She was surprised, given the chaos of the moment, how many of the dogs held their stays, but every one looked as if it might bolt the moment she turned away; they craned their necks to watch the others plunging through the field and circling the house and charging up to the porch steps, where Glen Papineau sat cradling his face in his hands.

Edgar

FOURTEEN RUNS JUTTED INTO THE LONG NIGHT-SHADOW OF the barn. Edgar staggered along palming up the wooden latches and flinging open the doors without waiting for the dogs to emerge. The afterimage of the fire-flash twisted in the air before him like a violet snake. By the time he opened the last run, nearest the silo, the dogs were circling him in the dark, pawing one another and bucking in excited, foreshortened leaps. Then the sound of Glen Papineau’s voice echoed from the front yard. Opal and Umbra stopped, cocked their heads, then turned and galloped side by side through the pack and rounded the stone belly of the silo.

Yes, he signed at the rest. He swept his hands along their sides to get them moving. Go! Get! They turned their heads to mouth his hands, then, one after another bolted past the silo until only Essay remained, seated in the grass. She was nosing the plush fur along the back of her hind leg. He knelt and pushed her muzzle away and ran his hand across singed fur. Brittle as wire. Another patch on her tail. The flash must have caught her on the way out, he thought, but the canvas flaps over the door had damped it. Essay nosed his hand aside impatiently and chewed at her leg and snorted to clear the scent from her nostrils. She scrambled to her feet and shook out.

Edgar gestured toward the silo. You too. Get.

She looked at him, blinking, then turned and bounded into the pale light, shadow out of shadow, a thing created mid-leap, her ears pricked forward, eyes wide, jaw agape, for the very first time wolflike to Edgar’s eyes.

He ran to the rear of the barn. A band of smoke crawled past the lintel above the double doors and lifted skyward. How long had it taken to release the dogs? A minute? Two? How could that much smoke be pouring from the barn? From his vantage point he could see Glen sitting on the porch steps, hands to his face. A half-circle of dogs surrounded him with their heads cocked. Edgar’s mother held a dozen or more dogs in quivering down-stays in the side yard and twice that number still ran wild, bunching up in packs and sailing through the orchard, splitting and joining in a chaotic ballet. As he watched, his mother halted a dog by name and walked to it and downed it using both hands. Then, noticing the gazes of the dogs, she turned. They began a simultaneous exchange of sign.

Are the pups with you?

Are you okay?

No.

Yes.

I’ll get them.

Before she could sign anything else, he ran through the double doors. The interior of the barn was eerily hot. The bulb he’d left screwed into its socket flickered away and the smoke billowed and streamed past it along the ceiling and into the night. The air smelled of hickory and burning straw. Edgar came upon the remains of Glen’s ether-soaked rag, an orange-fringed char. In two of the pens, he found straw still burning, the flames dispersed and yellow. He tore open the doors and kicked the straw until the embers were dark and he looked about. The plank walls were scorched in places. The timbers of the runs blackened. He found glowing, smoking piles of half-burnt straw in three other runs and he stomped them out. Overhead, the heavy crosswise beams were sooty but not aflame. Yet the smoke had not lessened. From outside, he could hear a shouted exchange between his mother and Claude. He ran down the aisle looking for the source of the smoke, but all he saw was a faint orange glow between two of the ceiling boards. When he looked again even that had gone black.

From the whelping room came a pair of high, yiking cries. The air inside was clearer. The solid walls of the whelping rooms had blocked all but a thin scum of smoke, but the two pups were panicked, almost hysterical. The moment he unlatched their pen door, they scrambled past, turned the corner, hindquarters skidding out from under them, and were gone. He followed them out. He wasn’t groggy from the ether anymore, but his head throbbed. Once outside, he gasped the clear air into his lungs and raised his hand and pressed the lump where his head had struck the floor. What he felt wasn’t even pain, just the black hand of unconsciousness passing before his eyes. His knees almost buckled and he yanked his fingers away.

The smoke pouring out of the doorway had doubled since he’d gone in, and blackened. He ran across the yard to where his mother stood among the dogs. The two pups were yapping and tumbling at her feet. She laid her hands on his shoulders and then on the sides of his face.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded.

“All the dogs are out?”

Yes.

“Then keep away from the barn. It’s going to burn.”

No. I put out all the flames I could find. Have you called the fire department?

She shook her head. “We can’t get through.”

What?

“When they put the extension in the barn, they routed the line there first. Claude just tried the house phone. The wires must have burnt or shorted already.”

No. No. No. The lights are on in the barn. The phone there might still work.

“Edgar, listen to me. No one goes into the barn. Look at the smoke. Look at it. The barn is gone.”

A glance was all it took to know she was right. Smoke had begun to seep from the eaves, rising and blacking out the stars in ebony rivulets. The sight of it pressed some tremendous weight down on Edgar. He knew very well how dry and brittle the wood in the barn was. He might have extinguished all the flames he could see, but something was smoldering inside the walls and ceiling. Even if they called that instant, it would take time for the Mellen Volunteer Fire Corps to arrive. Half an hour, maybe. And by then, the barn would be ablaze.

All at once the image of his father lying on the workshop floor flashed into his mind. Snow, seeping toward him. How he wouldn’t look at Edgar. Wouldn’t breathe. “These records are it,” he’d once said. “Without those records, we wouldn’t know what a dog meant.”

When Edgar turned back, his mother was looking at the house. Glen sat slumped on the porch steps, towel pressed to his face. Claude was standing beside him, speaking in a low, urgent voice and trying to pull the towel away so he could flush Glen’s eyes with a pan of water.

“Why would Glen do this?” his mother said. “God damn him.”

He had ether. I knocked it out of his hand.

“What was he doing with ether?”

He had it in a bottle. He held a rag over my face.

She looked at the gray powder in Edgar’s hair and on his clothes.

“You threw quicklime at him.”

Yes.

“That flash was ether fumes.”

Yes. I think the heat of the light bulb set it off.

“What did he mean to do?”

I don’t know.

She was shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How did he even know you-”

Then her voiced trailed off. She seemed to register for the first time that Glen Papineau was not in uniform. He was dressed in jeans and a checkered, short-sleeved shirt with its own bib of quicklime. Claude had coaxed him into setting aside the towel, and as they watched, he pulled back Glen’s eyelids and tipped water across his broad face. When the liquid touched his eyes, Glen’s back arched. He pushed Claude away with a sweep of his hand and hunched over again.

“How did he know?” she said. She took a tremulous breath. Tears spilled onto her cheeks. She began to walk toward the porch, hands fisted at her side. Then her strides lengthened and she was running and her voice rose to a wail, asking the same question over and over.