"The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wroblewski David)

The Stray

MORNINGS, CLAUDE STOOD ON THE PORCH SIPPING COFFEE, breakfast plate balanced on his palm. After dinner, he sat on the steps and smoked. Sometimes he unwrapped a bar of soap and turned it over and after a while began to shave away curls with a pocketknife. One morning, not long after Claude moved in, Edgar picked up the bathroom soap and discovered the head of a turtle emerging from the end.

For a long time, Edgar and his father had had a ritual of walking the fence line after first chores, before the sun had cooked the water out of the grass and the air had thickened with dust and pollen. Almondine came along sometimes, but she was getting older, and just as often when Edgar told her they were going, she rolled on her back and held her feet prayerfully above her breastbone. His father never invited Claude, not even those first weeks of summer, before the arguments between them overshadowed everything else.

Their route started behind the garden, where the fence stood just inside the woods’ edge. Then they followed the fencepost-riddled creek to the far corner of their property, where an ancient, dying oak stood, so thick-branched and massive its bare black limbs threw full shade on the root-crossed ground. A small clearing surrounded the tree, as if the forest had stepped back to make room for it to perish. From there they bore east, the land sweeping upward and passing through sumac and wild blackberry and sheets of lime-colored hay. The last quarter mile they walked the road. It wasn’t unusual for Edgar’s father to go the whole way in silence, and when he was quiet, each step became the step of some earlier walk (spray of water from laurel branches; the musty scent of rotting leaves rising from their footfalls; crows and flickers scolding one another across the field), until Edgar could draw up a memory-maybe an invention-of being carried along the creek as an infant while Almondine bounded ahead, man and boy and dog pressing through the woods like voyageurs.

It was on a dark morning that summer, on one of these walks, when they first saw the stray. During the night a white tide had swallowed the earth. At sunrise the near corner of the milk house shouldered through the fog, but the barn and the silo had disappeared, and the woods were a country of the only-near, where the things Edgar saw at all he saw in extraordinary detail and the rest had ceased to exist. The creek ran from nowhere to nowhere. The limbs of the dying oak hung like shadows overhead. In the sky, the sun was reduced to a minuscule gray disk.

They were almost home, walking the road, the world cottoned out ahead, when something caught Edgar’s eye. He stopped near the narrow grove of trees that projected into the south field atop the hill. A granite ledge swelled from the ground there, gray and narrow and barnacled with moss, cresting among the trees and submerging near the road like the hump of a whale breaking the surface of the earth. As his father walked along, Edgar stepped into the wild mustard and Johnson grass and waited to see if the ground might ripple and seal over as the thing passed. Instead, a shadow floated into view at the ledge’s far end. Then the shadow became a dog, nose lowered to the mossy back of the leviathan as though scenting an old trail. When the dog reached the crest of the rock, it looked up, forepaw aloft, and froze.

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.”

“You know I won’t do it.”

“We all know,” said Claude. “No one has ever been as stubborn as Gar Sawtelle. Strychnine, then.” Claude glanced up toward the porch. His expression almost but not quite hid a grin, and what he said next had the sound of a taunt, though Edgar did not understand what it meant.

“You’ve done it before, Gar. You’ve done it before with a stray.”

There was a pause, long enough that Edgar ventured a look out the window. Though his father stood in profile, half turned toward the field, Edgar could see the anger in his face. But his voice, when he replied, was even.

“So I’m told,” he said. Then, with finality, “We take them into Park Falls now.” He walked up the porch steps and into the kitchen, face flushed. He took a stack of breeding records from the top of the freezer and set them on the table, and he worked there for the rest of the evening. Claude sauntered into the living room and paged through a magazine, then climbed the stairs, and all the while a silence occupied the house so profound that when the lead snapped in his father’s pencil, Edgar heard him swear under his breath and throw it across the room.

THEN, FOR DAYS, NO SIGN of the stray. Almondine would stop and stare across the creek, but neither Edgar nor his father saw anything, and after a few moments he’d clap her along. He liked to think she’d caught the stray’s scent, but Almondine often stared into the bushes like that, drawn by exotic scents unknown to people.

