from tripping, and I sensed nothing from him for several seconds when the grasses underfoot became a well-trod trail of dirt. I could smell several different men—all of them old scents but as clear to me as the track of children up and down the streets back home. Then suddenly the boy straightened, taking in a breath. “Hey!” he said softly, his gaze sharpening on the path.
Now that I had a firm sense of where we were going, I trotted on ahead a few yards, my fatigue lifting with the boy’s rising excitement. Both the trail and the river were bending in parallel to the right, and I kept my nose down, noticing how the man smell was becoming both more strong and more recent. Someone had been here not long ago.
Ethan stopped, so I went back to him. He was standing, staring, his mouth open.
“Wow,” he said.
I realized there was a bridge across the river, and, as I watched, a figure broke out of the gloom and walked along the railing, peering at the water. Ethan’s heart rate ticked up; I could hear it. His excitement, though, faded into a fear, and he shrank back, reminding me of my first mother’s reaction when we would come across men while we were hunting.
“Bailey, be quiet,” he whispered.
I didn’t know what was going on, but I sensed his mood—it was the same thing that had happened at home, the night he got the gun out and poked it into all of the closets. I looked at him alertly.
“Hey!” the man on the bridge called. I felt the boy stiffen, getting ready to run away.
“Hey!” the man shouted again. “Are you Ethan?”
{ TWELVE }
The man on the bridge gave us a car ride. “We’ve been searching the whole state of Michigan for you, son,” he said. Ethan looked down, and from him I sensed sadness and shame and a little fear. We drove to a big building, and as soon as we stopped Dad opened the car door and he and Mom hugged Ethan and Grandma and Grandpa were there and everyone was happy, though there were no dog treats of any kind. The boy sat in a chair with wheels and a man pushed him into the building, and just before he went inside the boy turned and waved at me, and I thought he would probably be okay, though I felt pretty anxious to be separated from him. Grandpa held tight to my collar, so I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
Grandpa took me for a car ride and I was a front-seat dog. We went to a place where they handed Grandpa a delicious-smelling sack through his window and he fed me dinner right there in the car, unwrapping hot sandwiches and handing them to me one at a time. He ate one, too.
“Don’t tell Grandma about this,” he said.
When we got home I was startled to see Flare standing in her usual place in her yard, regarding me with a slack expression. I barked at her through the car window until Grandpa told me to stop barking.
The boy was only gone one night, but it was the first time since we’d been together that I had slept without him, and I paced the hallway until Dad shouted, “Lie down, Bailey!” I curled up in Ethan’s bed and fell asleep with my head on the pillow, where his scent was the strongest.
When Mom brought Ethan home the next day I was overjoyed, but the boy’s mood was somber. Dad told him he was a bad boy. Grandpa talked to him in front of the gun cabinet. Everyone was tense—and yet nobody so much as mentioned the name Flare, and it was Flare who was the cause of the whole thing! I realized that because no one else had been there they didn’t know what had really happened and were mad at the boy instead of the horse.
I was angry enough to want to go outside and bite that horse, but I didn’t, of course, because the thing was huge.
The girl came over to see the boy, and the two of them sat on the porch and didn’t talk much, just sort of mumbled and looked away from each other.
“Were you scared?” the girl asked.
“No,” the boy said.
“I would have been scared.”
“Well, I wasn’t.”
“Did you get cold at night?” she pressed.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
I alertly followed this exchange, sifting carefully for words such as “Bailey,” “car ride,” and “treats.” Hearing none of them, I put my head down and sighed. The girl reached down and petted me, so I rolled on my back for a tummy rub.
I decided I liked the girl, and wished she visited more often and brought more of those biscuits and gave me some.
Then, before I was ready, Mom packed and we took the big long car ride that meant school was coming. When we pulled in the driveway at home, several of the children came running over, and Marshmallow and I got reacquainted on the lawn, slipping right into our ongoing wrestling match.
There were other dogs in the neighborhood, but I liked Marshmallow the best, probably because I saw her nearly every day when the boy went to stay with Chelsea’s mother after school. Often when I would head out through the open gate on an adventure Marshmallow would be out, too, and would accompany me while we explored the issue of other people’s trash cans.
So I was alarmed to hear Chelsea leaning out of her mother’s car one day, calling, “Marshmallow! Marshy! Here, Marshmallow!” Chelsea came over to talk to Ethan, and before long all the kids in the neighborhood were
