He took the chain from the dog's neck and read the tag's inscription. The dog's name, JIM, was in capital letters, but underneath it, in smaller type, was the name of his owner, the rider in the sage, and his address and telephone number. William C. Harden. He lived out of Malaga on Joe Miller Road. Ben squeezed the tag in his fist and raised his head to look into the east, where the sky now showed a paler hue, a cerulean tint on the horizon, the stars fading away. Dawn, he understood, was imminent, and he'd survived to witness it.
With the light he knew there was no choice left but to go in search of Tristan. He walked the rim of the willow draw, crossed at a swale of low wheatgrass that wet his boots with morning dew, and reconnoitered up the farther side with the steam puffing from his mouth. Twice he stopped to call into the silence, and in the heightened stillness that followed, he listened carefully. No answer came from any quarter, nor did he really expect one. For hours, now, he'd sensed the dog's fate, and it angered him to imagine it, this dog he had known for ten full years as a placid, sober, sensible companion, this dog he had brought home at seven weeks, not to hunt birds—he was not hunting then—but because he had wanted a dog in his life as a vestige of childhood. He'd seen Tristan through ringworm, coccidiosis, cherry eye, yeast otitis, then through a series of old-age maladies—gastroenteritis, a perineal hernia, a dislocating kneecap. He'd observed the dog's steady decline, his need to sit whenever possible, his waning zeal to cut up cover or pound his way through heavy brush, his great thoroughness everywhere to make up for an advancing sloth. That was when Ben brought home Rex, in the hope that the young dog might learn what he could in the seasons before Tristan died.
Another twenty minutes passed before Ben found Tristan at the base of a willow, sprawled in the position in which he slept, so that at first Ben hoped it was only sleep, until he saw Tristan's broken neck. The dog's head had been wrenched and distended, the skin at the throat torn open, the jugulars both severed. A penumbra of blood surrounded Tristan's head and stained the ground under him. Already his upturned eye had clouded, entirely obscuring the lens.
Ben carried Tristan up into the sageland, and at a little distance from his willow fire dug up the ground with the entrenching tool he carried in his rucksack. The grave was shallow and imperfect, but he had no strength to give Tristan more, and he laid him to rest with a little less care than he might have mustered at better times. Nevertheless, it was a grave of sorts, and the dog deserved at least that. He knelt beside it for a moment, then pressed the dog's eyes closed and shoveled the sand back over him.
It was that odd morning hour when clouds roll over after a clear fall night has passed, clouds that would douse the sage for an hour before marching eastward across the desert toward the Selkirk Mountains. Sitting beside his willow fire, Ben noted them, first and foremost, as a transformation in the texture of the air and a subduing of the morning light, as something imminent to be felt in all things, a sensation he remembered from childhood. He watched the sky and then, a third time, tucked his fingers under Rex's right hindleg to press against the femoral artery, measuring the dog's resting pulse, which seemed satisfactory enough. Then, his back warmed by the flames, he turned to watch the clouds come. They were high, dark plumes, fully massed in vertical columns like the ramparts of battleships, their lower reaches dense with rain. Ben, in the face of them, stirred himself and urgently loaded his rucksack.
He stood with his compass in his palm and estimated that in three miles of walking, shading slightly northeast, he would hit a piece of section road, or perhaps the reclamation projects West Canal, and then he could follow the roads or the canal another five miles into George. It was shorter, he guessed, than the walk into Vantage, and while he could not outrun the rain, he could get a jump on it if he set out now, and with luck he might even hail a ride, though chances were slim, in the Frenchman Hills, that many cars would be on the roads. George, Ben decided, might be ten miles off, which in his state of health and with the dog to carry meant the better part of the day ahead. His work stood starkly cut out for him.
He spread his blanket on the sand and, after a moments hesitation, put one hand on Rex. The dog didn't move except to lift his head—but as if this were part of some bird-hunting dream—nor did he move when Ben took him by the forelegs and right hindleg, worked him gently into the center of the blanket, took up the corners in a jury-rigged sling, and devised himself a thick carrying knot against which to settle his hands.