Edgar woke one night to the sound of a howl echoing across the field, a long, lonely oooooooooohr-ohr-ooooh that finished in a high-pitched chatter. He sat in the dark and listened, wondering if it had only been in his dreams. There was a long silence, then another howl, this time farther away.

What happens if he comes in? he asked his father the next morning.

“He’s gone, Edgar. If he was going to come in, he would have already.”

But I heard him last night. He was howling.

“If he comes in, we’ll take him to Park Falls,” his father said. Then he glanced up and saw Edgar’s expression, and added, “Probably.”

That evening Edgar pulled two yearlings into the kennel aisle and got the grooming tackle. By the time he’d finished, the setting sun bathed the back of the house in crimson. Claude stood on the porch smoking. As Edgar mounted the porch steps, Claude lifted his cigarette to his mouth and drew on it and pointed its incandescent tip toward the field.

“Look there,” he said.

Edgar turned. Down near the edge of the forest, three deer sprang across the field in parabolic leaps. Behind them, in grim pursuit, the small, earthbound figure of the stray. When the deer vanished into the aspen the stray stopped and circulated as if winded, or confused. Then it too passed into the trees. Claude stubbed out his cigarette in the bowl of an ashtray as the sun dropped below the horizon.

“There’s how it’s staying alive,” he said. The light had gone gray around them and Claude turned and walked into the kitchen.

Late that night, an argument. Edgar made out only some of it from his bedroom. Claude said now there was no choice-it would never come in on its own once it started chasing deer. His father said that he wasn’t about to shoot it if there was any other way. They’d seen no downed deer. Then something else Edgar couldn’t make out.

“What happens if it goes onto someone else’s property?” his mother said. “We’ll be blamed for it, even if it isn’t one of ours. You know we will.”

Around it went among them, their voices faint and sibilant through the floorboards. Then silence without agreement. The spring on the porch door creaked. Footsteps along the driveway. The barn doors rattled on their old hinges.

The next morning, his father handed Edgar a steel food bowl with a hole drilled in the rim and a section of light chain. He dumped two handfuls of kibble into the bowl. They looped the chain around the trunk of the old oak and snapped it. The next day the bowl was empty. They moved it twenty yards up the trail, refilled it, and chained it to a birch.

FIXING THE BARN ROOF, it turned out, was a perfect job for Claude. It hadn’t taken long to see how ferociously solitary the man was. A day spent alone climbing the ladder and ripping tarpapered shingles from old planking left him whistling and jaunty. Sometimes he balanced himself on the long axis of the barn’s peak and watched them working the dogs. He might have been earning his keep, but the barn roof was also a convenient surveyor’s point, a perch from which their entire, insular little kingdom was revealed. Time and again when Edgar looked up, he found Claude in the process of turning back to work.

As soon as the situation required him to work with Edgar’s father, however, arguments arose, puzzling and disconcerting. Though the details differed each time, Edgar got the idea that Claude and his father had slipped without their knowing it into some irresistible rhythm of taunt and reply whose references were too subtle or too private to decipher. Whatever the dynamic, it wasn’t Claude’s only aversion. Group conversations left him looking bored or trapped. He found reasons to dodge the dinner table, and when he did join them, he seemed to lean away as if ready to walk off if things took an unpleasant turn. Yet he never actually left. He just sat, responding to questions with a word or a nod and watching and listening.

It wasn’t that he disliked talk. He just preferred conversations one on one, and then he liked to tell stories about odd things he’d seen happen, though he himself was seldom the story’s subject. One evening, after Edgar had coaxed a new mother out of her whelping pen for grooming, Claude slipped through the barn doors and ambled over. He knelt and stroked the dog’s ear between his thumb and forefinger.

“Your dad had a dog once,” he said. “Named him Forte. He ever tell you about that?”

Edgar shook his head.

“We were just out of high school, before I went into the navy. Your grandpa came up with the name, because of his size. That one was a stray, too, and only ever half tame because of the time he spent in the woods. But he was a dog, you know? Smart as any we’d seen. Good build, good bones, ran a hundred-twenty, hundred-thirty pounds once he was fed right. Your grandfather had no qualms about using him for breeding stock when he saw what he had.” Claude talked about how strong Forte was, how quick, how the only bad thing about him was how he liked to fight, and how his grandfather made Forte his father’s responsibility, because, Claude said, “that dog was so much like Gar.”

