have a chance to think about it, you’ll get dressed and head over to your pop’s place, out the door and down the street before you remember your pop is gone for good. And that’s when it’ll hit you. That’s when you’re going to get angry. It’ll be over some little thing that really doesn’t matter. So don’t tell me what sort of justice you want, Glen. That’s a promise you can’t keep.”

“Well, I can tell you this much: I’m not going to sue you and Trudy for something Edgar did.”

“Why the hell not?” Claude said. “He’s a minor. Trudy’s his mother and I’m his uncle. Trudy raised him. She must have done something wrong or he wouldn’t have come after Page.”

“No, no, it doesn’t work that way. Well, maybe it does. I don’t know. I mean, think about me-I was a mixed bag at best. But Pop, he did the best he could. There wasn’t one time he didn’t tell me just how to…why I should have…”

Then Glen realized he was crying. It was embarrassing, but it just came up out of him, and there was no way to stop it. And that was the moment he’d realized he wasn’t done mourning-in fact, maybe he’d hardly begun. A person who was done mourning didn’t cry into his beer.

“I was pretty much of a fuckup, if you recall,” Glen said, when he could talk without blubbering. “Maybe you don’t know what it feels like to know what the wrong thing to do is, and just watch yourself do it anyway. Like you don’t even control it. But I do. My pop stuck with me through a whole bunch of times when I thought I’d end up in juvie jail.”

Claude sipped his beer and nodded.

“Pretty ironic that I ended up as the cop here, don’t you think?”

“I think it fits you. I think you do a good job.”

“Thanks,” Glen said. “I try.” There was something else he wanted to say, some other point he’d been trying to make, but the beers had finally added up, and he couldn’t remember. His head would have been swimming even if he was sober, and Claude had a way of making things confusingly complex.

“Tell you what,” Claude said at last. Glen could see Claude was troubled by the whole thing, maybe more troubled than Glen himself. “You have the power here. You know it and I know it and there’s no point in pretending otherwise, or thinking that you know this minute what you want to do about it. That day when you get angry is coming. When it arrives, all I can think to offer is that you call me, and we’ll find a place to sit and drink some beers and talk about what to do. That’s the least I could do-hear you out.”

Glen looked at him. Claude seemed like he might be about to cry himself.

“Way back when, the old guys had all the answers,” Claude said. “Your dad. My dad.”

“Yup.”

“We’re the ones, now. We’ve got to have the answers.”

“They’re not all gone yet.”

“No. Mostly, though.”

“Ida Paine is still around.”

Claude shuddered. “Ida Paine has always been around,” he said. “Ida Paine will be around long after you and I are gone.”

“I was out to the store just last week. If anything, she’s gotten creepier.”

“Did she say it?” Claude asked, and Glen didn’t need him to explain what he meant by it. “Did she look at you through those Coke bottle glasses and say it?”

“Oh, yeah. ‘Is that all?’” Glen croaked, a fair imitation of Ida’s smoky voice. “‘Anything else?’”

It was funny, but neither of them laughed. You didn’t laugh at Ida Paine.

Claude pushed himself upright and walked to the Impala.

“Remember what I said.”

He fired off a drunken salute. “Okay. Ten-four. Roger. Over and out.”

Then Claude drove off, taillights dwindling as he topped the rise south of town. Glen didn’t feel like leaving just yet. He leaned on the trunk of his car, swaying in the moonlight, and considered the dark outline of his father’s shop. It was a fine summer night, the peepers all around making a melodious racket, the sky above a parade of stars and galaxies. When he was sure no one would see him do anything so maudlin, Glen Papineau raised his bottle of Leiney’s to the sky and let the tears come again.

“To you, Pop,” he whispered. “To you.”

Wind

ALL IT HAD TAKEN WAS ONE PARALYZING LOOK OUT THE REAR window of Henry’s sedan to realize their sojourn had ended. As soon as the train passed and the State Patrol cruiser diverted onto a side street, Edgar jumped into the back seat, and for the rest of the drive he’d held Tinder and Baboo in down-stays, ducking and hoping that Essay, up front with Henry, would look unremarkable. He should never have agreed to a joyride in broad daylight. If the State Patrol officer had looked at them a little longer, been a little less distracted, or had been reminded that morning of the curious bulletin outstanding for a runaway with three dogs, then the flashers atop his cruiser would have started to spin and that would have been the end of it.

By the time they pulled into the driveway, Edgar had resolved to leave at once. Henry stalled him and dug out a map and calculated the distance from Lute to Thunder Bay. It turned out to be over two hundred miles. Henry pointed out the impossibility of Tinder walking that far with a half-healed foot. “And that’s if you go straight through Superior. How did you plan to do that if you’re so worried about being spotted?”

I don’t know, Edgar wrote. We’ll figure out something.

“Look,” Henry said. “If you’re dead set on this, let me drive you as far as the border. I know the back roads around here. We can stay off the main highways. I can even get us around Superior. Then it’s a straight shot up the North Shore Highway.”

Let me see that map, Edgar signed.

