The Old Blog in the Desert

Lucas Hale had never been the kind of man to shy from a chore. The frontier cured a fellow of that quickly enough.

But standing inside the sagging iron bones of the old furnace, with the Nevada wind humming through every rusted seam and the cold crawling its slow fingers up his spine, he knew he’d come up against one of those tasks no man ever feels ready for. Some jobs test the body, while others test the soul.

Still, a promise was a promise, and Lucas Hale was from the kind of timber that didn’t splinter under the weight of his word.

He’d gathered what fuel the land begrudged him, splintered planks scavenged from abandoned shacks, crate wood beaten soft by storms, brush hacked from beneath packed snow. He stacked it with care, knowing he was building not just a fire, but a farewell.

Then he lifted Andy Mercer, a man he’d ridden beside, fought beside, and argued with over more than one cold camp supper. Death makes saints or devils of men, but Lucas kept Andy exactly as he’d been, flawed, stubborn, decent when it counted. He laid him inside the furnace with a kind of rough gentleness only working men ever seem to master.

When he lit the fire, he expected a slow, steady burn. But the flames leapt up like they’d been waiting years for the chance, quick, greedy, roaring out with a thirst that startled him.

Heat slammed against him, bright as forge-fire, and Lucas stumbled back onto the glassy skin of the frozen lake. His boots skidded on the slick surface, and his breath broke into clouds.

He didn’t stay close. Couldn’t.

A man ain’t meant to hear another man meet fire, no matter how far past feeling he is. That kind of sound worms its way into a man’s memory and digs in its heels.

Even knowing Andy was beyond pain, Lucas felt something inside him flinch, recoil, retreat. He trudged farther across the ice until the heat dulled to a distant pulse behind him.

He bowed his head, shoulders tight, breath shuddering as though the cold were hunting him from the inside. The fire snapped and cracked behind him, each pop echoing across the lake like small, sharp gunfire.

Above, the low winter clouds caught the fire’s glow and turned furious, lit from beneath like an angry sky. The lake lay silent, but the land remembered sound.

It always did.

From the dark tree line came the dogs, those half-wild curs that had been shadowing him for days, their yellow eyes gleaming with something between hunger and loyalty. They lifted their muzzles and gave tongue to long, mournful howls.

The sound twisted through the cold air, thin and sharp as a wire pulled tight. It drifted across the basin, swallowed by the mountains that ringed the lake like old, patient sentinels.

Then the wind began to stir.

It started low, like a restless sleeper muttering in his dreams, then rose into a high, lonely wail that cut straight through wool and leather. It came sweeping down from the peaks, fierce and unkind, stirring up the snow on the lake and stinging Lucas’s face as if it carried sand instead of ice.

The fire answered the wind with defiance, hurling sparks skyward, and small red embers caught in the gale and thrown into the deepening dusk. Lucas steadied himself, squinting against the sting, the cold gnawing into his fingers until they felt like carved bone.

And yet, despite the bitter cold, sweat ran down his temples, hot and sour, trailing along his jaw. He wiped at it with shaking fingers, baffled.

“I don’t know why,” he murmured, voice swallowed by wind.

Maybe it was the heat of the furnace clawing at his nerves, or grief pressing outward in the only way it knew. Or that a man sweats when he’s carrying more weight inside than anyone’s heart ought to bear. Whatever the reason, sweat didn’t belong on a night like this, not in air sharp enough to skin a man.

A deep groan rolled from the furnace, as though the old metal skeleton remembered its working days. Then the smoke began to pour.

It came thick and black, heavy as coal tar, spilling from every rotten seam in the roof and every shattered pane. It pushed upward in writhing, oily ropes, twisting against the wind, refusing to be carried off cleanly.

It spread across the winter sky like a dark banner unfurled from some grim battlement. Against the gray heavens, it looked like a bruise spreading slowly and surely.

Lucas watched it rise, watched it stain the cold air, and felt something tighten in his chest.

There was no grace in that smoke. No beauty.
Just the last sign of a promise kept, the last earthly trace of a man who feared lying forever in ice.

Lucas Hale stood alone on the frozen lake, boots planted, wind screaming at his back, dogs wailing from the woods, and the black smoke rising into the clouds like a shadow climbing its final trail.

He stayed until the flames gentled down and the furnace sagged into weary silence. A promise made was a promise honored, and Andy Mercer, that poor, stubborn Andy, was finally free of the cold he had dreaded more than death itself.

