Weed stepped closer. Pigeon smelled as if he were rotting alive.

“Once you been in here awhile, your eyes start seeing again. Notice? I think all those lights from the cars below us have something to do with it,” Pigeon said. “You don’t look like you’re much older than ten.”

“Fourteen,” Weed indignantly replied.

Pigeon dug in a trash bag and pulled out part of a submarine sandwich. Weed’s mouth watered but he felt kind of sick, too. Pigeon dug in the bag again and set down a two-liter bottle of Pepsi that was half empty. He flicked the cigarette butt into the night.

“Want some?” Pigeon asked.

“I ain’t eating or drinking nothing that came out of the garbage,” Weed said.

“How you know it came out of the garbage?”

“’Cause I seen people like you digging things outta the garbage. You go around with shopping carts and don’t live anywhere.”

“I live here,” Pigeon said. “That’s somewhere, isn’t it? Get your butt closer. I’ll show you something.”

Weed tried to block out the smell as he walked all the way to the blanket Pigeon sat on. Pigeon reached into a pocket of his ragged Army jacket and showed Weed a Baggie filled with something.

“Peanut butter crackers,” Pigeon confided in his rough, raspy voice. “Didn’t come outta the trash. The soup kitchen downtown is where.”

“You swear?” Weed said as his stomach begged him to help out a little.

Pigeon nodded.

“I gotta bottle of water that’s never been opened. Soup kitchen again. I guess I can share with a little lost boy.”

“I’m not lost,” Weed said.

Bubba was. The minute the dogs had been cut loose, Half Shell had taken off through the woods in one direction while Smudge and Tree Buster had gone in another. The dogs crashed through underbrush for a good ten minutes before Half Shell barked three times.

“STRIKE, HALF SHELL!” Bubba hollered.

The crashing in Smudge’s direction stopped. Bubba started running as best he could, breaking branches so he could find his way back, stepping over logs and wading through creeks, his headlamp clearing the way. He stamped and crackled, hoping if there was a snake in the area, it would think twice about getting near all that noise. Bubba’s heart was pounding and he was gasping for breath as he followed the sound of his dog.

Half Shell’s front paws were up an old pine tree and she was barking and bawling, her tail wagging, when Bubba appeared. Bubba had no doubt that Half Shell had either backtracked and followed the scent of where the coon had been instead of where the coon was going, or Half Shell had found yet one more slick tree that no more had a coon in it than an iceberg had sugarcane. Bubba shone his submersible Super SabreLite up into the branches, sweeping the beam from high to low, disappointed but not surprised.

He dug out two iridescently painted pearls on a string and whirled them over his head. He flung them as high as they would go and was relieved when they snagged halfway up the pine tree. He shone his light on them and they glowed yellow, two perfect coon eyes. Bubba’s heart swelled with euphoria as Half Shell continued barking at nothing and Tree Buster crashed in on them, Smudge right behind him.