He traced out the route for himself, but there was no real choice. Henry could jump them ahead by weeks in a single day. Once near the border they could choose a likely spot and continue on foot. After that, they both guessed five more days walking to Thunder Bay, ten if he babied Tinder. In truth, accepting Henry’s offer looked like the only way Starchild was reachable.

Okay, Edgar signed. But we leave tomorrow.

HE WAITED UNTIL HENRY was asleep that night and walked to the shed and opened the doors. He squeezed his way along the fender of the Skyliner and hiked himself over the door and sat in the driver’s seat and rested his palms on the fluted ring of the steering wheel. In the dark, he could barely see his hands.

Are you there? he signed.

He waited. A long silence followed. After a time he decided it was no use and he started to go back to the house. Then he told himself it wouldn’t hurt to try anyway. He lifted his hands in the dark.

Did you see that thing in me? he signed. That rare thing?

IN THE MORNING EDGAR calmed the dogs by running exercises in the yard-fetches, come-fors, heels. They had stayed so long with Henry the dogs were lax about sticking near him, and now that they were heading out again they would need those skills. Henry called in sick to work, coughing weakly into the telephone receiver and grinning at Edgar. They left just after ten o’clock, when Henry guessed traffic would be lightest. Tinder sat up front, but Edgar stayed in back with Essay and Baboo and a set of blankets, trying to shake off his jitters. He downed the dogs and drew the blankets over them whenever a car came into view. Henry was quiet. He lay his arm across the front seat and rested a hand on Tinder’s shoulder.

After an hour they were west of Brule. Henry cut across Highway 2. He had a spot in mind, he said, where they could stop, give the dogs a break-a little cove he and Belva had discovered while exploring the coastline.

Keep going, Edgar signed. They don’t need it.

“Are you kidding?” Henry said. “These dogs are pee machines. I don’t want to find out what it’s like to wipe that out of the nooks and crannies of my fine vinyl seats.”

Essay seemed to sense an opportunity. She peered into Edgar’s face and breathed anxiously.

Stop it, he signed. You’re going to get us in trouble.

When they’d left Henry’s little valley, the sun was shining between sparse white clouds, but as they approached Lake Superior the clouds merged into the solid blue mass of a storm front. By the time Henry arrived at the turnout and killed the engine, the sun had been eclipsed by the advancing storm.

Henry climbed out of the car. Edgar sat in the back seat, looking up and down the road for traffic.

“Relax,” Henry said, knocking on the side window. “Don’t you want to see the lake? Look around. No one’s here.”

Henry was right, but the thought of standing in the open with all three dogs made him edgy. He’d spent whatever luck he had. On the other hand, the weather was turning ugly, so there was little chance they’d linger. And it would be harder to let the dogs out in the rain.

“See,” Henry said. “Nobody for miles. You’ll like this. Follow me.”

He led them through stands of scrub pine and maple on a faint trail. The trees were slick with green moss and the ground slippery, and made all the more treacherous by the storm gusts that had begun lashing the underbrush. The air was filled with the scent of the lake. Even before Edgar glimpsed water he heard the smashing of waves against the shore.

They emerged near a secluded cove, not much bigger than Henry’s yard. At the back stood a sheer rock wall, twenty or thirty feet high, forming an irregular curve covered with gray ledges and pocked with erosion holes, some so big they looked like caves. A colony of water birds squawked and flapped near the top, where a shag of turf and tree roots overhung the rock.

Edgar saw at once why Henry liked the spot. On a sunny day, it would have felt cozy and secluded-a place where Edgar could have relaxed and watched the flat, watery horizon without fear of being spotted. Up and down the coastline all he could see were trees on rocky cliffs. No houses, no roads, not even boats on the water.

As Edgar and Henry picked their way down the last few feet of trail the dogs bounded onto the driftwood-strewn beach. Out on the lake, the water beneath the storm had turned black and choppy. A thread of lightning flickered between the sky and the water.

When Tinder paused to lift his leg against one of the larger chunks of driftwood, Henry gave Edgar one of his significant looks. The dog was only scent marking, but Henry took it as vindication that the dogs indeed needed a break.

“I told you. Don’t feel bad. You just have to know how to read them,” he said, modestly. “If you were staying around longer, I could teach you how I know these things. People think it takes some special talent, but I tell them-”

Then his mouth dropped open and he lifted his hand to point. Something was happening out on the lake. In the time it had taken them to walk onto the beach, the storm front had lowered, blackened, begun to roll over itself. What looked like a puff of steam jumped off the water, disappeared, then formed again.

“Tornado,” Henry said. “Waterspout, I mean. Oh, Jesus Christ, look at that.”

Edgar turned and was instantly riveted at the sight. As the funnel drew water up from the lake, it resolved, bottom to top, translucent at first, then white, then gray. Two more funnels appeared behind the first, wooly tubes dropping from the clouds. A chest-rattling thrum reached them. The dogs looked up, hackles raised.

“This is not good,” Henry said. “I don’t like this.”