Lucas Hale came down off the ridgeline like a man who had run out of choices long before he had run out of trail. The descent had been rough—ankle-breaking rocks under the snow, drifts that swallowed his knees, wind that scoured a man’s face clean of heat and hope. He’d been traveling for days, though the cold stretched time until hours felt like miles. The sled rope had cut deep grooves into the palms of his gloves, and even through the leather, he could feel the solid, unyielding weight of the man he dragged behind him.

When the basin opened before him, he stopped, sagged a little, and took the sight in with the slow, careful stare of a man who no longer trusted anything to be real at first glance.

Lake Lamoille lay below. In summer, it was a mirror of deep alpine blue.

Now it was a white platter of ice rimmed by snow and granite. The clouds sat low across the sky, a heavy pewter lid that kept the world dim and close, muffling sound, flattening distance.

It was the kind of cold that gnawed steadily at a man’s resolve, as if the air itself wanted to take something from him. But the thing stopping Lucas was not the lake.

Something stuck up from the frozen shoreline, too angular to be a boulder, too solid to be brush, too deliberate in shape to be a trick of light. At first, Lucas thought it might be a collapsed lineshack.

Then perhaps some prospector’s shed. But as he came down the last incline, boot heels sliding in the crusted snow, the truth rose clear.

It was a reverberatory furnace, the sort used in the early days when men brought ore down from the high ridges to smelt it before hauling the metal to the valley towns. This one stood half-canted in the ice, as if the lake itself were trying to swallow it.

Rust streaked its sides like dried blood. Snow powdered the top in a thin, undisturbed sheet.

The heavy iron door hung open slightly, revealing a dark interior that seemed to drink up the daylight. Lucas stared for several long seconds before a short, sharp laugh barked out of him, less humor than disbelief.

“A furnace,” he said softly. “Of all things.”

Only the wind answered, sliding across the flat ice and whispering through the brittle weeds along the shore.

He let his gaze travel up and down the hulking metal carcass, abandoned a decade ago, back when the miners still believed the mountains held fortunes for anyone willing to work for it.

Most of those outfits had vanished when the veins pinched out or the winters proved too bitter, leaving behind broken timbers, rusted pans, and empty dreams. This furnace, though, this one had held on, hunkered here like some stubborn old sentinel against the cold.

Lucas turned back toward the sled. The tarp had frozen stiff over the outline of Andy Mercer’s body.

Snow had gathered on the cloth, feather-light, as if even the storm had grown tired of taking from him. Lucas had brushed it off a dozen times during the journey, each time feeling the ache twist a little deeper in his chest.

He drew a slow breath, letting the cold burn his lungs clean.

“Well now,” he said, voice low, “ain’t you a sight for sore eyes, Andy Mercer. Almost like the land set this here just for you.”

The dogs, a ways behind him, gave a thin, eerie cry. They had grown nervous near the lake, pacing in restless circles. The burros held their ground but flicked their ears back, uneasy with the silence.

Lucas stepped toward the furnace. The snow crunched under his boots in a way he could feel through the soles, a brittle, high-country sound.

He put a gloved hand on the rusted metal and felt the cold bite instantly through the leather. The thing was dead, long dead, but it still had the shape of purpose in it.

The kind of purpose he needed.

Though his mind was tired, working dimly from hunger and cold, a thought began to take form, first a spark, then a flame, then a certainty.

“Here,” he murmured. “Right here.”

He took another step, testing the frozen ground, seeing himself dragging Andy through that iron doorway, sheltered from the wind, sheltered from chance and trouble alike. A place where fire could stay lit long enough to do what needed doing.

“Here,” he said again, louder now, voice cracking like a branch in frost. “This is the place. My cre-ma-tor-eum!”

The word rang out across the basin, echoing off the far ridges. The dogs flinched. The burros stamped. Something distant—a lone coyote maybe—answered in a hollow cry. The world listened.

And Lucas felt something in himself shift, like a burden set down for just a moment’s rest.

The furnace wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t anything a sane man would choose for shelter. But it was enough. More than enough to keep a promise made in the dark hours when Andy Mercer’s breath had rattled and faltered and finally gone quiet.

Lucas tightened the rope in his hands. The fibers bit into his palms like teeth, but he welcomed the feeling. It meant he was still here. Still capable. Still bound to the vow that had brought him across miles of snow and hunger.

He squared his shoulders.

