“Because I’ve met him twice before and he didn’t hurt me. Remember when I came up to the Petersons’ and said I’d seen a dog?” I said nothing about the hag or whether this might be her mutt. I imagined Samuel climbing up to her camp. Ending up in a pie. And I understood why my parents hadn’t talked about her. “He’s just a hungry stray.”

“Then let’s catch him and take him home for ours.”

But I had no intention of doing that. Maisie and Quiet and, for a while, the other puppies were ours if they were anyone’s, but this dog was not. If he was the hag’s, something had changed up there at that camp. Something had sent him down among us.

I wondered what. And I decided, just then, to find out.

—

“Git!” I suddenly yelled, waving an arm, and the dog loped off through the brush and out of sight, the rabbit flopping in his mouth, and I thought it odd that the dog had not eaten it right away, as most hungry dogs would, while it was still warm.

“What did you do that for?” Samuel said, coming out from my shadow to glare at me. “He could have been my dog, Ellie.”

“Or you could have been his boy, more likely. He’s too much dog for you. And wild, besides. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have hidden behind me.”

At which Samuel glared harder. “I wasn’t hiding. You make me sound like a baby. I’m not a baby, Ellie.”

“Of course you’re not,” I replied. “You haven’t been a baby for years and years.”

“And years,” he said. “Third time you’ve been right.”

Chapter Sixteen

The river was where we’d left it, endlessly traveling down its own winding path, through shadow and sunlight, under fallen trees furred with moss and over boulders polished by the current.

Someone, somewhere had named this the Androscoggin, but we generally called it “The River.”

At the end of the path and across some marshy ground, a flat rock above a deep pool at the edge of the current made a perfect place to drop a line. “Find me some bait,” I said to Samuel, who would have been happy to hunt crickets in September when they were thick on the ground but was less eager to forage for April slugs.

“I don’t like things that are slimy,” he said, making a face.

“Help or go home,” I said again, so he sighed a huge sigh and crawled into the undergrowth to hunt for a slug, which he found and brought back to me on a leaf veined with its glimmer-trail. “Go get me another,” I said.