Somehow the three funnels gave the impression of standing still and hurtling forward at the same time. Edgar felt no impulse to run or hide or do anything but watch. The most distant of the three was nothing more than a sinuous thread coiling over the water. The one nearest to shore, maybe a mile away, had thickened into a sturdy vortex that narrowed to a point at the water’s surface. All three were heading east, across the lake; if they kept going, they would pass in front of the cove, though not by much. He stood wondering if the storm that had corkscrewed the boards on their barn roof had birthed funnels like these.

Henry shared no part of Edgar’s fascination. He turned to the steep trail leading into the woods, trotted a few feet, slipped, stood, and turned around.

“Uh, no. We ought to find cover. We don’t want to be in a car if they come this way,” he said. “They say to find a culvert, if you can.” He surveyed their surroundings and the rock wall curving behind them. “Let’s get into one of those caves,” he said. “There’s no time for anything else.”

The center funnel lifted off the lake. It was close enough that it seemed to slam against the water when it came down again. Just moments earlier, it had looked broad and sluggish. Now it was more compact, as though drawing itself inward, spinning faster, and the noise of it was suddenly very loud.

“Nat?” Henry said. “Nat? Are you paying attention? We need to get out of the open. Now.”

Reluctantly, Edgar tore his gaze away from the water. He clapped and recalled the dogs as the first real blast of wind caught him flat against his back. He stumbled and almost pitched forward. By the time he’d gotten the dogs together, Henry stood waiting at the rock wall.

“Here and here,” Henry said, pointing and shouting above the roar. “We have to split up. Nothing’s big enough for all of us.”

Henry had located two recesses, each a few feet off the ground-alcoves scooped from the rock by thousands of years of waves. Neither was very deep, four or four five feet at most. There were other, deeper, nooks in the wall, but they were either too small or too high to reach without an arduous climb.

Edgar nodded at Henry and trotted forward, Baboo following at his heels, Essay and Tinder hanging back. The alcoves were separated by forty feet or more; the leftmost was larger, but also higher and more difficult to reach. Edgar chose that one for himself and two of the dogs.

He signed Tinder over toward Henry, then turned to Baboo.

Up.

The dog looked at him, trying to make certain what Edgar wanted.

Yes, he signed. Up!

Then Baboo crouched and sprang to the ledge. As soon as the dog landed, Edgar turned to Essay, who was back-pedaling toward the water.

Come, he signed to her. Up.

Essay shook off and retreated again and Edgar ran to her.

No games now, he signed. Come on.

He put his hands under her belly and wheelbarrowed her forward. She twisted and mouthed his arms, then broke free and leapt to the ledge beside Baboo and the two dogs stood side by side looking at him. Behind them, the roof of the alcove was soot-blackened-someone had once built a fire inside. The floor, eye level for Edgar, had been swept clean by wind and water. He backed away, holding the dogs’ gaze, then looked over at Henry and Tinder, who were standing together in the sand.

“He won’t let me lift him,” Henry said. “He won’t jump, and there’s no other way up.”

Edgar looked at the vacant hole in the rock. It was just big enough to fit a man and a dog. And Henry was right; beneath the opening was a ledgeless rock face. There was no way Tinder could climb it.

Edgar walked to Tinder and took the dog’s head in his hand.

You’re going to have to try.

Henry scrambled onto the ledge while Edgar led Tinder back a few paces. Then Edgar ran forward and slapped his hand against the rock.

“Come on, Tinder!” Henry cried. “Try not to get us all killed.”

At first, Tinder just stood there, panting and looking over his shoulder at the funnels roaring on the lake. The sound came from every direction now as the rock wall gathered it and echoed it back over the water. Twice, urged by Edgar and Henry and the barks of the other dogs, Tinder hobbled forward, but each time he drew up short and lowered his ears and looked at Edgar.

Then Essay and Baboo leapt down from their ledge and came running across the sand; Edgar caught Essay two-handed as she passed, but Baboo kept running. When he reached Tinder they touched noses and then without delay Baboo wheeled and ran to the rock wall. Tinder didn’t move. Baboo backtracked, barked, and nosed him. And this time they ran forward together, Tinder limping badly.

When they reached the rock wall, Tinder launched himself awkwardly into the air, yelping as he left the ground, his feet pedaling. He landed hard, back leg nearly off the ledge and kicking loose sand into the air, but Henry had him by his front legs, pulling him forward. Baboo had sailed through the air beside him, but there was barely room for the three of them on the tiny ledge and he jumped down at once.

The roar from the lake penetrated every part of Edgar’s body. He prodded Essay and Baboo toward the other alcove and they sprang up without hesitation. Edgar scrambled after them.

“Nat?” came Henry’s shout. Edgar looked across the rock wall. Henry knelt on the other ledge, hands cupped around his mouth. “There’s going to be a lake swell. Stay in the cave.” Then there was nothing more to say and nothing Edgar could have heard over the wind. He turned back to the dogs.

They were in a low, shallow scoop that narrowed rapidly into an egg-shaped cavity. Edgar had hoped to block the entrance with his body, but he saw at once that was impossible; at best, he might shield half the opening. He scuttled back, scraping his head on the sooty ceiling, and turned to face the lake. He signed Baboo down across one leg and scissored him with the other. Then he downed Essay-who, to his amazement, complied-and he wrapped both arms around her. That was the best he could do. If they panicked, he could keep them in place, for a while at least, maybe long enough to calm them down.

