For three nights in a row, Biscuit stood at the edge of Walt Brenner's back porch and barked at the woods.
Not her regular bark, either. Not the lazy *woof* she gave the mail truck. This was the deep, rolling bay of a beagle who had found something and wanted the whole county to know.
"Coyotes," Walt told her on the first night. "Leave 'em be."
On the second night he said, "Biscuit, I'm seventy-six. I need my sleep."
On the third night, his neighbor called.
"Mr. Brenner," Brandon Hale said. He was polite about it. He'd been polite about everything since the business with the fence. "I'm sorry to bother you. It's just, the dog. Owen can't sleep. He's five. He thinks it's a monster."
"I'll bring her in," Walt said.
He did. Biscuit lay by the door and whined at the woods until two in the morning.
Biscuit was thirteen. She had a gray muzzle and cloudy eyes, and she couldn't hear much of anything unless you said it right into her ear. She slept nineteen hours a day. Doc Park had told Walt at her last checkup that she was "in the bonus years."
But her nose still worked. A beagle's nose always works. Walt had hunted rabbits with her for ten years, and he had never once seen it wrong.
He should have remembered that.
On the fourth day, a little before five, Walt was splitting kindling when Brandon's wife came running up the new shared lane between the two farms.
Jenna Hale was barefoot in the cold. Her face was the color of paper.
"Have you seen Owen?"
Walt put down the hatchet.
Owen had been playing in their backyard. Jenna had gone in to stir something on the stove. Four minutes, maybe five. When she came back out, his little red boots were by the swing set, and he was gone.
The woods started forty feet past their yard. Two hundred acres of oak and hickory and old pasture gone wild, running all the way down to Hollow Creek.
And the sun was going down.
Earl Whitaker had forty people there in an hour. By dark there were nearly a hundred. Men from the feed store, women from Grace Methodist, the Panthers football team in their practice jerseys. Hank Doyle brought spotlights and a generator. Clay Hollister came on horseback. Dot brought coffee in the back of Tyler's car and didn't charge anybody.
They walked the woods in long lines, arm's length apart, calling his name.
"Owen! Owen!"
Nothing came back but their own voices.
The temperature dropped to thirty-one. Owen was wearing a sweatshirt. No coat. No boots.
Walt stood on his porch with Biscuit, because Earl had told him, kindly, that seventy-six-year-old knees and dark woods didn't mix. Biscuit stood at the edge of the porch, the same spot as the last three nights, nose pointed at the same corner of the woods.
She was baying again. Louder than ever.
"That dog's been barking at those woods all week," one of the searchers said, coming back for coffee. "Maybe she knows something."
"She's half blind and all the way deaf," another one said. "She barks at leaves."
Walt didn't say anything. He watched Biscuit. Her whole body was pointing like an arrow, quivering.
Around ten, the fog came up from the creek. Thick, white, the kind you can't see your own hand in. Earl called the searchers back. It wasn't safe. Too many ravines, too much creek. They'd start again at first light with dogs from the state.
Jenna Hale made a sound Walt hoped he'd never hear again.
Brandon stood in the yard with a flashlight in his hand, staring at the white wall of fog like he could see through it.
That was when Biscuit slipped her collar.
She backed right out of it, the way she hadn't done since she was a puppy, and went off the porch like a shot, low to the ground, nose down, baying.
Straight into the fog. Straight into the woods.
Walt grabbed his flashlight and went after her.
He heard Earl shout his name behind him. He didn't stop.
The fog closed around him in ten steps. His flashlight beam turned into a white wall. His knees hurt. His breath came hard.
Ahead of him, somewhere in the dark, his old dog was howling.
And then, all at once, she stopped.