He drank the last of his water. He would have to find more water soon, somewhere in the sage. He slipped his arms into the rucksack, hoisted the dog over one shoulder, and adjusted Rex's weight carefully, so as to not cause him pain. Bent under his burden, Ben doubted he could endure it. But he set out anyway, an old beleaguered man in the desert shuffling along on a cold fall morning with the rain clouds bearing down from the west, his back straining beneath his load. His chin was gray with stubble, his left eye swollen shut. He felt himself a node for travail, a gathering up of suffering into a single point. It was something he'd known long ago at war and on steep hard windy glaciers, where endless meditation on pain served only to deepen it. In desiring always not to suffer, one only heightened suffering. So now he employed the climber's trick, which was also the slogging infantryman's trick, of working to detach his mind from his body, of standing aside as best he could, observing his labored, torturous progress instead of enduring it. Yet he found, at his age, no relief in this. He was too downtrodden, beaten to the core. He stopped beside the next willow draw, eased the dog into the sand, and collapsed beside him, defeated.
Ben lay staring up at the sky, fiddling with the Italian carabiner. He worked its hinge aimlessly. He deliberated for a long time, until he came to a solution. Then, with his folding saw, he went down into the draw and cut two willow poles. He brought them out, smoothed them patiently, then lay one on either side of the dog, drew them into the shape of a V, and lashed their ends together. It took time to adjust things to his standards, but eventually he tied in Rex's blanket sling at the carrying knot he'd made earlier. Finally he ran a loop from the pole ends, clipped the Italian carabiner in, and slung the webbing over his shoulder to use as a makeshift harness.
It was a travois of the sort once used by Indians to move loads over the plains. As Ben pulled it, Rex swayed where he hung, snared like so much cargo. Still, it worked acceptably. The lashings held up sufficiently. The ring-angle piton, threaded on the carabiner, bobbled as Ben hauled his dog across the desert, and his travois scored the sand.
He felt a damp wind blowing at his back, and the first large raindrops began slapping hard against his shoulders. He remembered the poncho in his rucksack, but it seemed impossible to wear it and pull Rex without overheating. Ben was already drenched in a sweat that turned cold whenever he stopped, so he pushed on under the rain, pausing often to catch his breath with his elbows against his knees. The cold rain soaked the crown of his head, his neck, back, and ears.
Sometimes, journeying, he thought of other things, but mostly his mind was returned to the present by his agonized discomfort. He was worn-out, utterly exhausted, and at times his discipline fragmented and he felt himself begin to cave. The rain moved east, leaving the morning dour, the desert sand darkly stained with water, the sagebrush dripping wet. Ben's periods of rest lengthened. There was a rhythm to his thoughts when he struggled forward—panic alternating with redoubled efforts to cultivate detachment. Finally he rested on his back for so long that he had to quell the urge to rest permanently before setting out once more.
In two hours Ben left the sage behind and entered into a vast, dreary field, turned to lie fallow for the cold season. He crossed its unbroken, sodden expanse, traveling toward a line of power pylons and carefully keeping the big river bluffs over his shoulder to the southwest. Tucked under a ridge stood a stack of moldering hay bales five times as large as any farmhouse and covered with black tarpaulins. Ben came down into wheel ruts and a sign— HUNTING BY PERMIT ONLY—nailed into
a fence post, and another that said LEASED HUNTING. The weeds at roadside had been burned off It occurred to him that yes, he had trespassed last night, as the rider in the sage had indicated. He cleared a rise and south, toward Royal Slope, lay blond, sweeping, dry wheat fields and north toward the Caliche Lakes grew trellised apple trees stretching geometrically across the plateau reach.
He came down out of the Frenchman Hills, tortured beneath his burden. Below stretched big fields all disced under, and standing fields of grain corn. On the slope grew Gala apples trained on spindles in the European fashion, and a broad neat swath of Red Delicious trees in umbrella form, with centers open. The branch props were stacked by the orchard. There were no bins in sight.
