The silence was worse than the howling.
Walt stood still in the fog and listened. His heart was going hard. He was seventy-six years old, alone in two hundred acres of dark woods, and he had just lost track of the only one who knew where she was going.
"Biscuit," he called. Then louder. "Biscuit!"
She couldn't hear him. He knew that. He called anyway.
Then, off to his left, faint and close to the ground, a sound he had heard ten thousand times.
Not a howl. A whine. The little whine Biscuit made when she'd treed something and was waiting for him to catch up.
Walt turned toward it.
He knew where he was before he saw it. His boots hit the soft ground and the old stone, and he remembered.
The Lutz homestead. Emil Lutz's grandparents had built a cabin back here in the 1870s, long before the farmhouse. The cabin had burned or rotted away a lifetime ago. All that was left was the stone cellar hole. Eight feet deep, with walls of stacked sandstone and a dirt floor, half full of leaves and fallen branches.
Walt had meant to fence it off for forty years.
Biscuit was lying flat at the edge of the hole, nose pointing down, tail going slowly back and forth.
Walt got down on his bad knees and pointed the flashlight over the edge.
At the bottom, curled up in a nest of dry leaves against the stone wall, was a small boy in a dinosaur sweatshirt.
And in his arms, a gray kitten.
"Owen," Walt said. Quietly. You don't startle a scared animal, and you don't startle a scared boy. "Owen, my name's Walt. I'm your neighbor. You're okay now."
The boy looked up into the light, squinting. His face was dirty and streaked from crying. But his eyes were open, and his voice, when it came, was strong.
"I followed the kitty," he said. "It came out of the woods and I followed it and then I fell down. There's a mama cat and two more babies."
Walt swept the light along the wall. Sure enough, in a gap in the old stones, a skinny gray cat stared back at him with two more kittens behind her.
So that was what Biscuit had been barking at, three nights in a row. Not coyotes. Not monsters. A stray cat and her kittens living in an old cellar hole, smelling up the whole corner of the woods.
And tonight, a little boy who smelled like that cat.
"Are you hurt anywhere, Owen?"
"My foot hurts. And I'm cold."
Walt couldn't climb down. He knew that without trying. If he went into that hole, there'd be two people to pull out instead of one.
So he did what he could. He took off his heavy barn coat and lowered it down on the end of a long branch until Owen could grab it. He told the boy to wrap himself and the kitten up in it, and Owen did.
Then Walt sat down at the edge of the cellar hole in his shirtsleeves, in the freezing fog, and talked.
He told Owen about Biscuit, and how she used to chase rabbits. He told him about the time a raccoon got into the barn and ate a whole bag of dog food and was too fat to get back out. He didn't tell him about the war, or about the nights in 1969 when he'd learned how to sit very still in the dark and keep someone else calm. He just used what he'd learned.
Beside him, Biscuit threw back her head and started baying again. Long and loud, over and over, so anybody in those woods could follow it straight to them.
Brandon Hale got there first.
He came crashing through the fog with his flashlight, following the dog's voice, and when he saw Walt sitting at the edge of the hole in his shirtsleeves, he started running.
He went down into that cellar hole without even thinking about it, and came back up the stones with his son in his arms, still wrapped in Walt's barn coat, still holding the kitten.
Earl came next with six searchers and a blanket. Then Jenna, who had to be held up between two women from church.
Owen had a sprained ankle and a little frostbite on two toes. Doc Martin at the hospital in Marietta said if he'd been out there until morning, it might have been a different story.
The next week, Brandon came up the shared lane with a toolbox and two rolls of woven wire, and he and Walt built a fence around the old cellar hole. It took them all day. Neither one of them talked much. They didn't need to.
Owen kept the gray kitten. He named it Biscuit Junior, which nobody had the heart to tell him was a terrible name for a cat. The mama cat and the other two kittens went to live in Walt's barn, where they ate better than they had in their lives.
Dot sent over a T-bone steak for the real Biscuit, cooked medium rare, with a note: *For the best nose in Calder County.*
That night, Biscuit stood at the edge of the back porch and looked at the woods for a long time.
She barked once.
Then she lay down by Walt's chair and slept until morning.