And then, backed into that cramped hole, they waited and looked out over the lake. Two of the waterspouts were close now, their sound a blast of every octave and pitch as they ground their way through the atmosphere. The closest stood a quarter of a mile out, like a cable dropped from the clouds into a ball of water vapor at the lake’s surface. A fragment of cloud revolved along its shaft and vanished. Gobs of water splatted against the rocks, gulped out of Lake Superior and thrown landward.

It made Edgar think of how his father stood in the doorway of the barn during thunderstorms, looking up at the sky. Even as he tried to pull the dogs farther back into the cave, Edgar wondered if his father would be doing the same thing now.

As Henry predicted, the water began to rise; the spot where they first sighted the funnels was already submerged by the waves crashing ashore. The wind entered Edgar’s nostrils and mouth, puffed out his cheeks, tried to lift the lids of his eyes. Sand and pebbles pelted them. He thought the sound and the wind might cow the dogs, but it didn’t-the dogs permitted his hold on them but never rolled back against him for reassurance. A gray chunk of driftwood began to roll end over end along the beach, come alive now and fleeing for its life; the dogs turned their muzzles to track it.

Then the smallest of the funnels slid by, its bloom of water skimming the lake’s surface like an upended rose. A jagged thread of light snaked down, drawn to a tree near the shoreline. The sound that followed was more like an explosion than thunder, but it was instantly swept away by the howling wind. When Edgar looked back at the lake, only the larger funnel remained, so squat and black it looked as if the thing were drawing earth and sky together.

What happened next took maybe ten seconds. The ropy funnel that had just passed out of view reappeared, skipping and twisting across the water like a tentacle, moving back along its line of travel. Then the sinuous gray thread of its body was pulled toward the large funnel. They separated for a moment, then twined, the smaller of the two spiraling around the larger before it was consumed. Or nearly so. A whirling streamer peeled away and flailed over the lake, dipping halfway to the water before evaporating. At the same time, the larger funnel changed from ashen to ghostly white, towering palely over the cove, lunging and retreating.

Unbelievable, Edgar thought, as the wind buffeted them. What he was seeing was unbelievable.

Yet he had seen unbelievable things before, came the answer. And he had run from them.

That was the moment Essay decided to bolt. One instant Edgar’s arms were wrapped tightly around her chest, the next she’d slipped away as effortlessly as if greased. She dashed across the cove, her bounds foreshortened by the wind. Baboo barked and scrabbled his hind feet against the bare rock, but Edgar doubled over and threw his arms around the dog, clamping one hand over his muzzle to stop his thrashing. Almost at once he understood that Baboo didn’t intend to follow Essay-he wasn’t drawn by her vision, her compulsion, whatever had made her race to meet the pillar that roared at them from out on the water. He was only trying to call Essay back.

The white funnel lurched toward shore, two hundred yards away now, maybe less, the distance from the Sawtelles’ house to the middle of the lower field, and there it came to a standstill, swaying over the lake. Essay faced it, barking and snarling, tail dropped like a scimitar. When she turned sideways, the force of the wind blew her hind feet out from under her and she rolled, twice, barrel-wise, before scrambling up and facing the wind squarely again, this time carefully holding her ground.

Something crashed to the beach in front of the rocks and a spray of blood pinked the air-an enormous fish of some kind, guts burst and streaming across the pebbled cove.

Now Essay tried to advance. Each time she lifted a foot from the sand her body wobbled precariously in the gale. Finally, it drove her to the ground. She lay there, ears flattened against her skull, muzzle wrinkled, legs extended like a hieroglyph of a dog, stripped by the roar of the wind, it seemed to Edgar, to her essence, insane and true all at the same time. When the wind abated for an instant, her hackles stood. Then it hit again, harder than ever. The trees along the shore whirled and bent and righted themselves, the breaking of their limbs like rifle cracks.

I should go out there, Edgar thought. She’s going to be killed. But then Baboo will bolt.

He had time to debate it in his mind, to weigh the loss of one against the other, and he saw there was no way to decide. She had made this choice, he thought-what his grandfather had always wanted, what he’d wished for time and again in his letters. So, in the end, Edgar lay on the floor of the cave as the wind fired stones at them like bullets. He redoubled his grip on Baboo and watched between his fingers as Essay was driven back to the tree line, crouching and retreating, her muzzle moving but no sound reaching them.

And in that moment, he thought: it isn’t going to work. I’ll never get far enough away. I may as well never have left.

Out on the lake, something changed. The funnel stalled, narrowed, whitened, whitened still more, then lifted off the water. The steam at its base dropped into the lake as if a spell had been broken. The stem of it writhed in the air above them like a snake suspended from the clouds. The wind lessened and the blast of sound abated. Essay’s bark came thinly to them and Baboo began to bark in response. From across the cove, Edgar heard Tinder doing the same.

Overhead, the tube of wind slid sickeningly through the air, preparing to crash down again, this time directly onshore, but without pause it revolved up into the clouds and disappeared as if pursuing some tormentor there. A wash of foamy black water swept up from the lake almost to the rock wall, then carried back with it half the water flooding the little cove. The freight train sound vanished; the wind gusted and was still. There was the hiss and boom of waves breaking up and down along the shore.