At last he found a branch canal, which he knew to be laden with pathogens and the excreta of cattle, water he would never imagine drinking at any but desperate times. Now he filled his bottles with it, dropped into each an iodine pill, waited for the crystals to dissolve, and drank with steady greed. The taste was abhorrent; he spat it out. He untied Rex's traveling hammock, let him lap water from his palm, and fed him the remaining chukar meat.
Ben stroked the dog's coat softly. Rex sat on the blanket looking about, pawing tentatively. Finally, he pushed into a standing position, and keeping one foot free of the ground, hobbled forward on the other three.
"You're looking good," Ben called after him. "You're looking better, Rex."
The dog limped off about twenty yards, and with consider able trouble, whining a little, defecated in the sand. He tried for a time to lick his wounds. He turned, hopping, ran his tongue along his hamstring, poked his nose into folds of his coat, then hobbled off another ten yards and urinated feebly, stumbling in the midst of his stream. Licking his wounds again, he limped to the blanket, where Ben was already dismantling the travois. "Looks like you can walk," Ben said.
He looped the carabiner once more around his neck. It bounced against his sternum as he walked.
They limped on, two invalids, two lame wanderers in the desert. They hobbled across the plateau reach and at noon came out on a section road. They passed a pile of rubble in a ditch—stone, bricks, slab concrete—and then a draw strewn with worn-out tires and the rusting hulks of appliances—refrigerators, freezers, dryers. There were dusty side roads, irrigation pumps, the canal water drifting lazily in its course of half-round concrete. A sign sat mounted on a metal post, PURPLE LOOSESTRIFE HARMS WETLANDS AND WATERWAYS, and a few cattails grew here and there where the irrigating water spilled over. They'd come into true farm country. There were mobile homes with satellite dishes. There were lines of poplars, irrigated fields, and newly planted orchards. They came to an intersection with a paved two-lane that Ben guessed was the Beverly-Burke Road as it cut north from Low Gap Pass back in the Frenchman Hills.
They traveled on across the plateau, past mailboxes, newspaper flutes, and big aluminum silos. They surprised three coots on a brackish pond, who began to swim as Ben and Rex approached, paddling silently around a corner. The plain lay broken by shade trees and silhouetted farm buildings far into the east. There were no cars anywhere. Some time after two o'clock they passed what remained of the George Feed Store with its window frames devoid of glass, a mobile-home park laid out behind poplars, a gravel yard full of irrigating pipe, and finally a street of unkempt homes with ragged squares of lawn. They passed the Church of the Assembly of God and the George Community Hall. There was a sign in English and then in Spanish: WARNING NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME WATCH. ALERTA SE ESTA VIGILANDO LE VECINDAD. They limped on into the town of George, the doctor first and behind him his dog, and when they came across a boy behind a chain-link fence who was changing an excavators hydraulic hose—a boy dressed in a mechanic's grease suit, haggard-thin, his hair worn long, a cigarette hanging from his lips—Ben asked in a weary voice if there was a vet somewhere in town. The boy replied that he didn't know, cast an eye briefly over them, and then, adjusting his cigarette, went back to his labors.
At the Colonial Market, Ben selected a can of dog food, a gallon of spring water, a quart of prune juice, five bags of salted peanuts, a banana, and a Winesap apple. It was warm inside, and he lingered; there were no other customers. One clerk worked the checkout stand and another the video counter. All the shelves seemed a quarter stocked, as if the place was going out of business. There were mostly canned goods and little that was fresh—two heads of iceberg lettuce, a clutch of bananas, a few tomatoes, some apples, a handful of pears. A glass case displayed cheap souvenirs—spoons, mugs, postcards, American flags, painted plates.
The checkstand clerk, a teenage girl, was unfriendly in a neutral fashion, offering nothing in the way of pleasantries when he approached her with his armload of goods, though she gawked at his swollen eye. "Is there a vet in town?" he asked.
"Quincy," she answered. "Eleven miles."
"I don't have a way to get to Quincy," Ben explained to her. "You don't have a vet here, do you—someone right here in town?"
