They stood looking at each other. The animal stepped forward to get a better look, as if it hoped to recognize him. At first Edgar thought it was a kennel dog enjoying a stolen hunt. It was the right size, with a familiar topline, and its blond chest, dark muzzle, and saddle of black weren’t unusual for a Sawtelle dog. But its ears were too large and its tail too sabered, and there was something else—its proportions were wrong somehow, more angular than Edgar was used to seeing. And if it had been one of theirs, all but the most contrary would have bounded forward.
His father had nearly vanished down the road but by chance he looked back and Edgar lifted his arm to point. Seeing Edgar hadn’t spooked the animal, but the motion of his arm did. The dog wheeled and retreated into the field, growing grayer and more spectral with each step, until at last the fog closed around it and it was gone.
Edgar trotted down the road to his father.
There was a dog back there, he signed.
In the kennel, every dog was accounted for. They cut back through the field to the finger of woods, hoping to sight it again. They were standing on the road where Edgar had first seen it when his father noticed its stool.
“Look at that,” he said, poking the meager pile with a stick. It was the same rusty orange as the road. Only then did Edgar understand why its lines had looked wrong as it walked the spine of the whale-rock. He’d never seen a starving dog before.
THEY TOLD HIS MOTHER they’d spotted a stray and that it was eating gravel. She just shook her head. It wasn’t much of a surprise. People were always pulling into their driveway, hoping the Sawtelles would adopt the pups that scrambled across their back seats, maybe even train them along with their own dogs. Edgar’s father would explain that they didn’t work that way, but at least once every year a car would crunch to a halt by the orchard and a cardboard box would drop to the gravel. More often, pups were abandoned out of sight, on the far side of the hill, and these they would discover in the mornings huddled against the barn doors, exhausted and frightened and wagging their stumpy tails. His father never let them near the other dogs. He’d pen them in the yard and after chores drive them to the shelter in Park Falls, returning grim and silent, and Edgar had long since learned to leave him alone then.
And so they expected to see the stray appear in the yard soon, maybe even that morning. In fact it didn’t appear for days and then only a glimpse. Almondine and Edgar and his father were walking the fence line. As they approached the old oak, something dark bolted through the sumac and leapt the creek and crashed through the underbrush. Edgar threw his arms around Almondine to stop her from chasing. It was like holding back a tornado—her breath roared in her chest and she surged in his arms and that night she barked and twitched in her sleep.
His father placed several telephone calls. No one was looking for a lost dog, not that Doctor Papineau knew about. Likewise with the animal shelter and with George Geary at the post office and with the telephone operators. For the next few days, they left Almondine behind on their walks, hoping to coax the stray along. When they came to the old oak, Edgar’s father produced a plastic bag and shook out dinner scraps near the twisted roots of the tree.
On the fourth day, the animal stood waiting near the oak. Edgar’s father saw it first. His hand dropped on Edgar’s shoulder and Edgar looked up. He recognized at once its blond chest and dark face, its black saddle and tail. Most of all its bony physique. Its hind legs quaked out of fear or weakness or both. After a time it turned sideways to them, flattened its ears against its skull, lowered its head, and slunk back toward the bole of the oak tree.
Edgar’s father retrieved a scrap of meat from his pocket. His hand swung past and a chunk of meat came to rest on the ground between them. The dog bolted back, then stood looking at the offering.
“Step back,” Edgar’s father said quietly. “Three steps.”
They backed slowly away. The dog lifted its nose and shivered, whether from the scent of food or of people, Edgar couldn’t tell. His own knees began to jitter. The dog trotted forward as if to grab the meat, but at the last minute it whirled and retreated, watching over its shoulder. They stood regarding one another from across the greater distance.
“Yawn,” Edgar’s father whispered.
Edgar raised his hands to sign as slowly as he could.
What?
“Yawn. Real big,” his father said. “Like you’re bored. Don’t look at the food.”
So they gaped their mouths and gazed at the sparrows flicking from branch to branch in the crown of the dying oak. After a while the stray sat and scratched its shoulder and yawned as well. Whenever it looked at the meat, Edgar and his father became entranced all over again by the movement of the sparrows. Finally the stray stood and walked up the path, quickening at the last instant to snatch the meat and plunge into the underbrush.
They let out their breaths.
“That’s a purebred German Shepherd,” his father said.
Edgar nodded.
“How old, would you guess?”
A yearling.
“I was thinking less.”
No, it’s a yearling, he signed. Look at its chest.
His father nodded and walked to the base of the tree and dumped out the rest of the dinner scraps. He looked into the underbrush on the far side of the creek.
“Nice structure,” he mused. “Not so dumb, either.”
And beautiful, Edgar signed, sweeping his hands wide.
“Yeah,” his father said. “Give him a little food and he’d be that, too.”
CLAUDE HAD BEGUN WORKING on the storm damage on the back pitch of the barn roof—hammer strikes echoing against the woods, the scream of nails pulled from old wood, a grunt when he gouged himself.
“They just peel right off,” he said at dinner, pinching two fingers and daintily lifting an imaginary shingle from his plate. His face was sunburnt, and his hand was bandaged where he’d driven a toothpick-sized splinter into it. “Some of the roofing boards are in okay shape, considering the shingles have been letting so much water through. But there’s plenty of rot.”
Claude led them to the mow and pointed out the blackened boards, then climbed the ladder in the dusk and tossed shingles down. If they didn’t reshingle the whole thing, he said, they would be reroofing it, timber and all, a couple of years down the line. And any way you sliced things, it would take him a good part of the summer. They closed up the kennel and walked to the house. After Edgar went inside, his parents stayed in the yard with Claude. Their voices, pitched low, came through the porch screen as they talked, and Edgar stood in the kitchen and listened, carefully out of sight.
“That’s no good,” Claude was saying. “It’ll end up in the yard some night, and get into the barn and pick a fight with one of the dogs.”
“It’ll come in on its own soon enough.”
“Out this long and still running? Whoever dumped it probably beat it. Probably it’s crazy as hell. If that dog was going to come in, it would have run up to you peeing on itself by now.”
“Just give it time.”
“They starve out there, you know that. They don’t know how to hunt, and it’d be worse if they did. Better to shoot it.”
Silence. Then his mother said quietly, “He’s right, Gar. We have three mothers coming into heat in the next month.”