Then he began to drag Andy Mercer toward the old furnace, toward the rusted doorway that would take him out of the cold at last, and toward the one place left in this hard Nevada winter where a man could see a promise through to the end.

The winter trails of Nevada have no mercy in them. They run cold and long and hard, and they care nothing for the strength of a man or the weakness in him.

They wait to see who will cross and who will fall. Lucas Hale meant to cross.

Each morning, when the frost snapped under his boots and the sun crawled slow and thin over the far ridges, he took hold of the sled rope and started forward. Behind him, wrapped tight in stiffening canvas, lay Andy Mercer.

A man changes after death, but not in the way folks think. The body stayed the same, but the burden of it grew, and every day that weight pressed a little deeper.

Sometimes Lucas swore the frozen shape settled lower in the sled, as if trying to root itself in that wild stretch of country where wind shaved the snow into razor ridges, and the cold chewed at anything that still breathed.

“You mind yourself back there,” he muttered one morning, his voice hoarse from frost and silence. “I’m keepin’ my word. You don’t have to make it a chore.”

The burros were played out, hide dull, steps stumbling, and the dogs that had begun trailing them weren’t much better. Half-wolf, half-starved, they drifted along the edges of campfires at night, too hungry to vanish, too scared to draw near.

Food was a memory. The jerky had turned so hard it needed boiling to keep one’s teeth from breaking. Fuel was scarce, and some nights he scraped by without fire, hugging his coat close against the dark. Hunger took the mornings too.

But he kept on.

The trail wound through narrow cuts of canyon, then out across long white flats with drifts tall as a man. More than once, the sled went over, and Lucas heaved it upright with hands too numb to feel. He cursed the cold, the trail, and the promise made, but kept pulling.

A man alone in such a country finds thoughts creeping on him like shadows. The silence was big enough to swallow him whole. The cold sharpened the edges of things—fear, memory, loneliness—and sometimes those edges cut deep.

So, Lucas sang.

Not pretty, but strong. Old trail songs. Saloon tunes. A hymn or two, thought forgotten long ago. Andy sang loud enough to hear himself over the wind, loud enough to keep his mind from splitting open.

And always, he sang toward the sled.

“Keeps the spirits up,” he told the silent shape once. “Mine more’n yours—but maybe you’re listenin’ all the same.”

There was no answer.

Yet on nights when the fire guttered low, when the cold pressed close, and Lucas felt the weight of the whole wilderness leaning in, he’d catch a shift in the canvas. Not much, just enough to make a man wonder.

Enough to feel the patience of the dead waiting for him to slip, to stumble, to fall short of the promise he’d sworn. But Lucas Hale wasn’t fashioned that way.

A man’s word was the one thing he carried that couldn’t be taken from him. So he walked on, hungry, frozen, worn thin to the bone, and pulled that sled one mile farther, then another.

Because a promise made beside a dying friend is the kind of man who hauls clear to the end of the trail.

Winter had its own way of settling scores in the Nevada high country. It carved the land clean, pared it down to rock and wind and silence, and a man either matched it or he didn’t.

Out here, promises weren’t things you spoke; they were things you carried. And a debt, once taken on, rode a man harder than any mustang.

Lucas Hale knew that well enough.

Snow whispered under his boots as he trudged on, the sled rope cutting a groove across his shoulder. Behind him lay the bundled remains of Andy Mercer, once partner, once friend, now a weight heavier than any man should have to haul alone.

Miles stretched long out here. They had a trick of lengthening the colder it got, as if distance itself turned mean.

Lucas didn’t waste breath talking. The cold would’ve taken the words anyway, and there wasn’t much to say.

Silence suited the land, and it suited him. But inside, where a man’s voice lived, he cursed the trail, the winter, the damned slow-going snow, and yes, even Andy, for asking what he’d asked with his dying breath.

Yet an oath, once given, locked itself deep. Lucas was a man shaped by such things.

Nights were the worst. The mountains rose black against a sky vast enough to swallow a man whole.

Lucas scraped together what fire he could, piñon twigs, brush brittle as old bone. The flame caught reluctantly, a stubborn glow fighting off the dark.

The burros settled near the heat, shoulders hunched, heads low. They didn’t bray or stamp, just breathed quietly, as if noise itself might break something fragile in the frozen air.

But the dogs were another matter. Half-wild things born from camps long abandoned, they drifted after Lucas like shadows with ribs.

The scent of death trailed him, and winter made beasts bold. They circled beyond the firelight, just shapes and eyes, waiting for weakness.