This last comment made Edgar look up in surprise.

“Oh, yes. Once upon a time your father was a hell-raiser. Come home drunk, or sometimes not at all. Those two were made for each other. Your dad taught him a trick where he’d whistle and the dog would jump into his arms, all hundred-twenty pounds of him. They’d go into Park Falls and your father would let Forte fight somebody else’s dog and of course Forte would win, and as often as not the other guy’d pick an argument, and there they’d be, man and dog fighting side by side. They’d come home bloody and sleep so late the next morning your grandpa would get mad and kick them out of bed.”

Edgar had never seen his father lift his hand in anger, not against a dog and not against a person. He couldn’t imagine him letting a dogfight happen. But Claude just grinned and shook his head as if reading Edgar’s thoughts.

“Hard to believe, right? Just like from looking at me you wouldn’t necessarily think I was the one patching things up all the time, but that’s true, too. Anyway, your father fell in love with that dog, even though he wouldn’t listen worth a damn. One night he grabs me and Forte and we drive to The Hollow. He downs a fair number of beers and pretty soon some guy says he’s heard of Forte and next thing I know, we’re bouncing along a back road in the dust of this guy’s truck. Your father’s at the wheel, weaving all over, but it doesn’t matter because we’re so far back in the woods there’s nobody else on the road.

“He stops in the driveway outside the man’s house, which turns out to be just a shack. There’s no lights. Your father leaves the headlights on, and as we watch, the guy walks to a shed and a minute later out comes the biggest, blackest mastiff I’ve ever seen in my life. The thing puts its front feet on the hood of the truck and looks in at us, slavering like a bear. Your father pushes open the passenger-side door, but Forte’s seen this monster and thinks he’s got no chance, so all of a sudden he’s sitting in your father’s lap. The mastiff gets off the hood and comes around by the open door. I’m sitting closest to that side, and I go to shut the door, but the mastiff’s head is between me and the handle. Next thing I know, it’s hunching backward and then I’m not in the truck anymore-I’m being dragged through the grass by one boot. I’ve got a free foot, but I’m afraid if I kick it, it’ll start in on my leg, so all I can do is holler for your dad.”

“In the meantime, this guy’s standing in the headlights. He’s got a rifle over his shoulder, and he’s doubled over laughing. Your father’s struggling to get out of the truck, but he’s too drunk to move fast, and he’s got a grown dog cowering in his lap. He throws Forte out of the truck. The dog no sooner touches the ground than he’s back in the cab, and they start all over again. Meanwhile, the mastiff is pulling me back toward its pen to gnaw on me for a good long while.

“Well, your dad finally gives up on Forte and falls out of the driver’s-side door, which would have been funny in any other situation, but right then I’m screaming for help. He gets up and grabs the gun out of the guy’s hand and runs over, jams the barrel of the rifle into the mastiff’s ribs, but it pays no mind. So he jabs it again. It finally notices him and it drops my leg. By the time I get on my feet, it’s got him backed up against the side of the shack and he’s shouting, ‘How do you call it off? How do you call it off?’ The man is still laughing. ‘I got no idea!’ he says, and then there’s a lunge and the gun goes off and before any of us know what’s happening, the mastiff is laid out on the ground.”

Edgar led the dog he’d been grooming back to the whelping room. When he returned, Claude stood waiting for him.

“So the guy’s mad now,” he continued. “He takes the gun from your father and says, ‘Get your dog out of that truck or I’ll shoot it where it sits,’ and it’s clear that he means it. Your father goes to the truck and pulls Forte out. You have to understand how angry he was at Forte for cowering in there. The man lifts up the rifle but your father says, ‘Wait.’ And here’s the strange part: he takes the gun away from the guy, easy as anything. They’re both real drunk, see, swaying in the headlights of the truck. But instead of punching the guy and pitching his gun into the weeds, he calls Forte out and shoots him himself. He shoots his own dog. And then he tosses the gun down and cold-cocks the guy.”

