table.
“He seems to have recovered,” said Rila.
“Oh, he’ll be all right,” I told her. “He’ll heal up fast.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Bowser has been with me for years. A sedate city dog to start with, very correct and pontifical. Chased a bird sedately every now and then when we went out for a walk. But once we came here, he changed. He became a roustabout and developed a mania for woodchucks. Tries to dig them out. Almost every evening, I have to go hunting him and haul him out of the hole he’s dug, with the woodchuck chittering and daring him from deep inside his burrow. That’s what I thought Bowser was doing last night.”
“And see what happened when you didn’t go to find him.”
“Well, I had more important things to do, and I thought it might do him good to leave him out all night.”
“But, Asa, it was a Folsom point. I can’t be mis-taken. I’ve seen too many of them and they are distinctive. You said some kid might have got hold of it, but I know no kid could mount it on the shaft the way that it is mounted. And you said something about dinosaur bones.”
“I told you he was a time-traveling dog,” I said.
“Impossible as that sounds.”
“Asa Steele, you know that’s impossible. No one can travel in time, least of all a dog.”
“All right. Explain fresh dinosaur bones.”
“Maybe they weren’t dinosaur bones.”
“Lady, I know dinosaur bones. I taught paleontology at the college and dinosaurs became a sort of hobby for me. I read all the papers I could lay my hands on and one year we picked up some dino bones for the museum. I mounted the damn things. I spent one entire winter stringing all those bones together and making artificial skeletal details that were lacking, coloring them white so no one could accuse us of faking anything.”
“But, fresh!”
“Shreds of flesh still clinging to them. Some gristle and tendons. The meat was getting high. So was Bowser. Apparently, he had found a decaying carcass and had rolled in it, picking up all that lovely scent.
It took three days of scrubbing him to get the stench out of him. He was so high there was no living with him.”
“All right, then, if you say so. How do you explain it?”
“I don’t. I’ve gotten so I don’t even try. For a time, just to show you, I toyed with the idea that maybe a few smallish dinosaurs had survived into modern times and that Bowser had somehow found one that had died. But that doesn’t make any more sense than a time-traveling dog.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Who is there?” I yelled.
“It’s Hiram, Mr. Steele. I came to see Bowser.”
“Come on in, Hiram,” I said. “Bowser’s in here. He had an accident.”
Hiram stepped inside, but when he saw Rila at the table, he started to back out. “I can come back later, Mr. Steele,” he said. “It was just that I didn’t see Bowser outside.”
“It’s all right, Hiram,” I told him. “The lady is Miss Elliot, a friend of mine I haven’t seen for a long time.”
He shuffled in, snatching off his cap, clutching it with both hands to his chest.
“Pleased to meet you, miss,” he said. “Is that your car outside?”
“Yes, it is,” said Rila.
“It’s big,” said Hiram. “I never saw as big a car.
And you can see your face in it, it shines so nice.”
He caught sight of Bowser in the corner and hurried around the table to kneel beside him.
“What’s the matter with him?” he asked. “He’s got all the hair off one of his hams.”
“I cut it off,” I told him. “I had to. Someone shot him with an arrow.”
The explanation wasn’t exactly correct, but it was simple enough for Hiram to understand and not start asking questions. Arrows he knew about. A lot of kids in town still had bows and arrows.
“Is he bad hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
Hiram bent and wrapped an arm around Bowser’s shoulders. “That ain’t right,” he said. “Going around and shooting dogs. There ain’t no one should shoot a dog.”
Bowser, inviting sympathy, beat the floor feebly with his tail and lapped at Hiram’s face.
“Especially Bowser,” said Hiram. “There ain’t no better dog than Bowser.”
“You want some coffee, Hiram?”
“No, you go ahead and eat. I’ll Just sit here with Bowser.”
“I could fry you up some eggs.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Steele. I already had breakfast. I stopped at Reverend Jacobson’s and he gave me breakfast. I had cakes and sausages.”
“All right, then,” I said. “You stay with Bowser.
I’m going to show Miss Elliot around the place.”
When we were in the yard and out of earshot, I said to her, “Don’t let Hiram bother you. He’s all right.
Harmless. Wanders around. The town sort of takes care of him. Drops in and people give him food. He gets along all right.”
“Hasn’t he anyplace to live?”
“He has a shack down by the river, but doesn’t spend much time there. He goes around visiting friends. He and Bowser are great friends.”
“I gathered that,” said Rila.
“He claims he and Bowser talk together — that he talks to Bowser and Bowser talks back to him. It’s not only Bowser. He’s a friend of all the animals and birds. He sits out in the yard and talks to a crazy, cockeyed robin and the bird stands there, with its head tilted to one side, listening to him. You’d swear, at times, it understands what he is saying. He goes out into the woods to visit the rabbits and the squirrels, the chipmunks and the woodchucks. He gets after Bowser for hasseling the woodchucks. Says if Bowser let them alone, the woodchucks would come out and play with him.”
“He sounds simpleminded.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt of that. But there are people like him all over the world. Not just in little villages.”
“You sound as if you like him,”
“More accurately, I don’t mind him. There’s no harm in him. As you say, he’s a simple soul.”
“Bowser likes him.”
“Bowser dotes on him,” I said.
“You said — I think you said — forty acres here.
What in the world would a man like you want with forty acres?”
“Look around you,” I told her. “Perhaps you’ll understand. Listen to the birds. Look at that old apple orchard over there. Filled with blossoms. No great shakes at producing apples. Most of them are small and wormy. I could spray them, I suppose, but that’s a lot of bother. But small and wormy as they may be, there are apples here most people have forgotten, if they ever knew. There is one old snow apple tree and a couple or three russets. You haven’t tasted anything until you bite into a russet.”
She laughed. “You’re making fun of me,” she said.
“You always made fun of me. In your nice, soft-spoken, gentle way. You’re not here for bird song or for some long-forgotten apples. That may be part of it, of course, but there is more than that. You said last night, you came here to find something, then you never told me what it was.”
I took her by the arm. “Come along,” I said. “I’ll give you the tour.”
The path went around the weather-beaten barn with the sagging door, across one corner of the orchard with its scraggly trees and then along the edge of a long-neglected field overgrown by weeds and bordered by woods. At the end of the field, the path stopped at the edge of a depression.
“This is a sinkhole,” I told her. “Or, at least, it is thought of as a sinkhole.”
“You’ve been digging here,” she said, looking at the trenches I had excavated.
I nodded. “The natives think I’m crazy. At first, they thought I was treasure hunting. I found no treasure, so