When the moon climbed, their howls rose with it, long, hollow cries that spoke of hunger and hard years. The sound rolled out across the basins as if the land itself was grieving.

Lucas hated those howls. Hated how they braided with the wind until his ears rang with them. Hated how they made the shadows twitch around the shrouded form on the sled.

Sometimes the blankets shifted with the tightening cold, and a man could believe things best not believed on a lonely winter trail.

More than once, he dropped his face into his hands, muttering, “I despise this. Every inch of it.”

But he kept going.

The land watched him with the indifferent patience of old deserts, but Lucas Hale was of the same stubborn stock. A debt was a debt. Andy Mercer had asked for fire, not a shallow grave in frozen earth, and Lucas intended to see him given to the flame, proper, clean, final.

Until then, he would walk.
Through the cold.
Through the long nights.
Through the slow orbit of hungry dogs.

And through the weight of the promise he bore like a brand across his heart.

Morning comes slowly in the Nevada high country. It doesn’t burst over the horizon the way folks who’ve never been there like to claim. Instead, it seeps into the world, thin, colorless, and wary, like a traveler unsure of the country he’s riding into. That was the kind of dawn Lucas Hale woke to, feeling the bite of cold before he ever opened his eyes.

Frost had stiffened the edges of his lashes. Each breath felt cut from iron. The snow they’d burrowed beneath during the night had hardened, settling around him like a crust. None of it troubled him much. He’d known worse weather and lived to tell it.

However, the man next to him was a different story.

A promise between partners was something Lucas had never taken lightly. He’d given his word the night before, when Andy Mercer, weak and shaking, had asked him for one last favor. If death came for him in that frozen wilderness, he didn’t want to lie there forever, locked in ice. He wanted fire, not frost.

Lucas had promised. And a man’s promise, in a country like this, was one of the few things that still held meaning.

He hoped he wouldn’t have to keep it.

But when the dawn finally pushed its way through the gray sky, Lucas saw the truth plain as trail-dust.

Andy looked near the end of his trail.

His skin had the pale look of old parchment. His lips had gone blue at the edges. His eyes, half-open, wandered past Lucas as though searching for something far beyond the mountains around them.

When he tried to rise, Lucas steadied him gently. “Easy there. We’ll make the refinery before nightfall. Get you warmed up.”

But Andy didn’t seem to hear. His voice drifted like woodsmoke on a wind that wouldn’t hold still.

“Home,” he kept murmuring. “Gotta get home…”

So he talked while they traveled, though it wasn’t really talking, more like wandering through memories. He spoke of Mississippi as if he were already standing there.

Porch swings. Late-summer heat. Bare feet on warm dirt roads. Work he’d done as a boy, skipping stones, patching the old river road, listening to his mother sing while she cooked.

Lucas let him talk. Sometimes a man’s mind rides ahead of his body, especially when the trail grows short.

The burros trudged on, their breath rising in white bursts that vanished as quickly as they came. Lucas walked beside the makeshift sled they’d rigged from pack boards and rope, tightening Andy’s blankets again and again, fighting the wind that kept trying to steal them away.

The mountains weren’t giving them anything easy. The drifts ran deep. Ice waited beneath the loose snow like a hidden enemy. The sky stayed low and colorless, pressing down on the world until a man felt small beneath it.

Still, Lucas drove on. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Every faltering word Andy spoke told him time had thinned to a thread.

By afternoon, Andy’s voice had worn down to almost nothing. By evening, he was barely breathing.

And just as the last of the daylight drained from the west, Andy Mercer let out a long, uneven sigh. And went still.

Lucas halted in the snow. The wind moaned across the ridge, then quieted, as if the land itself understood what had happened.

Slowly, he turned back toward the sled. Andy lay motionless, face peaceful, as though he’d finally made it home after all.

Lucas bowed his head. “Travel easy, friend,” he said softly.

A promise was a promise. And before the mountain night closed around him, cold, black, and deadly, all Lucas Hale had left was the weight of his word, and the man who had trusted him to keep it.

Daylight Saving Time has returned, like a relative who borrows money and remembers the door code. The ceremony begins at two o’clock Sunday morning—an hour when only burglars, owls, and government planners are awake and thinking clearly.

At that moment, we are to advance every clock in the house by one hour. It is said to save daylight, though no one has ever produced the jar where the surplus gets held.

