Summer mornings he’d sit on the steps and watch across the yard where Foster had the puppies loosed from the barn, the pups’ coats growing out, their legs overtaking their bodies as they galloped and chased through the hemlock duff, their markings, more a roaning than spots, coming out on them. Long streaks of color in their ears and tails, the lemon or blue truing up. One of the males a tricolor, with a black mask and dark bay streaks on his legs. Foster sat on a crate tipped back so he could rest against the side of the barn, his legs sprawled out before him, the puppies over them like a steeplechase or using them as logs to hide behind for ambuscade. Foster near inert, only leaning time to time to pluck a pup away from embedding its teeth too deep into his ankle or to unravel a mess of them from his legs. As if the motion, the turmoil of the young dogs, soothed him. Less often, Foster would throw himself off the crate onto all fours into the duff and sand, swatting out with his hands in gentle swipes to bowl a puppy, the hand hovering as the pup righted itself and sought around itself, spying the hand overhead and attacking it. Sometimes Foster’d be down on his back, the puppies mauling over him, the boy’s laughter a bright rippling shatter to the held morning.

He’d turned sixteen the March passed. His father watched him: the boy and man piled up one atop the other inside the single gangling form. Something coming to an end. He would sit those mornings and try to determine what came next.

Late July there was an incident, what the papers called it, a calamity, far above the Connecticut Lakes in the rough unroaded border country. Something middle-of-the-night that left two federal marshals and three other men dead. A wrecked set of cars bogged to the axles with loads of Canadian whiskey. The Littleton paper was shrill. In the article Pat Jackson was quoted as identifying the three unknown men as being members of a “criminal network not locally based.” He had nothing else to say. The dead marshals were local men with wives and children. There was a service with overflow attendance. The Littleton editorial called for stomping out the blight, for cutting its head at the source. It failed to locate that source.

The doctor, Dodge, took his stud fee in the tricolor male. Afternoons Foster would take the gang of pups down to the sheep pasture along the river and sit on one of the boulder backs and watch them play. In the late afternoons he’d shut them in the barn except for the little bitch he called Glow and he’d walk out through the swampy puckerbrush with her fighting to keep up with him. Sometimes he’d get far ahead, out of her sight, and he’d hear her begin to cry. He’d sit then and wait. She’d find him. Sometimes it took awhile. Learning how to use her nose, to let her nose direct her head. He was happy to wait, squatting in the damp, holding back all urge to speak her name or utter a low whistle, anything at all. And then she’d lift her head from where her nose was drenched in his scent and spy him, coming at him then with the unleashed passion of one come to love. And he would take her up so, pressing his nose into her coat, the sweet puppy smell of her wrapping his heart.