Watch Henry. He doesn’t know much yet.

Then he stood and held out his hand and Henry shook it.

“All you ever need to do is come back and ask,” Henry said. “I’ll take good care of him until then.”

No. He belongs with you. He chose.

And he had. Edgar could see it as Tinder sat bright-eyed and panting and leaning slightly against Henry’s leg. He’d seen it in the car, driving back from Lake Superior, and later that night at Henry’s house. It seemed to Edgar that Tinder was still making the leap onto that ledge to join Henry, and in one way or another, he would be making it every day for the rest of his life.

Edgar turned and walked up the cabin driveway with Baboo and Essay beside him. He let himself look back just once. Henry and Tinder stood by the car, watching them go. When they reached the lake, Baboo noticed that Tinder wasn’t following. He looked at Edgar, then wheeled and trotted back toward the car. Halfway there, he came to a halt. Edgar stopped and turned and slapped his leg. Baboo came toward him a few steps, then looked over his shoulder at Henry and Tinder by the car and whined unhappily and sat.

Edgar stood looking at the dog. He walked back and knelt in front of him.

You have to be sure, he signed.

Baboo peered at him, panting. He looked past Edgar’s shoulder at Essay. After a long time, Baboo stood, and together they trudged to the car. Baboo bounded the last twenty feet and jumped into the back seat to join Tinder.

“It’s not about me, is it?” Henry said. “He can’t leave Tinder.”

No.

“You think I can do right by both of them?”

Edgar nodded.

“It’s okay with me. Hell, more than okay.”

Edgar stood looking at the two dogs for a long time, trying to fix the memory of them in his mind. Then Essay trotted up and Baboo jumped out to meet her. They circled, end to end, as if they hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and Baboo lay his muzzle along her neck.

Edgar turned and walked up the drive. He didn’t give a recall or any other command. He couldn’t bear to turn around. The underbrush whipped his face but he hardly noticed it over the pounding in his head. He squeezed his eyes down to slits but the tears leaked out anyway. Eventually, Essay appeared by his side. Then she bolted ahead and vanished into the underbrush.

No more commands, he thought. Never again. She knew where they were as well as he and she could run as she pleased.

Behind them, Henry’s car groaned to life. Despite himself, Edgar tracked the sound as it rolled along the road until, even standing still, only the forest sounds came to him.

Return

THEY SPENT THAT NIGHT ON THE SPIT OF LAND WHERE THEY had watched the fireworks consumed by their own reflections, where the howling of the dogs had moved another watcher to announce himself. The next day they walked the perimeter of the lake. Shady patches giving onto cattails and vast tracts of water lilies. Leopard frogs bounded into the water wherever they stepped. The fish were plentiful, the campers sparse. Most of the cabins had been shut down for the season, plywood nailed across their windows, and there was no point in forcing his way into them. Henry had supplied him with matches, fishhooks, and a small gnarled brown-handled pocketknife with ivory inlays.

For each of the next three nights they moved their camp a little farther into the low hills north of Scotia Lake. Essay adjusted to the solitary life more quickly than Edgar expected. At night she and Edgar slept spooned together against the chilled air. She understood that they waited for something or someone. At times she stood and paced, scenting for her two missing littermates. The days had grown shorter now. The August dusk began by seven o’clock, night an hour after that.

Late in the evening of the fourth night, when their small fire had burned down to embers, a pair of eyes glinted in the underbrush. Not deer or raccoon, whose eyes reflected the orange firelight as green. These eyes mirrored red when the flame was red, yellow when it was yellow, disappearing for an instant and then flickering back. Their possessor had approached from upwind, a habit, Edgar supposed, after all that time in the woods. He lay an arm across Essay’s back. He’d saved a bit of fish and he picked it up now and tossed it across the fire.

Forte stepped out of the shadows. He padded forward to sniff the offering. When Essay saw him, her body tensed, but Edgar asked her to stay with the pressure of his hand. It wasn’t a command. He felt he hadn’t the right anymore, that he had long ago fallen from grace but only recently understood it. The stray’s colors were just as Edgar remembered, amber and black across his back, his chest broad and blond. One of his ears hung tattered from some fight long past. But his body had filled out and his legs were thick and solid.

Essay rumbled a warning in her throat and Forte retreated into the dark. Edgar nursed the fire along late into the night, bent over the coals like a wizened old man, fatigued, though they had hardly done a thing all day. In the morning, Essay, too, was gone. She returned at noon, panting and covered with burrs. Edgar had already amassed a great number of fish. He fried the fish on sticks and they gorged themselves. When Essay turned her nose away, he urged her to eat anyway; it was important she not want it later. He fished some more and cooked the fish and thought of Henry sitting at the card table behind his house, roasting bratwurst while he and the dogs looked on from their hiding place by the sunflowers.

Blue evening reflected in the water. Starshot cirrus veils. Forte appeared again late that evening and this time Essay trotted forward to meet him and scented his flanks while he stood rigidly waiting. Then she posed in return. When Forte left, much later, the pile of fish Edgar had set aside was gone.

HE BEGAN TO FISH AGAIN as soon as he woke the next day. He cooked the fish and stacked them up. Catcalls sounded from the woods around them. When they had eaten their fill, he stuffed the remainder into his satchel and left the Zebco lying on the ground and they set out. The traveling was easy now. He didn’t understand why it had taken so long to cross such a meager distance on the way out. In a single day they covered a quarter of their return. Occasionally, he dropped a shred of cooked fish onto the ground as a trail. He’d wondered if he would recognize the route they’d taken all those weeks before. He did.

Essay disappeared for an hour or more at times but always he kept moving. Then there would be a rattle of bracken and she would burst into a clearing and dash over to him, swiping her tail through the air. They came upon a familiar lake late in the day and he built a small fire. He slept beside the dying embers as if trading them for dreams.

He knew for certain that Forte was following as he’d hoped only on the second night. They’d walked all day picking at the fish, a particle for himself, a particle for Essay, a particle tossed on the ground. Essay rooted for turtle eggs, but that season was past. A few stray blueberries hung on bushes, cooked in their skins. They stopped midday along a lake and Edgar stripped and walked into the water and stood until his skin cooled and the fresh mosquito bites stopped itching. An egret lifted out of the reeds near the lake’s edge, white and archaic. It glided across the water and settled near the shore a safe distance away and cawed its objection to his scaring the fish. But the egret was wrong. Edgar ate only the fish that remained in the satchel, reheating them over the fire. God, he was tired of eating them.

He set the remainder of their cache near the edge of the firelight. He suspected it was a bad idea. The satchel was greasy from the fat in the bodies of the fish. Perhaps every bear in the region knew where they were by now, but so would Forte, and he was right about that. When he woke in the morning, the stray raised his muzzle and gazed at him over the glowing char of the fire. He lay still. Essay stood and circled to Forte and nosed him and both dogs circled back. Forte extended his neck and scented him, legs trembling. He stroked Essay under the chin, then let his hand pass to Forte.