No, Edgar signed. I don’t believe you.

“I put Forte in the back of the truck and drove us out of there. I buried him in the woods across the road, right over there. Then I told your grandfather that Forte ran away, because your father was too sick from the drinking to come downstairs, much less explain what happened. Besides, he didn’t even remember. I had to tell him. He asked some questions at first-like, why didn’t he do this or that, but I think it finally came back. Then he just rolled over in bed and stopped talking. Stayed there for the better part of three days before he could finally face anyone.”

Edgar shook his head and pushed past Claude.

“So you see how it is?” Claude said to his back. “There’s no way he can do it now, even when it has to be done.”

Almondine followed Edgar to his room and they lay on the floor, paw-boxing. He tried to put Claude’s story out of his mind. It was a lie, though he couldn’t have said how he knew, or why Claude would tell him such a thing. When Almondine tired of their game, he looked out the window. Claude was sitting alone on the porch steps, smoking his cigarette and looking at the stars.

THEY COAXED THE STRAY up the path each day by refilling the bowl and moving it closer to the yard, just a few feet at first and then, as the days wore on, much farther. At least, they hoped it was the stray: the bowl was always licked clean. Finally, they staked it close enough to the house that Edgar could see the glint of metal behind the garden, and the next morning, for the first time, the kibble was untouched. At dinner, he suggested they add a generous portion of the roast they were eating, but his mother said they weren’t throwing away any more table food, that the time had come to stop the handouts.

In the morning he found a half-dozen black-fingered manikins sitting around the bowl, rolling chunks of kibble in their paws. He shooed them away and stalked to the workshop carrying the desecrated food. His father stood by the cabinets, filing breeding records he’d taken to the house.

Squirrels are getting the food, he signed, indignantly.

His father pushed his glasses up his nose and peered into the bowl. “I wondered when that would happen,” he said. “There’s no point in putting that out anymore. Once they’ve found it, they’ll never let it alone.”

The idea made Edgar wild with frustration. Isn’t there some way we could trap him? he signed. Trick him into a pen? He’d settle down once we worked with him, I know he would. I could do that.

His father gave him a long look. “We might, I suppose. But if we tricked him, he’d just run off again. You know that.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Every time I think about that dog, something your grandfather used to say comes to mind. He hated placing pups, really hated it. That’s why he started keeping them until they were yearlings-said most people had no idea how to handle a pup. Wrecked their dogs before they were six months old. I remember him taking the truck one night after he’d heard about a new owner holding back food to punish a pup. The next morning the pup was in the kennel again.”

Didn’t they argue with him about it?

His father grinned. “They thought it had run away. And that wasn’t the first one he took back, either. If they cared enough to call, he’d tell them it showed up out of nowhere, give them what for, and maybe let them have the dog back. Most of the time he just sent them a check and told them to get a beagle. Anyway, what I mean is, he hated having to choose where the dogs went. He thought it was pure guesswork. ‘We’ll know we’ve got it right when they choose for themselves,’ he used to say.”

That doesn’t make sense.

“That’s what I thought, too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don’t think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We’re talking about an adult dog, a dog that’s been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him-he’d rather starve than make the wrong decision.”

He’s just scared.

“No question about that. But he’s smart enough to get past that if he wants to.”

What if he does come in?

“Well, if he chooses to, then-maybe-we’d have a dog on our hands worth keeping. Even worth bringing into the line.”

You’d breed him if he came in?

“I don’t know. We’d have a lot of work to do first. Understand his temperament. See how he takes to training. Get to know him.”

But he’s not one of ours.

“How do you suppose our dogs got to be our dogs in the first place, Edgar?” his father said, grinning wickedly. “Your grandfather didn’t care about breeds. He always thought there was a better dog out there somewhere. The only place he was sure he wasn’t going to find it was in the show ring, so he spent most of his life talking with people about their dogs. Whenever he found one he liked-and it didn’t matter whether it was a dog he saw every day or one he heard about halfway across the state-he’d cut a deal to cross it into the line in exchange for one of the litter. He wasn’t above cheating a little now and then, either.”

Cheating? Like how?

