Part 3
Owen ran back for a headlamp and the slip lead from the truck, and he was on the phone to Lo before he reached the road again.
“He’s out,” he said when she answered, thick with sleep. “Heading your way on Burnt Creek. Five minutes ago, maybe less.”
“I’ll come north,” Lo said, and hung up before he could say anything else.
He left the truck. Headlights would wash out the prints, and a puppy that size could vanish into any ditch along the road. Juno had taught him that tracking, like most things, was slow until it wasn’t. He kept the headlamp low and walked the shoulder fast.
The track was easy to read at first: a young dog trotting with his nose up, prints evenly spaced in the new snow. At the Kellers’ mailbox, where an old Lab barked behind the fence, the prints scattered. Tug had stopped, circled twice, and then gone on with a wider berth around the barking. Owen’s shoulders came down an inch. The pup was frightened, then, but still choosing his direction.
The plow came around the curve and went by in a roar of light and slush. Owen stood back against the trees until it passed. When the road went dark again, he couldn’t find the track. The blade had thrown a berm of wet snow across the shoulder. He walked back fifty yards, then forward, sweeping the light along the berm. Nothing.
He made himself stop and think the way a dog would. The wind came from the west, off the creek, and the east shoulder still carried last week’s bank of plowed snow, waist-high and crusted. A small, cold animal with a raw throat would put that bank between himself and the wind.
He crossed to the east shoulder, climbed the old bank, and found the prints on the far side of it, close against the crust. The stride had grown shorter. Every so often there was a smudge where Tug had stopped to cough with his head down.
A mile and a half from the house, the prints turned off the shoulder and dropped into the ditch beneath the Halvorsens’ driveway. Owen went down on his knees and shone the light into the culvert.
Tug was curled just inside the mouth of the pipe, out of the wind, so wet that his blaze looked gray. He was facing south. When the light found him, his tail moved once against the corrugated metal.
“Hey.” Owen’s voice wasn’t steady, and he didn’t try to make it steady. “Hey. It’s me.”
He crawled half into the culvert, got a hand on the pup, and pulled him out into his coat. Tug was shivering hard enough to make his teeth click. He coughed against Owen’s chest, then twisted, pushing with his back feet toward the road and the south.
“I know,” Owen said. “I know where you’re going.”
Lo’s headlights came over the rise a few minutes later. She put the heat on high and drove them the last mile and a half without a word, Owen in the passenger seat holding the puppy inside his coat. At the rescue, she stopped at the front walk and turned to him.
“He can’t come in.”
“I know.”
“But she can come to the door.”
She went inside. Owen stood on the walk in the cold with Tug zipped against his chest. The lights came on in the lobby. Lo crossed it carrying Wren, the blue splint dangling, and knelt behind the glass of the front door.
Owen crouched on his side of it. Tug went still. Wren stretched forward in Lo’s arms and pressed her nose to the glass, and Tug pressed his against the same spot from outside. Their breath fogged a small round patch between them. Neither pup made a sound.
They stayed like that until the patch had spread to the size of a dinner plate. Then Tug sighed, a long, shuddering sigh, and let his head sink against Owen’s collarbone. On the drive home in Lo’s truck, he slept.
Owen worked a day shift that afternoon. Between calls, he phoned the county road department and asked who had been plowing Rimrock Road the third week of October. The foreman didn’t have to look it up. “That’d be Dale Pruett,” he said. “District 3. He starts at seven.”
Owen found Dale Pruett at the road shed at seven that evening, sitting in the cab of a plow with the engine running and a thermos in his lap. He was close to seventy, broad and slow, with a gray mustache gone yellow at the edges. When Owen explained who he was and why he’d come, Dale opened the passenger door.
“The pups,” Dale said. “Lo said a deputy took the boy.” He poured coffee into the thermos lid and handed it over. “How’s he doing?”
“He ran off this morning. Tried to walk back to his sister.”
Dale nodded as though that made sense to him. He looked through the windshield at the shed lights for a while before he spoke.
“That tote was sitting at the back of the pullout. I’d have plowed right past it, but the lid was cracked and something white was sticking out.” He turned the thermos in his hands. “That was the boy. His back. He had it shoved right up in that crack where the wind was coming through, and there was frost on him. Frost in his fur. The little one was behind him, tucked in the corner. She was the only dry thing in there.”
Owen set the coffee on the dash.
“I figured the big one was all right, being big. So I took her first. Got her inside my coat and climbed back in the cab.” Dale shook his head. “She went crazy. Not biting, just kicking and crying and climbing. I put her down on the seat, and she went right over the back of it, trying to get out the window to that box. So I went back and got him, and that’s when I saw he couldn’t stand up. His legs just folded. She crawled under his chin and stayed there. I ran the heater with the both of them on the seat till animal control came.”
“Lo didn’t know any of that.”
“Nobody asked me. I gave my name and went back to work.” Dale screwed the lid back on his thermos. “I’d have kept them. My wife’s in the memory unit over at Sandview, though, and I work nights. Wouldn’t be fair. So I call Lo every few weeks. She tells me the little one’s a problem child now. With the leg.”
“She’s got another surgery on the eighteenth.”
“You’ll let me know how it goes.”
It wasn’t quite a question. Owen said he would.
At home, Tug lay against the crack beneath the front door, his back to the cold seeping in under it, the way he’d lain every night since Saturday. Owen stood in the hall and looked at him for a long time. Then he took Juno’s rope down from the top of the refrigerator and set it on the pile.
On the sixteenth, Sam cleared Tug in the parking lot. Owen was loading him into the truck when Lo called.
“Sam looked at Wren this morning,” she said. “He doesn’t want to do the repair.”
“Then what does he want to do?”
There was a pause long enough for Owen to hear the dogs in the background.
“He wants to talk about taking the leg.”
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