Part 2
The deputy got both arms under Owen’s and held on until the table quit moving, talking into his shoulder mic the whole time. Every unit in town was to understand that the animal loose off the courthouse block was Mercer’s and was to be taken alive, no exceptions, and he made dispatch say it back before he let go.
“He has walked every foot of the Harlow road,” Owen said. “He will not stop short of the timber.”
The deputy wrote it on the back of the visit form, then asked what the dog answered to and whether he would come to a stranger with food. Owen gave him both answers. He would come, and then he would not let a hand near his collar, and a man who knew that would put himself between the dog and the open ground. It was everything Owen had, and it was nothing, and no way to go along with it.
Outside, the dog crossed below the courthouse and came out behind the hardware store, where a man loading softener salt spoke to him in the tone people use for dogs they do not know. He did not slow. He went by the Bluebird with its lights off, past the corner of the lot where a girl had once come out the service door in her apron and crouched to hand him bacon off a folded napkin, and across the gravel of the church lot to the Harlow road.
The shoulder was wet and the borrow ditch below it held old snow. When headlights came up behind him he went down into the ditch and let them pass, and after the third set he stopped coming back up and stayed in the low ground with the grass whipping his flanks.
He had traveled that road beside Owen six years, head out a truck window mostly, twice a week on foot. He left the pavement where the culvert had caved the spring before, went around the cattle guard the way he always had, took the deer crossing under the wire, and worked the sheltered side of the pine stand where the ground stayed bare. Out in the open fields the wind came off the benchland and drove sleet flat across at the height of his shoulders, and he put his head down and angled into it.
Near midnight he stood with a forepaw off the ground while coyotes worked the creek bottom below, until the sound moved east and quit. Later he lay under the root plate of a windthrown fir with his nose against his flank, and the wind came over the top of it and took the snow off the field beyond in streamers. Ice built in the fur of his chest and knocked when he moved.
The porch light did not come on.
He went to the side door, where a strip of crime-scene tape had come loose and ticked against the jamb. He put his nose to the threshold and worked its length. Then he circled the house, past the propane tank, past the lawn chair left out all winter with its webbing slack, and came back to the door and stood with his head down.
The gap beside the fence post was where Owen used to duck through after him. He crossed the yard to it.
The flat rocks took him across dry to the ankle. Beyond the water the ground went up through slide alder and old logging slash, and he climbed it blowing, stopping to stand with his head up and his sides going. Below him and off to the left was the ground where the hunters had found her, marked by orange flagging somebody had stapled to a fence post and never come back for. He went by above it and kept on.
Farther up, the timber opened into a cut a generation old. A hunting blind had come down off its posts and lay in pieces under the young firs. Across a clearing maybe thirty yards wide stood a shack with a stovepipe and a porch sagging under a drift that had not melted. Wind had scoured some of the ground to hard leaves and ice; elsewhere the snow lay over ruts a foot deep.
He went first to the shack, put his forefeet on the bottom step, and worked his nose along the lip of the porch boards where the drift had pulled back, staying on the same eight inches until whatever was in it stopped interesting him. Then he came down and started around the clearing with his nose a few inches off the ground.
At the north end of the cut, under a limb that had come down whole, something was hung up in the branches: a torn strip of cloth, black, stiff with oil. He stopped under it with his nose in the fibers and stayed there. His tail moved once, slowly. Then he put his head into the leaf mat and started one forepaw going until whatever was under there shifted and rolled loose. A plastic bottle, cap still screwed on, knocking against a root. He got his teeth on the round of it, lost it, let it lie. Where it had been the leaves were slick and blackened.
He left it and followed that same smell toward the pine, nose down, quartering, crossing his own track twice and correcting each time. The odor ran heavier under the roots, old smoke and something thicker underneath the smoke, and his claws struck plastic.
He dug there. The soil was frozen an inch down and gave in pieces, and he worked at the frozen edge with both forepaws, throwing leaves back between his hind legs, stopping to push his nose into the hole and starting again. Dirt sprayed the base of the pine. He went at it the way he went at a badger hole, without hurry and without stopping, and was still working when the snow under his right forepaw came up red.
He did not stop for that. A flat case came loose out of the dirt with a cracked seam and a hinge sprung open, and he backed off it and stood over the hole with his chest heaving.
A small black card lay in the bottom beside the impression the case had left, thin as a thumbnail, tipped against the underside of a root where his digging had opened the ground.
He put his nose on it and moved on past it. What he took was the bigger thing, in the grip he used on sticks and balls and a frozen glove, and he brought it up crosswise in his jaws. Then he turned and went back down the path he had come up.
Down off the ridge he carried it. At the creek he set it on a flat rock and drank with the right forepaw held off it, and then took the case up again. The yard was gray when he came back through the fence gap. He went as far as the bottom of the porch steps and stood there with the case in his mouth, and the house stayed dark, and after a while he turned around and went out the lane to the road…
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