Instead of answering, his father turned to the filing cabinets and began fingering through the records.

“Another time. Your grandfather had already stopped that kind of thing when I was a kid, but I do remember one or two new dogs. All I’m trying to say is, we’ve got to be patient. That dog’s going to have to decide on his own what he wants to do.”

Edgar nodded as if he agreed. But something his father had said had given him an idea.

THAT EVENING HE CARRIED a sleeping bag out to the porch along with a flashlight and a book. He had untied and unrolled the sleeping bag in front of the screen door and was settling down to read when Almondine, as if she knew his plan and didn’t like it, stepped into the narrow space between Edgar and the screen door and lay down. He poked her in the flank where she was ticklish and she stood with a harrumph, then stepped over him and lay down again, this time draping her tail across his face.

Okay, I get the point, he signed, aggravated but smiling. He coaxed her into standing, this time more gently, cupping his hand under her belly, and he rearranged the sleeping bag. When he was done, there was space enough for them both to look through the screen, though Edgar had to crane his neck to see the spot behind the garden where the bowl sat. Almondine lay with her head on her paws, panting contentedly and watching Edgar with her flecked brown eyes. He drew his fingers along the soft fur of her ears and through her mane, and soon her eyes drifted shut and her breaths deepened on the exhale. He watched her and shook his head. She could be so vehement at times and, yet, when everything had been put her way, so gentle and accommodating and radiating certainty that the world was in order. After a while he propped himself up on his elbows. Under the glow of the flashlight, he paged through The Jungle Book until he found the passage that had come to his mind over and over that day.

Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera’s silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.

“There is no one in the jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark-the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died-in the cages of the King’s Palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera-the Panther-and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?”

“Yes,” said Mowgli; “all the jungle fear Bagheera-all except Mowgli.”

He switched off the flashlight and laid his head next to Almondine’s. He wondered if it was like that somehow with the stray, whether it had decided after some terrible moment that it was no man’s plaything, or whether it was some combination of frightened and crazy, like Claude said. In time the television went silent. Claude walked upstairs. His mother leaned out from the doorway.

“Good night, Edgar,” she said.

Good night, he signed-drowsily, he hoped. He could feel her sizing up the arrangement.

“What are you up to?”

It’s hot upstairs. We want to sleep where there is a breeze.

When the house had been silent for as long as he could stand it, he sat up, unlatched the door, and slipped outside. Almondine tried to follow, but he shut the door between them. She could open it, sometimes, by catching her claws at the bottom-but he hushed her, holding her gaze until he knew she understood. He walked to the flower bed beneath the kitchen window, and there he lifted a bread bag from among the green straps of the irises and crossed the garden and filled the dish with the kibble he’d packed into the top of the bag. Then he sat on the porch steps, leaning against the door’s cross brace, and waited. Eventually, his gaze lifted to the stars.

He woke to the sound of Almondine, behind the screen door, breathing hoarsely at his shoulder. The yard was flush with moonlight. It didn’t come to him at once why he was sitting there. His gaze wandered along the clothesline sagging from the house to where it vanished into the shadow of the maple tree. The rattle of kibble against the steel pan finally shook him out of his reverie. He jerked upright. Across the expanse of stakes and seedlings, the stray stood, eating greedily and watching Edgar, its chest silver in the moonlight.

He stood, slowly, and carried the bread bag, heavy and cold, into the shadow of the maple and knelt. The iron scent of blood wafted upward as he opened the bag-ground beef, stolen that afternoon from the freezer. He squeezed a portion into a ball and let out a soft whistle. The dog lifted its head and looked at Edgar. Then it turned back to the bowl to lick up the last dots of kibble and stood on three legs and scratched its chest with its hind fourth.

Edgar pitched the meat underhand, just as his father had done on the trail. The pale mirrors of the dog’s eyes glinted. It stepped out of the weeds and pressed its nose into the night air. Another chunk of ground beef sailed out and rattled the leaves of a tomato plant. The animal began to pick its way through the rows of vines and seedlings and foot-high corn stalks, pausing at one offering, then the other.