The official recommendation is simple. Before retiring Saturday night, set your clocks forward one hour. Afterward, I recommend a small improvement to the process: open the nearest window and toss the clocks out of it.

It saves considerable trouble next spring, when the whole enterprise comes creeping back again.

I paid a visit to the doctor the other day, which is always a hazardous undertaking for a man who has previously considered himself reasonably alive. The doctor studied his instruments, looked me over with the solemn interest of a tax assessor, and finally announced that I am, in his professional judgment, “a walking stroke.”

Those were his exact words. I would not have chosen them myself, as they lack cheer.

It is the same condition that carried off my father, which did not improve the tone of the conversation. By the end of the visit, he had supplied me with two more medications designed to quiet the uprising in my blood vessels, along with follow-up appointments that will keep both of us acquainted for the foreseeable future.

Now, I do not intend to perish immediately, at least it is not on my calendar, but the doctor has made it plain that a fellow in my condition ought to keep his affairs in some order. So I will say this much.

Should it happen, if I depart between one appointment and the next, I expect I shall miss you terribly. That is the principal inconvenience of dying: the leaving of people you would just as soon keep.

Still, I cannot complain about the life behind me. I have lived a stretch of years that certain observers claim equals the adventures of ten ordinary men, and I suspect they may be right. It has been a crowded and remarkable ride, and I have enjoyed most of it, sometimes even the parts that tried to kill me.

As for the business of crossing over to whatever lies beyond the curtain, I hold no particular dread about it. The universe has managed its affairs a long while without consulting me, and I suppose it will continue to do so.

My only regret in the matter is a simple one: that if I step through that door first, I will no longer see your face or hear your voice on this side of the veil. And that, I believe, will be the only real loss worth mentioning.

Winter in the high mountains didn’t drift in like morning fog. It came down hard, sudden as a rifle shot, and a man either respected it or perished under its hand.

Lucas Hale understood that well enough.

He and Andy Mercer lay buried to the shoulders in a drift they had packed over themselves for shelter. Their bedrolls were drawn tight, the snow tamped down to keep the wind from clawing in at them.

Above, the stars cut through the black sky like ice splinters, cold and sharp. The burros stood close to the rock windbreak, their breath hanging in the air before freezing away to nothing.

The world was still, too still, the kind that made a man listen harder than he breathed. It was then that Lucas heard Andy’s breathing falter, a thin catch, hardly more than a thread of sound.

“Lucas,” Andy whispered, voice scraped raw by the cold.

Lucas shifted in the narrow space the snow allowed. “I hear you. You holdin’ on?”

Andy tried to swallow and failed. “I’m runnin’ low,” he murmured. “Cold’s workin’ its way inside. Feels like it’s bit clear through.”

Lucas wasn’t the sort who rattled easily, but a man’s strength ebbing out into the night had a way of reaching deeper than danger. He kept his voice level.

“Sun’ll take the sting out of it come morning.”

Andy gave a faint, humorless laugh. “I ain’t worried about dyin’, Lucas. Cold’s got a way of makin’ a man settle with himself.”

He paused, breath shuddering like a loose shutter in the wind.

“It’s not the dyin’ that sits wrong with me.”

Lucas turned his head slightly. “Then what is?”

It took Andy a moment to find the words, and when he did, they came out low and rough.

“It’s the grave,” he said. “The frozen kind. I can’t stomach the thought of lyin’ locked in ice, stiff and forgotten under snow.” He trembled, the motion slow but deep. “A man ought to go back warm, not frozen like some butchered steer.”

Snow pressed down around them, white and heavy, but the weight between them felt heavier still.

“I know it’s askin’ near the impossible,” Andy said, breath hitching. “But if I fall to this cold… I want you to swear. Foul weather or fair—you see me burned. No icy grave. No winter holdin’ me after I’m gone.”

He turned his head, eyes searching Lucas’s face in the dim starlight.

“Swear it,” he whispered.

Lucas stared up at the sky, the stars hard points of light against the void. Cremation out here—fire in a land where wood cracked from frost and flame died before it could rise. It was a tall order. Maybe even a fool’s one.

But Andy was more than a trail partner. They had crossed rough country together, shared lean times and bad luck, and the kind of long miles that made strangers into brothers. It wasn’t a man’s whim. It was his last peace.

And Lucas Hale was not the kind to turn from that.

He let out a slow breath, white and thin in the cold.

“All right,” he said quietly. “If it comes to that, I’ll see you burn proper. No snowbound grave. You have my word.”