The moment Edgar loosened his grip, Baboo sprang from the ledge and ran to Essay, who was already trotting triumphantly before the retreating waves. Baboo accompanied her for a few yards then turned and bounded toward the rocks where Tinder and Henry huddled, and he paced there, waiting.

Getting Tinder down was not easy. The rock was wet and slick and Tinder resisted being carried. Henry took him in his arms and slid down, managing just enough grace to maintain his hold and scraping his back across the rocks in the process. When Henry set Tinder down on the wet sand, the dog limped to the wind-thrown fish and sniffed it. Drops of rain-real rain, not flung lake water-began to fall. Out on the lake, a huge mass of driftwood floated in the water like the tangled bones of a sailing ship dredged from the bottom.

They found Henry’s car plastered with green leaves. The passenger-side window sported a long white crack. They hustled the dogs inside and sat for a long time breathing and listening to the patternless drum of rain on the roof.

“There’s something wrong with that dog,” Henry said. “That wasn’t hardly a sensible thing to do.”

Edgar nodded. But he thought, how can we know? He closed his eyes and the image of Ida Paine, bending toward him across her counter, filled his mind. If you go, she whispered, don’t you come back, not for nothing. It’s just wind, that’s all. Just wind. It don’t mean nothing.

It don’t mean nothing. He tried saying that to himself.

He took up the paper and pencil lying on the seat.

Let’s turn around, he wrote.

“Now that’s more like it,” Henry said. He keyed the ignition and wheeled the car onto the road facing the direction they had come. “At least one of you is thinking straight.”

Edgar smiled, grimly, his face turned to watch the rain and the passing trees. If Henry knew the alternative, he thought, he’d like it even less.

On the way back, Henry kept the radio off. He drove without comment, except for once, when, apropos of nothing in the moment, he shook his head and muttered, “Christ all Friday.”

IT WAS STEAMING HOT that next August afternoon, as Henry’s car rolled along the forest road near Scotia Lake, where Edgar and the dogs had passed the Fourth of July in what now seemed to him a time of aimless wandering. The water was hidden by the trees and foliage. From the inside of the car, it all looked unfamiliar. They overshot the driveway before Edgar caught sight of the little red cottage, now boarded up for the season.

Stop, he signed. That was it.

“You sure?”

Edgar looked again and nodded. He recognized the white trim and the front door and the window he had crawled through. He remembered the taste of the chocolate bar he had stolen there, how it had melted in his back pocket while he fed the dogs butter squeezed through his fingers.

Henry nosed his sedan into the weedy drive and killed the engine. “I’m going to say this one last time,” he said. “I can take you all the way to wherever you’re going. I don’t mind.”

Thanks, Edgar signed. But no.

He knew Henry wanted him to elaborate, but what he wanted to do there at the lake-whom he hoped to find, what he hoped would result from it-required him to go on foot. He could think of no words to explain his hopes, just as his mother had been unable to find words for the value of their dogs. They got out of the car and he retrieved the fishing satchel and the Zebco from the trunk. He hooked the satchel’s strap over his shoulder. The dogs nosed about until their curiosity was satisfied, then trotted back to the car, Tinder first, limping out of the underbrush, followed by Baboo and Essay. Edgar knelt in front of Tinder and stroked his muzzle. He lifted for the last time his injured foot to run his fingertips over the scarred pad. He watched Tinder for a flinch, but the dog only peered back at him. All the swelling was gone now, but his second toe still stood out. He set Tinder’s foot down. Tinder lifted and presented it again.

Stay, he signed. He did this out of habit and immediately wished to take it back, for it wasn’t what he meant. He started to get up, then knelt again.

Watch Henry. He doesn’t know much yet.

Then he stood and held out his hand and Henry shook it.

“All you ever need to do is come back and ask,” Henry said. “I’ll take good care of him until then.”

No. He belongs with you. He chose.

And he had. Edgar could see it as Tinder sat bright-eyed and panting and leaning slightly against Henry’s leg. He’d seen it in the car, driving back from Lake Superior, and later that night at Henry’s house. It seemed to Edgar that Tinder was still making the leap onto that ledge to join Henry, and in one way or another, he would be making it every day for the rest of his life.

Edgar turned and walked up the cabin driveway with Baboo and Essay beside him. He let himself look back just once. Henry and Tinder stood by the car, watching them go. When they reached the lake, Baboo noticed that Tinder wasn’t following. He looked at Edgar, then wheeled and trotted back toward the car. Halfway there, he came to a halt. Edgar stopped and turned and slapped his leg. Baboo came toward him a few steps, then looked over his shoulder at Henry and Tinder by the car and whined unhappily and sat.

Edgar stood looking at the dog. He walked back and knelt in front of him.

You have to be sure, he signed.

Baboo peered at him, panting. He looked past Edgar’s shoulder at Essay. After a long time, Baboo stood, and together they trudged to the car. Baboo bounded the last twenty feet and jumped into the back seat to join Tinder.

