Chapter 5 #3
Stuart turned around and looked the way the man had been sitting.
He was looking back at the town.
Twenty-six chimneys with the smoke standing straight up out of every one of them, and the Hall, and the lane, and away at the end of it a lamp in a window burning in the middle of the day because nobody had ever asked her to put it out.
"Oh," Stuart said.
"Yes," Camille said.
"He sat down in a ditch with no coat and looked at the lights and then he got up and went on."
"Yes."
Past the ditch it got worse and then it stopped being a track at all.
It ran out onto the south flat where the wind came, except there had been no wind in fourteen days, and so the track did not blow out.
It simply ended, in the middle of open ground, four hundred and ninety yards from the ditch, and Stuart stood at the end of it and could not make it mean anything for about a minute.
"Camille."
"I see it."
"Tell me what I'm looking at."
"You are looking at a man who stopped walking," she said.
There was no body.
There was a place where he had gone down, and it was a clear place, the whole shape of him, knees and hip and shoulder and one arm out.
And then there were other marks.
They came in from the west, out of the low brush along the creek, and they came in fast, and there were a great many of them.
Sorenson said, "God."
"No," Stuart said. "Wait."
"Mr. Redman, that's four of them at least."
"It's five," Camille said. "And they are not boots."
She was down on one knee with her hand flat beside a print, not touching it, and her face had gone the way it went when she was about to tell somebody a thing they would not enjoy.
"Dogs," she said.
The valley had eleven dogs.
That was a number the Crossing knew, the way it knew eighty-seven and nineteen and twenty-six, and every one of the eleven had a name and a house and a person, and Davey kept them on the same sheet he kept everything else on.
Eleven, and every one of them accounted for that morning in front of witnesses, because that had been the rule since the second year and it had never once been broken.
Twelve, if you counted Juno, and Juno had been shut in Stuart's house since the alarm.
Camille went around the churned ground on her hands and knees for eleven minutes in the cold and then she stood up and rubbed her palms on her coat and would not look at anybody for a second.
"Five animals," she said. "Not one of them is shod and not one of them is a wolf."
"How do you know it's not wolves."
"Because a wolf does not come in from downwind at a trot in a line," Camille said, "and because they stopped."
"Stopped where?"
"Here." She pointed, with two fingers, at a spot about nine feet from where the man had gone down. "Five animals came four hundred yards at a trot and they stopped at nine feet and they did not close."
Nobody said anything.
"And then?"
"And then they stood," Camille said, "for a long time. Look at the ground. That is not one minute of standing. And then four of them went back the way they came, and one did not."
"Where did the one go."
Camille pointed east.
And the fifth track went east away from the churned place, and beside it, for eleven feet and then thirty and then out of sight in the brush, was the drag of something heavy being moved across the snow by something that had hold of it.
Stuart stood in the middle of all of it in the still gray hours with his hands at his sides.
"Follow it," he said.
They followed it a mile and a quarter and it went into the creek brush and along the ice and out the other side, and where it came out the drag was gone and there were only the dog's prints, deep and close together, the walk of an animal carrying weight.
At two miles it turned north.
At two and a half it came up onto a bench and crossed it, and on top of the bench, in the open, in the flat dead light, they found where it had put him down.
There was no blood.
That was the first thing Stuart looked for and it was not there, not one spot of it in the snow, and he went down on both knees in the middle of that bench and made himself look at every foot of the ground twice before he would let himself have the thought.
"There is no blood," he said out loud.
"There is no blood," Camille said.
"A dog that drags a man two and a half miles does not put him down clean."
"No."
"Then it was not dragging him to eat him."
"No," Camille said, "it was not."
She was standing about six feet off with her head down, and when she looked up her face had something on it that Stuart had seen on it exactly twice in four years.
"Stuart," she said. "Come and look at this and do not say anything for four seconds."
He came.
In the snow where the man had been put down, in a clear place, pressed flat and frozen into the crust by the weight of a body, was a collar.
Leather. Old. The buckle green with it.
And the whole length of it, from the buckle to the tip, had been split open along the seam and sewn shut again by somebody with hands that could not hold a needle properly, in stitches a quarter inch long and crooked as a creek.