Andy’s eyes eased shut, the tension in his face slackening by degrees.

“Good,” he whispered. “That’s all I needed.”

The night deepened around them, the cold creeping closer with every breath. Lucas lay still beneath the weight of snow and promise alike, hoping—without saying so—that it was one vow he would never have to keep.

Winter in the Nevada high country has a way of swallowing sound until a man begins to feel he’s the only living thing left on earth. No wind whispered across the ridges, no coyote called from the draws. The world lay still beneath a hard gray sky, quiet enough that a man could hear his own heartbeat—and wonder if it was worth trusting.

Lucas Hale moved through that silence like a lone traveler in some abandoned kingdom. The rope in his hand had frozen stiff, biting into his glove, and the sled behind him groaned against the crusted snow. It carried a weight he hadn’t wanted—but one he’d sworn to bear.

Andy Mercer, or the remains of him.

Lucas didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. He felt the pull of that burden the way a man feels the memory of a mistake—deep, constant, carved into muscle and bone. He had made a promise, and a promise was something no distance or cold should break.

The land ahead stretched empty, a white desert under a dying sky. The cold clung to him like something with hands. It wasn’t the kind of country that welcomed men. It was the kind that tested them.

Lucas bent his shoulders and kept on.

“Just a little farther,” he said softly, as though distance might listen.

The sled made no such agreements. Every rise turned into a ridge. Every drift tried to swallow the runners whole. Ice tugged at his feet, hunting for a moment of weakness. But Hale had the sort of grit the frontier carved into a man—slow, steady, and tough as old leather.

Now and again, a blanket would shift on the sled, and a pale hand would slip free of the coverings. The coat corner lifted and fell in the cold breeze, a quiet reminder of what rode behind. Lucas tried not to look. He tried even harder not to listen.

But the mind is a treacherous trail partner.

You promised, Lucas, the memory of Andy’s voice whispered, “Don’t leave me to freeze. Burn what’s left. Don’t let the snow claim me.”

Lucas tightened his grip on the rope. “You always were a hard man to please, Andy.”

Whether the silence that followed was agreement or just the wind pretending to listen was anyone’s guess.

The sun crawled along the horizon, weak and tired, shedding little more than a gray glow. Each breath Lucas exhaled drifted around him like smoke from a dying fire. He felt the tug of fatigue in every limb, felt the rope slacken now and then as if the world itself was asking him to let go.

But a man doesn’t forget the last thing a friend asks of him. Not out here. Not anywhere worth living.

He remembered Andy’s eyes on that final night—fear plain as day, no jokes left in him. Just a man staring down the end and begging for one mercy: Don’t leave me to the ice.

That memory pushed Lucas on harder than hunger, harder than fear. The weight on the sled didn’t speak, but its meaning clung to him every step he took.

Foul or fair, the old promise seemed to say. You swore.

Lucas muttered, “I’m still with you.”

Somewhere ahead—if his sense of the country held—stood an old smelter mill. Abandoned years back, but solid, with a furnace enough to see a man’s last wish done.

If the cold didn’t take him first.

He leaned into the rope, boots digging into snow that seemed determined to pull him under. And through that dead, frozen silence, he kept dragging Andy Mercer toward the only warmth left in a land that had forgotten such a thing ever existed.

Buddy and I went for a walk today. The weather had a mean streak in it, bitter cold, with little flurries drifting about like the sky couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to snow or not.

We passed by a barn with a flock of sheep in the yard. Now, Buddy had never seen sheep before, and when a dog meets something new, he naturally assumes it is a dog of a peculiar shape and temperament.

So he marched right up to them with cheerful intentions, tail wagging, nose working, and all the manners a gentleman could ask for. The sheep did not return the courtesy. They stood there in a tight bunch and regarded him with the sort of suspicion usually reserved for traveling salesfolk and politicians.

Buddy, being a decent fellow, merely sniffed at them and wagged his tail as if to say, “Well, if you change your mind about the playing business, I’m available.”

They did not change their mind. So we went home.

I took up position in the big cushioned chair with a cup of coffee warming my hands, while Buddy crawled under his blanket and lay his head across my leg as if it belonged there. The wind could do what it pleased outside.

I sat there a spell and considered the matter carefully. After a thorough investigation, I concluded that a good dog, a warm blanket, and a hot cup of coffee are about as close to perfection as a man is likely to get in this world, and it would be poor manners to ask for more.