“It’s not about me, is it?” Henry said. “He can’t leave Tinder.”

No.

“You think I can do right by both of them?”

Edgar nodded.

“It’s okay with me. Hell, more than okay.”

Edgar stood looking at the two dogs for a long time, trying to fix the memory of them in his mind. Then Essay trotted up and Baboo jumped out to meet her. They circled, end to end, as if they hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and Baboo lay his muzzle along her neck.

Edgar turned and walked up the drive. He didn’t give a recall or any other command. He couldn’t bear to turn around. The underbrush whipped his face but he hardly noticed it over the pounding in his head. He squeezed his eyes down to slits but the tears leaked out anyway. Eventually, Essay appeared by his side. Then she bolted ahead and vanished into the underbrush.

No more commands, he thought. Never again. She knew where they were as well as he and she could run as she pleased.

Behind them, Henry’s car groaned to life. Despite himself, Edgar tracked the sound as it rolled along the road until, even standing still, only the forest sounds came to him.

Return

THEY SPENT THAT NIGHT ON THE SPIT OF LAND WHERE THEY had watched the fireworks consumed by their own reflections, where the howling of the dogs had moved another watcher to announce himself. The next day they walked the perimeter of the lake. Shady patches giving onto cattails and vast tracts of water lilies. Leopard frogs bounded into the water wherever they stepped. The fish were plentiful, the campers sparse. Most of the cabins had been shut down for the season, plywood nailed across their windows, and there was no point in forcing his way into them. Henry had supplied him with matches, fishhooks, and a small gnarled brown-handled pocketknife with ivory inlays.

For each of the next three nights they moved their camp a little farther into the low hills north of Scotia Lake. Essay adjusted to the solitary life more quickly than Edgar expected. At night she and Edgar slept spooned together against the chilled air. She understood that they waited for something or someone. At times she stood and paced, scenting for her two missing littermates. The days had grown shorter now. The August dusk began by seven o’clock, night an hour after that.

Late in the evening of the fourth night, when their small fire had burned down to embers, a pair of eyes glinted in the underbrush. Not deer or raccoon, whose eyes reflected the orange firelight as green. These eyes mirrored red when the flame was red, yellow when it was yellow, disappearing for an instant and then flickering back. Their possessor had approached from upwind, a habit, Edgar supposed, after all that time in the woods. He lay an arm across Essay’s back. He’d saved a bit of fish and he picked it up now and tossed it across the fire.

Forte stepped out of the shadows. He padded forward to sniff the offering. When Essay saw him, her body tensed, but Edgar asked her to stay with the pressure of his hand. It wasn’t a command. He felt he hadn’t the right anymore, that he had long ago fallen from grace but only recently understood it. The stray’s colors were just as Edgar remembered, amber and black across his back, his chest broad and blond. One of his ears hung tattered from some fight long past. But his body had filled out and his legs were thick and solid.

Essay rumbled a warning in her throat and Forte retreated into the dark. Edgar nursed the fire along late into the night, bent over the coals like a wizened old man, fatigued, though they had hardly done a thing all day. In the morning, Essay, too, was gone. She returned at noon, panting and covered with burrs. Edgar had already amassed a great number of fish. He fried the fish on sticks and they gorged themselves. When Essay turned her nose away, he urged her to eat anyway; it was important she not want it later. He fished some more and cooked the fish and thought of Henry sitting at the card table behind his house, roasting bratwurst while he and the dogs looked on from their hiding place by the sunflowers.

Blue evening reflected in the water. Starshot cirrus veils. Forte appeared again late that evening and this time Essay trotted forward to meet him and scented his flanks while he stood rigidly waiting. Then she posed in return. When Forte left, much later, the pile of fish Edgar had set aside was gone.

HE BEGAN TO FISH AGAIN as soon as he woke the next day. He cooked the fish and stacked them up. Catcalls sounded from the woods around them. When they had eaten their fill, he stuffed the remainder into his satchel and left the Zebco lying on the ground and they set out. The traveling was easy now. He didn’t understand why it had taken so long to cross such a meager distance on the way out. In a single day they covered a quarter of their return. Occasionally, he dropped a shred of cooked fish onto the ground as a trail. He’d wondered if he would recognize the route they’d taken all those weeks before. He did.

Essay disappeared for an hour or more at times but always he kept moving. Then there would be a rattle of bracken and she would burst into a clearing and dash over to him, swiping her tail through the air. They came upon a familiar lake late in the day and he built a small fire. He slept beside the dying embers as if trading them for dreams.

He knew for certain that Forte was following as he’d hoped only on the second night. They’d walked all day picking at the fish, a particle for himself, a particle for Essay, a particle tossed on the ground. Essay rooted for turtle eggs, but that season was past. A few stray blueberries hung on bushes, cooked in their skins. They stopped midday along a lake and Edgar stripped and walked into the water and stood until his skin cooled and the fresh mosquito bites stopped itching. An egret lifted out of the reeds near the lake’s edge, white and archaic. It glided across the water and settled near the shore a safe distance away and cawed its objection to his scaring the fish. But the egret was wrong. Edgar ate only the fish that remained in the satchel, reheating them over the fire. God, he was tired of eating them.

