They padded on in silence, watchful for every cracking twig or crinkling leaf. Lucky remembered the last time he had passed near the lair. He tried not to think about the howls of pain as a dog had cried for mercy. It had sounded gravely injured—it was surely dead by now. Mickey doesn’t need to know about that. . . .

As they curved around the Dog-Garden, Lucky was careful to keep their path upwind, hoping that this was enough to disguise their odors. But when they rounded the top edge of the Dog-Garden, Lucky heard a shrill yelp. He froze, his heart in his throat. Only a dog could have made that sound. He threw Mickey a warning look and they stood still as stones, ears pricked up.

There it was again! A high-pitched yap followed by plaintive whimpers. It was not the sound of a frightened dog but a vulnerable one.

“It’s a pup,” whispered Mickey. “More than one, maybe. . . .”

The Farm Dog was right. This wasn’t the dog he’d heard howling in pain before. Lucky thought he could detect at least two small voices whimpering and whining in terror. He couldn’t hear any grown dogs barking, or any sign that a Mother-Dog was close by.

Pity seized his chest. He longed to comfort the suffering pups. Where were their parents? Why would even the Fierce Dogs allow them to yowl like this without helping them? He shivered as he remembered the desperate yelps he had heard when he’d passed the Dog-Garden on the way to the city. The yelps that he had ignored. Tremors of guilt ran over his haunches. He had forgotten one of his Mother-Dog’s lessons. He had let another dog suffer.

Oh, Forest-Dog. Please give me the instincts to know what to do. Almost as soon as he had finished his thought, the answer came to him. “They’re in trouble. We have to help. . . .”

Mickey licked his chops nervously. “But the Fierce Dogs are so brutal. And how do we know that this isn’t a trap? What if they are pretending to be pups to lure in smaller dogs?” He backed away a couple of paces, bumped into a tree trunk, and spun around, his eyes wild with fear. “We can’t go into the Dog-Garden, Lucky. We can’t.”

They listened to the whimpers a while longer. Lucky thought about what Mickey had said. He remembered the huge, brutish Fierce Dogs with their booming voices, their glossy coats, and ferocious jaws. He struggled to imagine that any of them could mimic these desperate, high-pitched squeals.

And even if they could, was that really something a Fierce Dog would do? Were they so cunning? Their Pack seemed much more fond of attacking directly rather than luring outsiders by trickery.