Part 2 I want to tell you about my grandparents before I tell you what my grandfather said. My grandfather Earl farmed corn and soybeans on a hundred and ninety acres outside Chillicothe for forty-six years. He got up at five in the morning for most of those years. He has hands that look like…

Part 2 I want to tell you about my father and Beau before I tell you the rest, because you need to understand what those two were to each other. My father was not a sentimental man. He was a lineman. He was practical, and quiet, and he showed love the way men of his…

Part 2 I want to tell you about the nights, because the nights are where this starts. Cedar Hollow is not staffed overnight. We do not have the budget for it. The building closes at six p.m. and opens at eight a.m., and for those fourteen hours the animals are alone in the building together…

Part 2 I want to tell you about Eli before I tell you the rest, because you need to know him a little to understand what this meant. Eli is six. He is small for six. He has his father’s dark eyes and a cowlick at the back of his head that no amount of…

Part 2 I want to tell you about Walter, even though I did not learn most of this until afterward, because you should know who he was before I tell you what the dog did. Walter’s full name was Walter Brenner. He was sixty-eight years old that winter. He had grown up on the southwest…

Part 2 I want to tell you what the back room looked like, because the next five years of this story turn on what I found in it. The room was full of smoke down to about knee height and the heat was the kind of heat that you feel through turnout gear as a…

Part 2 I want to tell you about the seven returns, briefly, because the seven returns are the wound this story heals. The first family kept Wendell three weeks. They brought him back because, they said, he was “too big for the apartment.” That one I could almost understand. The second family kept him nine…

Part 2 I want to tell you about my father, because you are going to need to know the kind of man he was for the end of this to land the way it landed on me. My father was not a soft man, on the outside. He was a track maintenance man for the…

I got down that slope on my backside. Loose gravel. Wet mesquite. The kind of drop where a man my age — fifty-pound gut, bad knee — has no business being. But Mason had already gone over and I wasn’t going to be the kind of trucker who watched. The flashlight beam jumped around in…