(he was old, but not stupid), wagged his scraggy stub of a tail and barked.
“Be a Viet Cong!” Anderson ordered.
Peter obediently fell on his side—a little wheeze escaped him—and rolled on his back, legs splayed out. That almost always amused Anderson, but today the sight of her dog playing Viet Cong (Peter would also play dead at the words “hooch” or “My Lai”) was too close to what she had been thinking about.
“Up, Pete.”
Pete got up slowly, panting below his muzzle. His white muzzle.
“Let’s go back.” She tossed him a dog biscuit. Peter snapped at it and missed. He snuffed for it, missed it, then came back to it. He ate it slowly, without much relish. “Right,” Anderson said. “Move out.”
3
For want of a shoe, the kingdom was lost ... for the choice of a path, the ship was found.
Anderson had been down here before in the thirteen years that the Garrick place hadn’t become the Anderson place; she recognized the slope of land, a deadfall left by pulpers who had probably all died before the Korean War, a great pine with a split top. She had walked this land before and would have no trouble finding her way back to the path she would use with the Tomcat. She might have passed the spot where she stumbled once or twice or half a dozen times before, perhaps by yards, or feet, or bare inches.
This time she followed Peter as the dog moved slightly to the left, and with the path in sight, one of her elderly hiking boots fetched up against something ... fetched up hard.
“Hey!” she yelled, but it was too late, in spite of her pinwheeling arms. She fell to the ground. The branch of a low bush scratched her cheek hard enough to bring blood.
“Shit!” she cried, and a bluejay scolded her.
Peter returned, first sniffing and then licking her nose.
“Christ, don’t do that, your breath stinks!”
Peter wagged his tail. Anderson sat up. She rubbed her left cheek and saw blood on her palm and fingers. She grunted.
“Nice going,” she said, and looked to see what she had tripped over—a fallen piece of tree, most likely, or a rock poking out of the ground. Lots of rock in Maine.
What she saw was a gleam of metal.
She touched it, running her finger along it and then blowing off black forest dirt.
“What’s this?” she asked Peter.
Peter approached, sniffed at it, and then did a peculiar thing. The beagle backed off two dog-paces, sat down, and uttered a single low howl.
“Who got on your case?” Anderson asked, but Peter only sat there. Anderson hooked herself closer, still sitting down, sliding on the seat of her jeans. She examined the metal in the ground.
Roughly three inches stuck out of the mulchy earth—just enough to trip over. There was a slight rise here, and perhaps the runoff from the heavy spring rains had freed it. Anderson’s first thought was that the skidders who had logged this land in the twenties and thirties must have buried a bunch of their leavings here—the cast-off swill of a three-day cutting, which in those days had been called a “loggers’ weekend.”
A tin can, she thought—B&M beans or Campbell’s soup. She wiggled it the way you’d wiggle a tin can out of the earth. Then it occurred to her that no one except a toddler would be apt to trip over the leading edge of a can. The metal in the earth didn’t wiggle. It was as solid as mother-rock. A piece of old logging equipment, maybe?
Intrigued, Anderson examined it more closely, not seeing that Peter had gotten to his feet, backed away another four paces, and sat down again.
The metal was a dull gray—not the bright color of tin or iron at all. And it was thicker than a can, maybe a quarter-inch at its top. Anderson placed the pad of her right index finger on this edge and felt a momentary odd tingling, like a vibration.
She took her finger away and looked at it quizzically.
Put it back.
Nothing. No buzz.
Now she pinched it between her thumb and finger and tried to draw it from the earth like a loose tooth from a gum. It didn’t come. She was gripping the protrusion in the rough center. It sank back into the earth—or that was the impression she had then—on either side at a width of less than two inches. She would later tell Jim Gardener that she could have walked past it three times a day for
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