Not long after Jack Barlow rented a small house and moved into the pretty little mountain village to run a timbering operation, he was standing at his back door late one afternoon when a big gaunt blue-ticked setter trotted through the yard.

He wondered to whom it belonged and whether it would be any good on grouse. He had always loved grouse shooting, and hadn’t been able to do any of it for five or six years; now that he was back in grouse country and hadn’t a dog, he wanted to meet someone who did have one with whom he could shoot until he could get one of his own.

It was the first setter he had seen in the village, and he called to it. The dog stopped, turned its head toward him, looked at him for a long moment in an oddly speculative way, wagged its tail slightly and went on.

This piqued him a little, for he had a way with dogs. They liked him at sight, and any dog that didn’t hate the human race always came to him when he called it. This was the first one that had seemed to sum him up, make a gesture of friendliness and then dismiss him. It had seemed to say that it had more important things to do than pause for a pat on the head, no matter how pleasant this might be.

He was still thinking about the setter when he walked down the street to the little hotel where he had most of his meals, for he hadn’t found a housekeeper yet. After he finished his dessert, he went into the living room, sat down and waited until the proprietor — a tall, middle-aged man named Gibney — had finished his dinner and joined him. They talked a little about the weather and the lumbering, and then Barlow asked, “The grouse season opens pretty soon, doesn’t it?”

Gibney gave him a rather odd look. “Grouse?” he asked. “Oh, yes, it starts in about a week. You a grouse hunter?”

“I’ve been one since I could carry a gun,” Barlow said, “but I’ve been in the wrong kind of country for the past five years. I’d like to start in again. There was a big setter in my yard a while ago, and I thought I’d ask you— ”

Gibney interrupted him. “Is that why you came here?” he asked.

This seemed like a strange question to Barlow. “Here?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, is that why you came to town? Grouse?”

“I came to town for the lumbering. Surely you know that.”

“Why” — Gibney said, and blinked — “why, yes, so I do.” He got up, gave Barlow another odd look, and said, “Well, make yourself comfortable. I’ve got to write some letters.”

He turned to go out of the room, but Barlow wasn’t through with him yet. “I wanted to ask you who owned the setter,” he said, “and if it was any good on grouse.”

Gibney took a few steps, stopped and half turned. “Nobody owns him,” he said, “and nobody ever will. From all I hear he’s as good a grouse dog as you’re liable to find. But if I were you, I’d let him alone.”

Gibney started to walk again. He went out of the room, his footfalls fading down the hall, and Barlow stared after him. He couldn’t imagine what had got into the man, who had always seemed friendly and sensible enough before. He was apparently still friendly: his tone hadn’t been hostile or unpleasant; but it was hard to find him sensible. Why would a sensible man warn him against a dog that was both ownerless and good at his work? Was there some rivalry over the beast in the village, with trouble in the offing for anyone — any stranger, especially — who got interested in him? Barlow was well aware that there were occasionally some strange characters in out-of-the-way mountain villages, but what did that have to do with Gibney’s questions as to why he, Barlow, had come there? Gibney knew — and had known all along — that he was getting out timber. Gibney had even advised him when he had first started, what local men to hire and what men to leave alone.

None of it made sense. Barlow shook his head and went out of the hotel. When he was on the street, he paused for a moment, looking about, wondering what to do with himself. He didn’t want to return to his home; it was too early to go to bed, and he didn’t feel like sitting in the little old-fashioned living room wondering what Gibney had meant. There was a fog now, and the few lights along the street were haloed and dim. The eaves along the porch roof of the hotel dripped in a melancholy way, and the village — which was only a few scattered houses, the hotel and a store — seemed to have withdrawn into the mist and partially disappeared. Half a block away there was a diffused reddish glow, and Barlow remembered then that he previously had noticed a bar sign in that direction. He had stayed away from it, not being much of a drinker, but tonight he thought it would be better than his empty house; he walked down the street and went in.

It was not much of a place, made by knocking down the wall between two rooms in an old house. There was a homemade bar with a dirty mirror and a few bottles behind it, several battered tables and an old jukebox; the light was dim. He had met the man behind the bar, so he nodded to him, moved to the bar and asked for a beer. When it came he picked it up and looked around. At the other end of the room three men were seated around one of the tables, and Barlow was surprised to see that they didn’t look like most of the natives he had seen around the village.