He set the remainder of their cache near the edge of the firelight. He suspected it was a bad idea. The satchel was greasy from the fat in the bodies of the fish. Perhaps every bear in the region knew where they were by now, but so would Forte, and he was right about that. When he woke in the morning, the stray raised his muzzle and gazed at him over the glowing char of the fire. He lay still. Essay stood and circled to Forte and nosed him and both dogs circled back. Forte extended his neck and scented him, legs trembling. He stroked Essay under the chin, then let his hand pass to Forte.

When he stood, the dog backpedaled. With his one shredded ear, he looked at once comical and cagey. Edgar turned his back and gathered his things. When he looked around, Forte was gone. As was Essay.

NOW ALMONDINE OCCUPIED HIS THOUGHTS. He hadn’t seen her for two months or more and suddenly it felt like he’d been severed from some fundament of his being. At the end of the next day or the day after that, they would be joined again. Perhaps she would have forgotten his crimes, for which he wanted more than anything to atone. Everything that had happened to him since he’d left made him think of her. Others dreamed of finding a person in the world whose soul was made in their mirror image, but she and Edgar had been conceived nearly together, grown up together, and however strange it might be, she was his other. Much could be endured for that. He also knew that she was old, and he had squandered some portion of their time circling in the woods, blind, confused, stopping and starting with only vague notions of what to do. Without the strangest kind of intercession he might never have seen her again. Perhaps only when he’d become an old man would he realize how reduced he’d been by that decision, how withered he’d become, away from her.

He’d left in confusion, but his return was clarifying. So much of what had been obscure while he faced away was now evident. No sooner had he walked away from that cove by the lake than the need to go home possessed him. He understood the rightness of Tinder’s decision, and Baboo’s. Henry was a fretful person, filled with doubts and worries, but he was faithful as well. Edgar wondered what would have happened to them if Tinder had injured his foot a mile farther along. So much of the world was governed by chance. If they had left Henry’s house a day earlier, they might have been in Canada that very moment, maybe even at Starchild Colony. Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents-the rest you let float by. You met a good man, in whose care a dog would be safe. You looked around and discovered the most unusual thing in the world sitting there looking at you. Some things were certain-they had already happened-but the future could not be divined. Perhaps by Ida Paine. For everyone else, the future was no ally. A person had only his life to barter with. He felt that way. He could lose himself to Starchild Colony or trade what he held for something he cared about. That rare thing. Either way, his life would be spent.

These were his thoughts as he walked the edge of a marshy clearing. Across the way, Essay bounded and turned and nipped at Forte, who followed her, suddenly awkward and puppylike. At length, from Forte’s ineptitude and lurching clumsiness, a fight broke out between them. But it was a mock battle, and soon Essay gallivanted over to Edgar, ignoring the lout.

They slept far from water or any landmark familiar to him. He made a fire for warmth and let it bank. Forte lay watching, curled beneath a chestnut sapling. That night Edgar crossed the lighted circle to sit near the stray and work the burrs out of his coat. When he finished, he stroked the animal along his withers. Forte scented his wrist. He remembered those nights in the garden, Forte silvered in the moonlight and quivering beneath his hands. Then Edgar returned to his side of the fire. His last thought before he slept was that he was glad not to be eating fish, even if it meant going hungry.

The next morning they set off eastward, tracing shadows back to their source again and again. Essay and Forte disappeared. When he saw Essay again, her muzzle was stained red with fresh blood. He knelt beside her and ran his fingers along her gum line and ruff and legs but the blood was not hers. Forte was nowhere to be seen.

They came to the clearing filled with fire-scarred trees where they had stopped the very first night, where the owls had turned to watch them. He began to run. The sumac blazed red where earlier it had stood like green parasols. When he looked down, Essay was by his side.

The old logging trail appeared. They came to the fence line set in the middle of the creek. The water was no more than a trickle and the fence post he’d uprooted sat cockeyed in the silt and dirt. He stepped into the water and lifted the barbed wire. Essay passed beneath almost without breaking stride. On the far side she shook herself needlessly and waited. The creek water slipped over the sand and rocks. He stood waiting for Forte. After a time he decided the dog would find his own way to cross, if he was going to cross at all. He pushed the fence post over and stepped across the wires, not bothering to restore it as he walked back onto their land.

Almondine

WHEN SHE WASN’T SLEEPING ALREADY SHE LAY IN THE SHADE and waited for sleep to return. In slumber everything was as it had once been, when they were whole and he ran beside her, pink and small-limbed and clumsy. Those were nights when the timbers of the house had breathed for them and no sand had yet worked into her joints. No search for him was necessary. In her dreams, he was there, always, waving bachelor’s buttons for her to smell, unearthing oddities she was required to dig from his clenched hands for fear he’d found some dangerous thing. Not so in the waking world, which held nothing but an endless search.

