At first the little girl stood wide-eyed and placid. He sat back and looked at her. Then her eyes squinted into crescents and her lips drew together into an angry little circle.

“You don’t remember, do you?” she scolded, and now she wasn’t whispering. “You forgot!”

Edgar’s mother, on the far side of the dining room, stopped talking with Doctor Papineau and turned.

Don’t look at me, he signed. I don’t even know who she is.

Abruptly, the little girl turned and stormed off. She’d taken five or six steps before she whirled to face him again. She was a terribly dramatic child, and Edgar had a glimpse of what it must be like in her house. She was probably staging little scenes like this all the time over eating her vegetables and watching television.

She scrunched up her face as though thinking through a knotty problem.

“Would you tell me if you did remember?” she asked, finally.

Yes.

Her expression brightened into a smile. Her face was still oddly familiar, still impossible to place.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay!” Then she skipped away. Before she reached the corner booth her attention was caught by a baby in a high chair and she stopped to poke the baby and ask questions when it started to cry.

“What was that about?” Trudy said when she slipped into the booth.

I don’t know.

“Maybe you have an admirer,” she said.

And for the third time since they’d walked into the diner, he could think of no better reply than a shrug.

THEY WORKED HARD TO distract one another whenever they recognized bleakness descending. Edgar pulled Trudy to the kitchen table to play checkers and eat popcorn. One night she snuck his entire litter into the house without waking him. In the morning, when he opened his eyes, eight dogs lifted their heads to look at him.

Edgar opened The Jungle Book and discovered that, for the first time since the funeral, he could concentrate enough to read. And reading was more comfort than anything else. “Kaa’s Hunting.” “Tales of the Bander-Log.” It didn’t matter. It touched the old life, the life before. He watched the television for news of Alexandra Honeywell and Starchild Colony, and that too provided a comfort. Yet, in the mornings, the front of his ribcage ached as if someone had dropped an anvil on his chest in the night.

The whelping rooms consoled him. Also the workshop, despite what had happened there. But it was the row of paint-chipped file cabinets, standing like sentinels against the back wall of the workshop, that drew him most. Atop the cabinets sat a small reference library. Working Dogs, by Humphrey, Warner, and Brooks. Genetics in Relation to Agriculture, by Babcock and Clausen. Veterinary Techniques for the Farm, by Wilson and Bobrow. Genetics and the Social Behavior of Dogs, by Scott and Fuller. And of course, The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language. The master litter book was there, too-row upon row of ledgered names and litter numbers, one line for every Sawtelle dog, all the way back to his grandfather’s time. A thousand times he must have watched his father run a finger along a page, then snatch an overstuffed folder out of a drawer. Generations of dogs filled those metal drawers. If ever a folder turned up missing, his father said it was as if they had lost the dog itself, and he would search and search, saying, “These records are it. Without them, we wouldn’t know how to plan the next litter. We wouldn’t know what a dog meant.”

The bottom drawers of the oldest cabinets contained a hash of newspaper articles and letters, most addressed to Edgar’s grandfather. There was a letter from a man in Ohio whose dog had rescued him from drowning. Another, from a woman in Washington State, described how her dogs had interceded when she’d been attacked by a mountain lion. Some letters were paper-clipped to newspaper articles from faraway cities. The Boston Globe. The New York Times. Even the London Times. The pattern was clear: his grandfather had been writing to people because their dogs had done something remarkable, something reported in the newspaper.

One letter in particular caught Edgar’s attention. It was postmarked New Jersey, and the name, Brooks, sounded familiar. He’d read the first few lines before he stood and double-checked the spine of Working Dogs, and then turned back to the letter:

May 2nd, 1934

Morristown, New Jersey

Dear Mr. Sawtelle,

Thank you for your interest in our work. I am gratified that Working Dogs is of some assistance, and not a futile documentary effort. Unfortunately, I have no plans that would take me to Wisconsin in the near future, as our work demands my presence here. As one who works with dogs, I trust you understand.

First, to your questions. We do not attempt to train our dogs to make complex choices between training objectives. Of course, the dogs make substantial judgments many times a day, both in training and in service, but a command’s intent is always unambiguously clear. For example, when recalled, the dog should always come. When told to stay, it should always stay. I can think of no benefit in asking a dog to possibly come when recalled. Scent tracking requires a high level of choice-making, but not the kind you’ve asked about. We are eminently practical in these matters. Our goal is to produce the best possible working dogs, and consequently we emphasize predictability. I would not like to guess whether the choice-making behavior you asked about can be trained for or tested accurately, or whether it is heritable. And I have no more efficacious proofing procedures in mind than those you suggest. This whole question of choice between objectives has been a cause for idle speculation on my part the last few nights, and I have even gone as far as discussing it with my colleagues. The consensus seems to be that even if it were possible, there would be little utility in it for service dogs.

Second, for reasons I suspect you already understand, we cannot consider an exchange of dogs. The six strains that comprise the Fortunate Fields breeding program represent thoroughly researched bloodlines. In order to select a foundation stock of just twenty-one animals, we examined the pedigree data of hundreds of candidates, cross-indexed against their show and working titles. As a result, all of our dogs have a proven ancestry that has produced both excellent conformation and great success at work. Introducing an unknown into the bloodlines is out of the question.

I should also like to offer two observations. First, by beginning your breeding program with dogs you found “excellent in temperament and structure” but of unpedigreed stock, you have made attaining your objective-and I admit I don’t fully understand it-immeasurably harder. While it is true that our selection of German Shepherd Dogs was essentially accidental, the choice to begin with a well-documented lineage was not. We know, for example, that our dogs have been structurally sound for at least five generations. When questions arise about the heritability of some trait, we can contact the owners of ancestors two and sometimes three generations back. For the goal of producing a scientifically constructed working dog, this is invaluable. Without such information, one might expect that the first dozen generations would exhibit extreme variability in type; to bring order from that chaos, one would have to aggressively inbreed, with the predictable amplification of undesirable as well as desirable traits.

I also feel compelled to say that it is breathtakingly naïve to imagine creating a breed of dog in the first place. To do so by selecting what you arbitrarily think are outstanding examples-whatever dogs happen to catch your fancy-and crossing them into your line will only result in a jumble, and might well create unhealthy or unviable offspring. I warn you against this course. You seem to grasp the principles of heredity, and thus I am astonished at what you think you might accomplish. You, the canine species, and our society would be better served if you accepted the realities of animal husbandry. Yours is a common vanity, one that every breeder has indulged during a weak moment-but the best of them put such thoughts aside and ask what is right for the breed. I hope you soon do so as well. What you are attempting is, in essence, the opposite of our endeavor, and I cannot recommend it.