Nick continued to watch as the witch and her dog combed the field. They worked with remarkable speed and efficiency. Nick checked his watch; on average the dog was locating a new grave every ten minutes, and Nick kept trotting back and forth across the field to mark the spot with another red flag. She was finding so many graves that at first Nick wondered if the dog was making it all up—just picking up a general graveyard smell and sounding the alarm every few yards or so. But as Nick added each additional flag, he observed its position relative to the others, and there was no denying it—the flags were aligning in a definite grid pattern. The pattern was becoming so obvious that Nick could actually anticipate the location of some of the graves—and the dog did not disappoint. She found them all one by one, filling in the grid like a man working a complex crossword puzzle—and she did it all with three legs and a nose.

Nick was beginning to understand now. What looked like meaningless hocus-pocus at first was slowly beginning to make sense to him; there was definite method to the witch’s madness. Whenever she snapped her fingers the dog seemed to come to attention. It seemed to be some sort of operant signal, as if to tell the dog, “Pay attention! What comes next is a command.” The commands themselves were remarkably subtle: The barest lift of a finger or flip of a wrist sent the dog racing off in a different direction or called it back again. Sometimes she communicated with just a tilt of her head or a slight change in facial expression—the sort of signals a man might easily miss, but the dog never missed a single cue. They communicated without a spoken word, and the effect was eerie. It was almost as if they could read each other’s minds—at least that’s the way it would appear to any casual observer. “The witch can talk to animals,” the deputy had told Nick, and he was right—almost. It reminded him of something he had read once from Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Nick shook his head. No wonder they think she’s a witch.

He thought about Marge and Bosco again—the shouted commands, the constant piercing whistle—and he wondered if Bosco was a little slow or if this dog was just a genius. Maybe Bosco was like a confused child with an overbearing mother who kept screaming commands until the child just shut down in frustration. Maybe the difference was talent or maybe the difference was training, but the difference was obviously there—the two dogs didn’t belong in the same category. Bosco may have had all the right papers, but this three-legged mongrel seemed to have powers that bordered on the supernatural.