Edgar divided the remaining meat into two greasy lumps. One came to rest midway between them, no more than ten yards away. The dog went to it, sniffed, and swallowed the meat in a single gulp, then lifted its head and ran its tongue along its chops. The other lump of meat Edgar held in his hands. For a long time neither moved. Edgar leaned forward and set the meat on the grass. The dog walked forward and took the meat and swallowed and stood panting and looking at Edgar. A slash of matted fur crossed its forehead and burrs were twisted into its coat. When Edgar held out his hand, the dog stepped closer and at last licked the blood and grease from his fingers. Edgar ran his free hand through the dog’s ruff. He knew then it was possible to bring the dog in the rest of the way. Not that it would happen that night, but it could happen. The dog wasn’t crazy. Not all its trust was gone. It was undecided, that was all. It had watched them and what it had seen was not enough to make it stay or go. As his father had thought.

Edgar was trying to decide what to do next when Almondine began to whine and tear at the porch door. In four bounds the stray crossed the garden and disappeared. By the time Edgar got to the porch, one of the kennel dogs had pushed into its run, baying, and another was following. Edgar settled Almondine and turned toward the barn.

Quiet, he signed.

The dogs stopped and yawned, but nearly ten minutes passed before they ceased their pacing and bedded down again.

WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES the next morning, a fluted circle of dirty white lay just beyond the porch steps. He sat on his sleeping bag and rubbed his eyes. What he saw looked like a coffee filter-a soggy paper coffee filter, stained brown. When he walked outside to investigate, Almondine pushed past and, to his surprise, urinated on the thing. Then she rounded the corner of the house with her nose to the ground.

A black plastic trash bag lay in the front yard, chewed open, its contents strewn about-empty soup cans, a Wheaties box, bits of packages, newspapers, a milk carton. When he bent to peer at one of the papers, he saw his own handwriting in the crossword puzzle. The date on the newspaper was three days past. They had taken it to the dump the day before.

Over breakfast, they speculated over how the trash had gotten there. Claude said it was a prank, some kids out drinking. Edgar’s mother was the first to conclude that it must have been the stray. The dump was about a quarter of a mile down Town Line Road, up a narrow dirt drive that dead-ended in a semicircle of rubbish and the carcasses of stoves and refrigerators.

“Why would it drag garbage all the way back from the dump, for Christ sake?” Claude said.

His mother looked thoughtful. “Maybe it’s retrieving,” she said.

“Retrieving? Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Grateful for the food? ‘Here’s something you lost, thought you’d want it back’-that sort of thing.”

She was right, Edgar knew it at once, but he was the only one who understood the full significance of the dog’s labors. He considered telling them what had happened the night before, but that meant explaining how a pound of ground beef had disappeared.

The next morning a long-discarded pair of his jeans lay neatly unfolded in the front yard, as if a boy had evaporated from within them. The morning after that, a single tennis shoe, mangled and gray. His father laughed, but Claude was incensed. He stalked away to his roofing work.

“Imagine if that dog had spread garbage around the living room,” Edgar’s mother said, when Edgar asked her about it. “That’s how Claude feels. To him, the dog’s a trespasser.”

Then, perhaps sensing its efforts were underappreciated, the dog stopped bringing gifts, but by then Claude had begun his campaign. Bitter arguments erupted, Claude adamant that the stray be shot, Edgar’s father steadfastly refusing. His mother tried to make peace, but she, too, thought the stray needed to be dealt with. Two nights later there was an uproar in the kennel that had all four of them out in pajamas trying to calm the dogs. They couldn’t find anything wrong. What had happened was obvious, Claude said. The stray had tried to climb into one of the pens. At the idea, some pure form of anxiety inhabited Edgar. He didn’t want the dog caught, not if it meant loading it into the truck and driving it away. Yet, if it was getting bolder, something bad was bound to happen.

The problem was, he’d begun thinking of names. It was his job, he couldn’t help it, even if he knew it was a bad idea. And only one name seemed right. As if the original Forte had come back.

ON SATURDAY, HIS PARENTS took a trio of yearlings to Phillips for Ice Age Days to proof them around crowds. At first Claude planned to go along, then decided to work on the barn while the good weather held.

