Lee felt a serious stone turning in his stomach. “Really?”

“They expect you to be better than they are. And if you train them, give them order, that provides them with some hope. Say, old chap, perhaps it’s like acting. You’re asking them to behave civilly. Isn’t that just acting? Even now, people think civilization means order.” A dry chuckle. “No, it starts like this.” He touched each dog once on the flank. “‘You do this, you do that, then come back to me and we eat.’ Every day you decide to train your dogs and not eat them is another good day for order and a bad one for chaos. Have they sneezed?”

He had never heard any dog sneeze. It was like trying to imagine a person baying at the moon. “No.”

“Good. That would be the first sign of oncoming death.”

“Wait, what? I thought they—”

“Taking the beestings might have saved them. Winter is coming. You must keep them warm, exercise them well, and keep them covered when they rest. And train them two to four hours a day.”

Lee beheld the sleeping lumps, the quick rise and fall of fur. “Harry, I don’t know.”

Harry seemed to chew on his next words. “What happened to you, Corporal Duncan? I think you once had a confidence that you no longer have.”

Lee petted each dog once, in turn. Nanette’s fur was finer than her brother’s, but she was motionless and he reacted to each stroke as if it were praise.

“I’ve seen terrible things, Duncan. You cannot shock me,” Harry said with measured tones, a performer trying to tempt an audience member onto the stage. “Please tell me.”

“Well,” Lee said. He had never said this. “When I was in San Francisco”—he scratched the boy under the chin, which made him lean into it—“I auditioned to be a Four Minute Man.”

“And what is a Four Minute Man?”

“It’s a—you give speeches that—it doesn’t matter. What matters is”— and he blinked—“my mother laughed at me.”

On the other side of the wire, Harry was regarding him. It was a continental look, a patient one. “Yes?” he finally said.

Lee redoubled his efforts under the boy’s chin. “Laughed and laughed.”

After a profound silence, Harry finally said, “The war has caused many terrible things to happen.”

Lee expected the arbitrary end to the conversation. The enigmatic quip. Instead, Harry slipped something from his pocket and kicked it under the wire. With some adjustment not to disturb the dogs, Lee leaned over to pick it up. It was a hard rubber ball, perhaps two inches across. “Yeah?”