Interested?" Toby looked up worriedly, as if it was beyond conception that such an enormous great good thing as this could befall him without his parents objecting or the ground opening and swallowing him alive.
Heather glanced up at Jack, and he said, "Why not?" Looking at Travis, Heather said, "Why not?"
"Yes!" Toby made it a one-word expression of explosive ecstasy.
They went to the back of the wagon, and Travis opened the tailgate.
Falstaff bounded out of the wagon to the ground and immediately began excitedly sniffing everyone's feet, turning in circles, one way and then the other, slapping their legs with his tail, licking their hands when they tried to pet him, a jubilation of fur and warm tongue and cold nose and heart-melting brown eyes. When he calmed down, he chose to sit in front of Toby, to whom he offered a raised paw.
"He can shake hands!" Toby exclaimed, and proceeded to take the paw and pump it.
"He knows a lot of tricks," Travis said. "Where'd he come from?" Jack asked. "A couple in town, Leona and Harry Seaquist. They had goldens.all their lives.
Falstaff here was the latest."
"He seems too nice to just be given up." Travis nodded.
"Sad case. A year ago, Leona got cancer, was gone in three months.
Few weeks back, Harry suffered a stroke, lost the use of his left arm.
Speech is slurred, and his memory isn't so good. Had to go to Denver to live with his son, but they didn't want the dog. Harry cried like a baby when he said goodbye to Falstaff. I promised him I'd find a good home for the pooch."
Toby was on his knees, hugging the golden around the neck, and it was licking the side of his face. "We'll give him the best home any dog ever had anywhere anytime ever, won't we, Mom, won't we, Dad?"
To Travis, Heather said, "How sweet of Paul Youngblood to call you about us."
"Well, he heard mention your boy wanted a dog. And this isn't the city, everyone living in a rat race. We have plenty of time around here to meddle in other people's business." He had a broad, engaging smile.
The chilling breeze had grown stronger as they talked. Suddenly it gusted into a whistling wind, flattened the brown grass, whipped Heather's hair across her face, and drove needles of cold into her.
"Travis," she said, shaking hands with him again, "when can you come for dinner?"
"Well, maybe Sunday a week."
"A week from Sunday it is," she said. "Six o'clock."
To Toby, she said, "Come on, peanut, let's get inside."
"I want to play with Falstaff."
"You can get to know him in the house," she insisted. "It's too cold out here."
"He's got fur," Toby protested. "It's you I'm worried about, dummkopf.
You're going to get a frostbitten nose, and then it'll be as black as Falstaff's."
Halfway to the house, padding along between Heather and Toby, the dog stopped and looked back at Travis Potter. The vet made a go-ahead wave with one hand, and that seemed sufficient permission for Falstaff. He accompanied them up the steps and into the warm front hall… Travis Potter had brought a fifty-pound bag of dry dog food with him.
He hefted it out of the back of his Range Rover and put it on the ground against a rear tire. "Figured you wouldn't have dog chow on hand just in case someone happened by with a golden retriever." He explained what and how much to feed a dog Falstaff's size.
"What do we owe you?" Jack asked. "Zip. He didn't cost me. Just doing a favor for poor Harry."
"That's nice of you. Thanks. But for the dog food?"
"Don't worry about it. In years to come, Falstaff's going to need his regular shots, general looking after. When you bring him to me, I'll soak you plenty."
Grinning, he slammed the tailgate. They went around to the side of the Rover farthest from the house, using it as shelter from the worst of the biting wind.
Travis said, "Understand Paul told you in private bout Eduardo and his raccoons. Didn't want to alarm your wife."
"She doesn't alarm easy."
"You tell her then?"
"No. Not sure why, either. Except we've all got a lot on our minds already, a year of trouble, a lot of change. Anyway, wasn't much Paul told me. Just that the coons were behaving oddly, out in broad daylight, running in circles, and then they just dropped dead."
"I don't think that was all of it."
Travis hesitated. He leaned back at an angle against the side of the Rover bent his knees, slouching a little to get his head down out of the keening wind. "I think Eduardo was holding out on me. Those coons were doing something stranger than what he said."
"Why would he hold out on you?" — "Hard to say. He was a sort of quirky old guy. Maybe I don't know, maybe he saw something he felt funny talking about, something he figured I wouldn't believe. Had a lot of pride, that man. He wouldn't want to talk about anything that might get him laughed at."
"Any guesses what that could be?"
"Nope."
Jack's head was above the roof of the Rover, and the wind not only numbed his face but seemed to be scouring off his skin layer by layer.
He leaned back against the vehicle, bent his knees, and slouched, mimicking the vet. Rather than look at each other, they stared out across the descending land to the south as they talked.
Jack said, "You think, like Paul does, it was something Eduardo saw that caused his heart attack, related to the raccoons?"."And made him load a shotgun, you mean. I don't know. Maybe.
Wouldn't rule it out. More'n two weeks before he died, I talked to him on the phone. Interesting conversation. Called him to give him the test results on the coons. Wasn't any known disease involved-"
"The brain swelling."
"Right. But no apparent cause. He wanted to know did I just take samples of brain tissue for the tests or do a full dissection."
"Dissection of the brain?"
"Yeah. He asked did I open their brains all the way up. He seemed to expect, if I did that, I'd find something besides swelling. But I didn't find anything. So then he asks me about their spines, if there was something attached to their spines."
"Attached?"
"Odder still, huh? He asks if I examined the entire length of their spines to see if anything was attached. When I ask him what he means, he says it might've looked like a tumor."
"Looked like." The vet turned his head to the right, to look directly at Jack, but Jack stared ahead at the Montana panorama. "You heard it the same way I did. Funny way to word it, huh? Not a tumor. Might've looked like one but not a real tumor." Travis gazed out at the fields again.
"I asked him if he was holding out on me, but he swore he wasn't. I told him to call me right away if he saw any animals behaving like those coons-squirrels, rabbits, whatever-but he never did. Less than three weeks later, he was dead."
"You found him."
"Couldn't get him to answer his phone. Came out here to check on him.
There he was, lying in the open doorway, holding on to that shotgun for dear life."
"He hadn't fired it."
"No. It was just a heart attack got him."
Tnafr the influence of the wind, the long meadow grass rippled in brown waves.
The fields ref rolling, dirty sea. Jack debated whether to tell Travis about what had — happened in the graveyard a short while ago. However, describing the experience was difficult. He could outline the bare events, recount the bizarre exchanges between himself and the Toby-thing. But he didn't have the words-maybe there were no.words-to adequately describe what he had felt, and feelings were the core of it. He couldn't convey a fraction of the essential supernatural nature of the encounter.
To buy time, he said, "Any theories?"
"I suspect maybe a toxic substance was involved. Yeah, I know, there aren't exactly piles of industrial sludge scattered all around these parts. But there are natural toxins, too, can cause dementia in wildlife, make animals act damn near as peculiar as people. How about you? See anything weird since you've been here?"