Edgar and Almondine spent the morning with a litter of three-month-olds. After the crazywalking, which taught them that people were unpredictable and must be watched, Edgar put them in stays and tossed tennis balls to Almondine in front of them. She was an old hand at distraction training, and she chewed the prizes ferociously, whipping her head from side to side. When the pups held their stay for a ten count, he motioned them free, and there was a mad scramble. Now and then Claude hoisted himself up onto the ridge beam of the barn and sat, shoulders brown and slick with sweat.

After lunch, Edgar fell asleep on the couch while watching television and reading. Distantly, he heard Claude come into the house and leave again, but he thought nothing of it. When he woke, the apple trees seethed in the wind. Outside he found Almondine standing beside the silo, tail down and peering into the western field.

Two deer and a fawn grazed in the hay, small dun figures at that distance. Downwind of them, Forte crouched, stock still, and Claude, in turn, stood downwind of Forte near the wind-lashed tree line. In his arms, loosely cradled, the long black form of a rifle.

The deer flicked their tails uneasily and cantered along the woods’ edge. As soon as they moved, Forte trotted forward, hips low, but instead of charging the deer, he slunk into the woods and disappeared. When the deer began grazing, Claude also retreated into the trees, taking steps so slow Edgar could hardly see the motion.

He turned and ran Almondine to the porch, then closed the door and bolted for the trail behind the garden. At the rock pile, halfway downfield, the path curved around a patch of dogwood, and there he found Claude standing in a small clearing, looking over the raised barrel of the rifle. Thirty yards farther, just inside the forest’s edge, stood Forte. Edgar hadn’t seen the dog in daylight since he’d faced them at the old oak. His ribs showed through his coat and his belly drew up in a steep arc against his backbone. The dog’s ears were peaked forward, and he was drawing fast, deep breaths.

When Edgar reached Claude, he put his hand on the rifle stock. Claude knocked Edgar’s hand away.

“Get out of here,” he muttered. “Get back to the house.”

He’s almost come in twice, he signed, knowing that at best Claude would only gist it. He can’t catch them, not by himself.

He reached for the rifle again. This time Claude turned and grasped the front of his shirt and Edgar found himself sprawling backward into the dry leaves and undergrowth, fighting for balance and then hoping he might make enough racket to get Forte’s attention. But the wind was gusting through the treetops, and the stray was intent on the motions of the fawn.

He didn’t hear Almondine coming. Suddenly, there was a huffing beside him and she stood there, panting furiously, gaze riveted on the stray.

Edgar swept an open hand in front of her face.

Stay.

She saw the command coming and tried to look away, but he got her attention and repeated it. She dropped into a sit. When he turned, Claude had settled the rifle against his shoulder. Edgar watched his finger tighten over the trigger, but there was no kick, no roar. Claude fumbled along the stock, searching for the safety.

From the time they were pups, Sawtelle dogs learned that stay meant remaining not just still but quiet-that whining and barking were a kind of following. And Almondine was in a stay.

Edgar turned to her and touched a hand to his temple.

Watch me.

Her great head swiveled to face him.

Release.

He meant to catch her before she moved, but her hindquarters came off the ground before he’d even completed the sign. All he could do was lunge and clamp his fingers around the hock of her back leg. She sprawled out in the path with a loud yelp.

It was enough to make Claude glance away from the rifle sights. Then Almondine was up again, forging ahead, half dragging Edgar along the path. He finally got in front of her and put his hand around her muzzle and forced her to look him in the eye.

Speak, he signed.

And then Almondine began to bay.

This time Forte couldn’t mistake the sounds behind him for wind. He turned and saw them and leapt away all in a single motion. Claude swung the muzzle of the rifle to track the fleeing dog, but there was nothing left to sight on but swinging branches.

Edgar didn’t realize he’d loosened his grip on Almondine’s collar until she was already away, bounding down the path. She crossed in front of Claude. For a moment, the muzzle of the rifle dropped and tracked her, and then, without pause, Claude pivoted to the field and shot the smaller of the two deer as it stretched its neck, wide-eyed and preparing for flight. The other deer shrieked, executed three springing leaps, then vanished into the woods with the fawn close behind.

