It had started off well enough, with a nice call from his mother—well, not nice exactly, but short—and then a quick jog up the canyon. Runyon wasn’t the prettiest of walks or the most invigorating, but there were a lot of people with dogs who used those trails and that usually meant a fair number of girls. Or “women”—whatever. He was so tired of trying to figure out who went by what and at what age you could still call someone a “girl” or when you had to say “‘woman” that he no longer bothered. And names were impossible. Absolutely impossible. No, the best thing to do, he reasoned, was to just pitch right in when he bumped into someone that he even vaguely recognized and say, “Hey, how’s it going?” with a big smile-slash-grin, making it seem like the two of them were past having to play any of those introductory games anymore. Well past. And he wasn’t more than thirty yards up the path—not even to the gate where you can unleash your animals—when he got the chance to put his little theory to work.