All her life she had found whatever she had been asked to find and there had only been one thing ever. Now he was truly lost, gone away, crossed into another world, perhaps, some land unknown to her from which he could not return. The closet was as puzzled as she, the bed silent on the question. It was not out of the question that he had learned the secret of flight, and the window was not too small for him to pass through. There, sleeping on his bed at night, she would be the first to see when he returned. Old as she was, she still had questions to ask him, things to show him. She worried about him. She needed to find him, whole or changed, but know in any case, and she would taste the salt of his neck.

She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she’d been young, she’d had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn’t understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. The peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within. There was still work to do, of course. The young ones in the barn knew so little and she had taught so many before. It hardly seemed worth trying when she was asked, though she did.

She slowed. The farm danced about her. The apple trees bickered with the wind, clasped limbs in union against it, blackbirds and sparrows and chickadees and owls rimming their crowns. The garden cried out its green infant odor, its mélange the invention of deer or, now it seemed to her, the other way around. The barn swung her fat shadow across the yard, holding it gently by dark wrists and letting it turn, turn, stretch out in the evening upon the ground but never slip. Faster it all revolved around her when she closed her eyes. Clouds rumbled across heaven and she lay beneath, and in the passage of shadow and yellow sunlight, the house murmured secrets to the truck, the traveler, who listened for only so long before its devout empiricism forced it away in wide-eyed panic to test such ideas among its fellows. The maple tree held the wash up to the light in supplication and received (bright flames) yellow jackets each day, its only reply. The mailbox stood soldierly by the road, capturing a man and releasing him, again and again.

Among them, the woman passed, oblivious to it all, leading the pups once more through what they surely must already have learned-the foolish pups who made them all stop and watch, such was their power. Almondine sat and watched them and then, somehow, the boy would be sitting beside her, arm across her withers. The pups had so little time inside them they barely stayed attached to the ground. As it had been with her, she supposed. And then she turned her head and looked and Edgar was missing all over again. Had he really been there? Had it only been some bit of time inside her?

The answer mattered more and more, even as the power in her to find him ebbed. They’d shaped each other under the heat of some more brilliant sun whose light had quietly passed from the world. The towering pines in the front yard knew it; they suffocated one night when an ocean mist drifted into the yard, though no one noticed but she. Three days she lay beneath them, mourning. The squirrels, respectful of nothing, ransacked the carcasses. The nights grew darker, the stars distracted. She slept beside his bed because, if nowhere else, he would return there. He had been tricking her-he had hidden so cleverly! What a reunion they would have when he stepped out of his hiding place, how they would laugh, what joy there would be! The greatest trick of all revealed by him, there all along and watching while she searched! All along! The thought was so startling she rose and panted and shook her head. So many places worthy of another look. But empty, all of them, and all extracting their penalty, impassive, blithe, unconcerned.

And then, midmorning of a day when the sky rang overhead, she reached a decision. She rose from her sleeping spot in the living room. In the kitchen, she set her long soft jaw on the woman’s leg and tried to make it clear she would have to look elsewhere. The woman stroked her absently, a hand familiar against her flanks and caressing behind her ears. Almondine was grateful for it. The door stood unlatched. She still had the strength to pull it open. She walked between the rows of trees on the long slope of the orchard and waited near the topmost tree.

Perhaps he traveled. Now she would, too.

From far away, she heard the traveler coming. For as long as she could remember, they’d passed her yard, acquaintances of the truck, exchangers of the empirical, the factual, the mathematical-traders in unknowable quantities. Longitudes and azimuths. Secants and triangulations. She had thought them intruders when she was young, but learned to pay no attention, her alarm foolish. They were benign, careening about for reasons of their own. Unstealthy, broad, and stupid, they were, but they saw a lot of the world.

It was coming up the far side of the hill; its cloud of dust filled the air between the trees. The glint of its frontpiece appeared. She was not scared. One must try new things. Inside, she held the image of him on that first morning, awake in his mother’s sleeping arms. She’d thought what had begun then would never end. Yet he’d been too long missing for things to be wholly right. Nothing knew of him in the yard. Nothing in the house. All of it forgetting, slowly, slowly, she could feel it, and one could last only so long separated from the essence.

A quest waited in those circumstances, always.

The traveler was almost there. If this one knew nothing, she would ask the next. And the next. One of them would know. She’d asked the truck her question, but with silence it professed ignorance. It had not carried him lately, though it would not deny it had carried him many times before. She had never thought to ask the other travelers until that morning. The idea had come to her in a whisper.

She stepped onto the sharp red gravel of the road. She was very nearly not there at all, so deeply was she inside her own mind. There was a time in her when he had fallen from an apple tree, a tree she’d just stepped away from. He’d landed with a thump on his back. A time in the winter when he’d piled the snow on her face until the world had gone white and she’d dug for his mittened hand. Inside her were countless mornings watching his eyes flutter open as he woke. Above all, she recalled the language the two of them had invented, a language in which everything important could be said. She did not know how to ask the traveler what she needed to ask, nor what form its reply might take. But it was upon her now, angry and rushed, and it wouldn’t be long before she knew the answer. A bloom of dust like a thundercloud chased it down the hill.

She stood broadside in the gravel and turned her head and asked her question.

Asked if it had seen her boy. Her essence. Her soul.

But if the traveler understood, it showed no sign.