He wasn’t big enough to make a meal of me, and I still had the Smith & Wesson, so while he was looking me over, I took a good look at him. He was lean, but he didn’t look starved. He looked alert and curious. He sniffed the air, and I remembered that dogs were supposed to be oriented more toward scent than sight.
“Look at that,” I said to Joanne Garfield who was standing nearby.
She turned, gasped, and jerked her gun up to aim at the dog. The dog vanished into the dry brush and boulders. Turning, Joanne tried to look everywhere as though she expected to see more dogs stalking us, but there was nothing. She was shaking.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you were afraid of them.”
She drew a deep breath and looked at the place where the dog had been. “I didn’t know I was either,”
she whispered. “I’ve never been so close to one before. I… I wish I had gotten a better look at it.”
At that moment, Aura Moss screamed and fired her father’s Llama automatic.
I pushed away from the boulder and turned to see Aura pointing her gun toward some rocks and babbling.
“It was over there!” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “It was some kind of animal— dirty yellow with big teeth. It had its mouth open. It was huge!”
“You stupid bitch, you almost shot me!” Michael Talcott shouted. I could see now that he had ducked down behind a boulder. He would have been in Aura’s line of fire, but he didn’t seem to be hurt.
“Put your gun away, Aura,” my father said. He kept his voice low, but he was angry. I could see that, whether Aura could or not.
“It was an animal,” she insisted. “A big one. It might still be around.”
“Aura!” My father raised his voice and hardened it.
Aura looked at him, then seemed to realize that she had more than a dog to worry about. She looked at the gun in her hand, frowned, fumbled it safe, and put it back into her holster.
“Mike?” my father said.
“I’m okay,” Michael Talcott said. “No thanks to her!”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Aura said, right on cue. “There was an animal. It could have killed you! It was sneaking up on us!”
“I think it was just a dog,” I said. “There was one watching us over here. Joanne moved and it ran away.”
“You should have killed it,” Peter Moss said. “What do you want to do? Wait until it jumps someone.”
“What was it doing?” Jay Garfield asked. “Just watching?”
“That’s all,” I said. “It didn’t look sick or starved. It wasn’t very big. I don’t think it was a danger to anyone here. There are too many of us, and we’re all too big.”
“The thing I saw was huge,” Aura insisted. “It had its mouth open!”
I went over to her because I’d had a sudden thought.
“It was panting,” I said. “They pant when they’re hot.
It doesn’t mean they’re angry or hungry.” I hesitated, watching her. “You’ve never seen one before, have you?”
She shook her head.
“They’re bold, but they’re not dangerous to a group like this. You don’t have to worry.”
She didn’t look as though she quite believed me, but she seemed to relax a little. The Moss girls were both bullied and sheltered. They were almost never allowed to leave the walls of the neighborhood. They were educated at home by their mothers according to the religion their father had assembled, and they were warned away from the sin and contamination of the rest of the world. I’m surprised that Aura was allowed to come to us for gun handling instruction and target practice. I hope it will be good for her-and I hope the rest of us will survive.
“All of you stay where you are,” Dad said. He glanced at Jay Garfield, then went a short way up among the rocks and scrub oaks to see whether Aura had shot anything. He kept his gun in his hand and the safety off. He was out of our sight for no more than a minute.
He came back with a look on his face that I couldn’t read. “Put your guns away,” he said. “We’re going home.”
“Did I kill it?” Aura demanded.
“No. Get your bikes.” He and Jay Garfield whispered together for a moment, and Jay Garfield sighed.
Joanne and I watched them, wondering, knowing we wouldn’t hear anything from them until they were ready to tell us.
“This is not about a dead dog,” Harold Balter said behind us. Joanne moved back to stand beside him.
“It’s about either a dog pack or a human pack,” I said, “or maybe it’s a corpse.”
It was, as I found out later, a family of corpses: A woman, a little boy of about four years, and a just-born infant, all partly eaten. But Dad didn’t tell me that until we got home. At the canyon, all we knew was that he was upset.
“If there were a corpse around here, we would have smelled it,” Harry said.
“Not if it were fresh,” I countered.
Joanne looked at me and sighed the way her father sighs. “If it’s that, I wonder where we’ll go shooting next time. I wonder when there’ll be a next time.”
Peter Moss and the Talcott brothers had gotten into an argument over whose fault it was that Aura had almost shot Michael, and Dad had to break it up.