Edgar scrambled into the field. The doe lay kicking convulsively. Blood arced from the wound in her neck. Her eye rolled to look at him. Claude walked up beside Edgar and lowered the muzzle of the rifle to the animal’s chest and pulled the trigger. Even before the report finished coming back off the hills, Claude had turned and begun walking toward the house, rifle grasped loosely by his leg like a stick of lumber.

For a long time Edgar stood looking at the deer-her brown hide, her black-tipped ears. Crimson blood seeped from her wounds and then stopped. Almondine appeared at the edge of the field, panting. She trotted over, then froze and approached the animal step by step. The moment when Almondine had passed in front of the rifle’s muzzle kept replaying in Edgar’s mind.

Come on, he signed. Get away from that.

They met Claude walking back into the field carrying a hunting knife and a spade.

“Hold on a second,” he said.

Edgar stopped, then began to walk again.

“Okay, but you’re gonna have to make a decision in a while,” Claude said to his back. “We can help each other here if we want to.”

HE SPENT THE EVENING in the barn, Almondine close by, grooming dogs until his hands ached. Claude approached him once, but Edgar turned away. The sun had set and the stars were coming into sight overhead when the truck pulled into the driveway.

The carcass of the deer hung by one back leg from a low branch of the maple tree. His father was asking questions even before he was out of the cab. Claude walked over to meet them. Forte had finally downed a deer, he said. He’d watched it from the barn roof, but by the time he’d gotten the rifle the deer was down and the stray was working on it, and he’d fired a shot to scare it off.

“The doe was still alive but tore up pretty bad. No choice but to shoot it. I didn’t want to leave it, so I dressed it out and took off the one leg he’d chewed up and brought it back here,” he said.

The lie didn’t surprise Edgar, but what Claude said next did. He expected Claude to return to the old argument, insist they bait Forte and shoot him, or poison him. And this time it was an argument he would probably win. Instead, he suggested they forget Forte.

“As far as that dog goes,” Claude said, “I don’t think I hit it, but I know I scared the hell out of it. Took off so fast I never had time to take a second shot. We’re never going to see it again.”

He looked at Edgar as he spoke, and at first Edgar didn’t understand. His mother caught Claude’s gaze and turned to look at him.

“Where were you during all this?” she asked.

Lit by the porch light, flies penciled their shadows against the carcass of the deer. Edgar’s father turned to face him as well. Claude stood behind and between them, and the resolute expression on his face lifted. The corners of his mouth edged up into a smile.

Claude was presenting Edgar with a choice. He saw that. All his talk of scaring off Forte had just been making the terms of the deal clear. He was offering to forget the stray, let him come or go. The price was silence. Edgar looked at the carcass of the deer and then at his parents.

I was asleep in the living room, he signed. I missed everything.

IF HE AND CLAUDE HAD struck a pact that night, it remained a silent one. Claude never again suggested they try to find or kill Forte and Edgar never told his father the truth about the deer. When he could be surreptitious about it, Edgar filled the steel dish with kibble and set it behind the garden. It was empty by morning, though whether licked clean by Forte or plundered by the squirrels he couldn’t tell.

One evening, as Edgar was crossing the lawn, in that dilated moment after sunset when the sky holds all the light, he saw Forte watching from the far side of the garden and he stopped, hoping the dog would finally trot into the yard. Instead, he edged back. Edgar returned to the barn. He filled the steel dish with kibble and walked up the carefully weeded rows of sweet peas and corn and musk melon until he stood a single pace away. Even then the dog would not come forward. It was Edgar who took the final step, out of the garden and into the wild grass growing at the tree line. There, Forte ate the kibble from Edgar’s hand, trembling. Afterward, he let Edgar lay a hand on his shoulder. Thus began a ritual that would last all that summer and into the fall. A week might pass before the stray appeared again. Edgar would carry food out and the dog would eat while Edgar worked burrs from his coat. Always, before Edgar had finished, Forte would begin to pant and then he would turn and walk away and bed down at the forest’s edge, where the lights of the house glittered in his eyes. And if Edgar came closer then, the dog would rise and wheel and trot into the woods without pausing to look back or making a sound.