Leland sat back on the cot and folded his arms. Once, there had been a girl named Nanette, and she was perpetually about to be swept away by the next breeze, save for the love of her sweetheart. Once, there was an air raid, and the only ones who survived were these two, a boy and a girl. The girl was not long for this earth, and the boy was a fool for her. She could be kept cleaved to this earth if her boy was strong enough and loved her enough. There was Nanette, the girl, and the boy was named—

Harry, long ago, had guessed right. For Leland to invoke the other name meant to lose a bit of himself to eternal hope, to a destiny just out of reach. He now accepted his fate, and in this raw moment, his living dog was going to change. “Okay, so I’ll name you after the boy puppet. Get ready. It’s a stupid name. I mean, really.” The dog had earned the foolish boy puppet’s foolish name, and Leland would have high and foolish hopes, and somehow, together, they could maybe generate nobility, at least, in their defeats to come. Giant rocks? An acting dog? Maybe they were the same, but maybe the point was always to try. There was only one way to find out.

In a tiny supply closet that all but pulsed with the constant noise of the engines, alone at the end of a lower deck, on a steamer chugging across the endless ocean, Corporal Lee Duncan took into his heart the fathomless future he would share with his only dog, a sweet and untested dog, a dog who would from now on bear the strange, drumlike name of Rin Tin Tin.

52

When he was standing before the great marble fireplaces at headquarters, listening to the petitions of one politician or another, Ironside’s mind wandered toward his men, who were isolated in the vast, silent forest, and it broke his heart to imagine their weariness.

There was no safe way to visit them, but after days of what he called “well-meant hand-wringing,” he elected to begin unannounced trips to the farthest troops as a way to boost morale. But how? You couldn’t walk. Flying in the frozen twilight was impossible.