The woodsfloor was strewn with thickets of berry canes and ropes of vines and twisted black-barked trees with spiked thorns and he made his way down to the bottom with the dogs around him, the white of their coats and their speed a flaring brightness in the ocher of the woods. Then he untangled himself from a last vine and stepped down a short bank and knelt by the small stream, the water unmoving but clear and he dipped up handfuls of it. It was warm and faintly brackish but tasted good, tasted of the place, and this simple thing, that he could find water to drink, made him feel better. As if he might be able to find his way around more than just the woods. He looked up then, still crouching by the water, and saw both dogs locked up with their tails flagged at the edge of the cornfield above him. He called out a low whoa to them and stepped up the bank and went through the last of the trees, learning how to part the brush with his shoulders and backside rather than his hands and came out behind the dogs and paused a moment. Both of them steady. Glow rolling her eyes back to try and see him, to urge him along. Her quivering. The sun over the cornfield was gone into beetroot haze. He stepped past the dogs into the low hummocks of grass that lay between them and the corn. The quail went up then, whistling and bursting into the air, coming up everywhere it seemed in a cluster and then breaking off into long gliding separate planes.

Glow broke and went off into the corn after the mass of birds. Foster too flushed to care, not wanting to call her back. Old Lovey still on point, waiting for him. Her whole body shivering. He went up to her and stood with her between his legs and bent down to run his hands along her sides.

They went out through the cornfield after the singles and Lovey found three and Glow one or perhaps others that she’d flushed but not pointed and Foster flushed one just walking by. They could have gone on from there but the dusk was fast and deep, the woods line already forming up into a solid thing. And he was aware of the old man sitting waiting up in the car. Who had brought them to this place, had given them this thing. And whom Foster would now understand he had no choice but to trust. Not greatly, not overmuch, but some little bit. So he walked the dogs along the edge of the cornfield to the road rather than fight back through the woods and stopped and waited in the dust where the stream ran under the road while the dogs went down to drink and then they went up the short hill where he could see the Chrysler sitting out among the beans. A shape up against the blueblack sky.