"Only on Tuesdays," replied the girl. "The vet comes Tuesdays, runs a clinic."
He paid with a twenty-dollar bill, and she grew more comfortable. "Its a doctor you need, not a vet," she said. "'Cept we don't have one of those, either. Closest doctor's up in Quincy."
"I don't need a doctor," Ben said.
He found Rex where he'd left him, splayed out in front of the store. They made their way to a copse of willows, where there were two hubcaps just behind a log, among desiccated roof tiles and rotting sheaves of particleboard, and here he opened the can of dog food and dislodged the meat into one of the hubcaps with the length of his spear-point blade.
The dog choked the food down instantly. Ben watered him and thought of Tristan buried out there in the sage. The night previous seemed unreal. Except that his shotgun and Tristan were missing, it might have been only a nightmare.
Examining the stitches he'd put in Rex that morning, he decided they'd held together sufficiently during the desert crossing. He rinsed them a little with the spring water, then sat on the ground with his back against the log, sighed, and drank long and hard.
Ben ate a small bag of peanuts. The salt and oil tasted good, and he ate a second bag. He drank half the prune juice, but it didn't slake his thirst, so he followed it with long draughts of spring water. He ate the banana and the Winesap apple. It was a good apple for store-bought, sweet and properly ripened. He ate it to its core, happily, and wished he had another.
A farmer passed in a mud-splashed pickup and gaped at him through the side window. Another truck rumbled by and the people in it, a boy and a girl, leaned forward to gawk at him. In his dishevelment, Ben understood, he cut a disconcerting figure, a transient pauper, a graybeard drifter, a derelict or vagrant. A rootless old bum who had wandered into town to die in a corner or sleep in a barn, piss against the tire of a car, eat an apple squatting on the ground, feed his dog from a cast-off hubcap. He knew what he looked like suddenly, and for a moment he wanted to laugh.
Sitting there with his jug in his lap, he thought of those Hindu wanderers he'd seen on a public television documentary, mendicants abroad with begging bowls, dressed in rags and clutching staffs, divested of all other property, seeking to meet the world unencumbered, aspiring, always, toward—what did they call it?—atman, the self, God. They had a better chance when liberated from possessions, moving freely through the world. There were no distractions in this way of life, everything pared to the barest essentials: food, water, rumination. It wasn't the life he had chosen to live, but it seemed more comprehensible now, as he sat on the ground reduced by exhaustion to an appreciation of simple pleasures. He recalled reading once that the Hindus saw life in four progressive stages: twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter—one needed nothing martial to pursue this phase—twenty years as head of a household, and twenty in the cultivation of the spirit. It was part of this final stage that he was going to miss by dying of colon cancer, as if the last movement of a symphony had been truncated, rendering all before it po
intless, stripping it of fundamental meanings and preventing it from achieving its effect of harmony and completeness. A few more years of twilight, melancholy perhaps, but beautiful.
Ben and Rex shuffled on. They hiked along Montmorency Boulevard with its median grass and poplar trees. They passed a sign for a Lutheran Church declaring its membership in the Missouri Synod. The leaves had come down everywhere, and the wind had whisked them into the gutters, where they were ground to an auburn paste.
Out by the interstate, at Martha's Inn, a stock truck sat in a parking lot of dark, wind-rippled puddles. Underneath the highway sign, starkly gargantuan up on its pole—
MARTHA'S INN
CAFE, FAMILY DINING, LOUNGE
CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED
—sat two more gaudy tractor-trailers, one inscribed with the name Glory, the other painted pearl-black with jaunty purple roof faring. Ben crossed in front of them, tied Rex near the inns doorway, and settled him on the blanket. "Wait right here," he said softly; "I'm going to get you to a vet."
He pushed into the foyer with its Pepsi machine and inert, still video games. He pressed on through to the heat of the place—a snug, agreeable cookstove heat—and holding his rucksack at his side, waited in front of the glass cashier's counter where a painting of a black Lab was displayed for sale, another of three elk poised in a field, a third of an iridescent waterfall.