Their clothes were better; they looked more like retired city men, and not poor ones either. Each one had a drink in front of him, and they were talking in a desultory way. He was so bemused at seeing them there, in that dingy place, that he stared at them. They looked back at him uninterestedly, and after a moment he remembered his manners and turned away.

“Do those men live here?” he asked the bartender in a low voice.

“Them?” the bartender asked, inclining his head slightly. “No. They all got little houses — fancy cabins, sort of — outside of town and come up about this time of year.”

“What for?” Barlow asked. “What could they do here?”

“They say they hunt them grouse,” the bartender said. “But nobody sees them doing it very often.”

“Ah,” Barlow said, and walked over to their table. “Gentlemen,” he said, “my name is Barlow. I don’t want to intrude, but I’m a grouse hunter, and Jerry tells me that all of you are too. Would you mind if I sat down?”

The three of them seemed to withdraw into themselves. They looked at him somewhat stonily, with an obvious lack of enthusiasm, for a long moment, then the tallest of them spoke up. “Ah,” he said in a grudging tone. “Yes. Do sit down. My name is Roberts. This is Charley Deakyne and that’s Bill Farley to your right.”

Deakyne was a chunky, sandy-haired man, and Farley had a square, ruddy face; all three of them wore good tweeds and had an executive look about them. They nodded to him with no change of expression, with no warmth whatever, and Barlow was suddenly thoroughly fed up with them.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I seem to have come along at an inopportune time.” He turned away, went back to the bar, swallowed his beer, paid for it and with a nod at the bartender walked out of the place. As he went out the door he glanced back at the three men; none of them had moved.

The fog was, if anything, thicker than when he had gone in and, as he walked through it back to his house, he began to simmer with an anger that was half bafflement. What the devil, he wondered, was wrong with everybody? The three deadpan executive types, he was sure, had manners if they felt like using them; the hotel proprietor didn’t make sense. It seemed to happen when he mentioned grouse — which, in his previous experience, had always brought men together for lively and pleasant talk; for grouse hunters were a dedicated lot and had much to say to one another. It was certainly different in this place.

The rest of the week he was busy, running about in his jeep to the four places where he had men working in the bright autumn woods and seeing to the sawing up of his logs after they were trucked to the sawmill. He kept a sharp eye out for grouse as he moved around or bumped over the logging roads, but saw only two or three of them. It looked as though the shooting was going to be very poor, and he began to feel discouraged about it; in the old days, moving about as he had been moving, he would have seen dozens of birds. A good dog would have been a godsend to him, and he saw no chance of getting one.

On Sunday afternoon, at loose ends and still feeling discouraged, he got his gun out of its case and took it out on the back porch to clean the grease out of it. He was working with rags and cleaning rod when he looked up and was startled to see the big setter sitting ten feet away in the grass with its head cocked to one side, looking at him. It waved its tail gently. It was rather old and ribby, bigger than people want setters any more, and there was a ring around its neck where the hair was very thin, as though a collar had chafed it badly. Barlow stopped rubbing the gun; he almost stopped breathing. His head was instantly filled with wild schemes to get the beast into the house or the garage, and he frantically cast about in his mind to remember where there was something he could use for a leash. The dog somehow seemed to sense what he was thinking, moved off several steps and, as some dogs do, raised its upper lip slightly and grinned at him.

This manifestation, at once sardonic and as plain as words would have been, brought Barlow back to earth again. It indicated to him that the dog knew perfectly what he had been thinking, that such things had been tried on it many times before and that it didn’t intend to be taken in. Barlow stood the gun in the corner of the porch and grinned.

“All right,” he said. “We won’t try to fence you in. All grouse hunters are crazy, but this one isn’t crazy as all that.” He stepped off the porch. “Come on,” he said, “let’s take a walk.”

The dog watched until he reached the back of his lot, where the woods began. There he stopped and waved an arm, calling it on. It came past him at a run and, as they got into the woods and moved on, it began to hunt, quartering back and forth in front of him, never too far away. It was a delight to Barlow to be in the woods again, moving through the crimson and gold of maple and beech and the somber gloom of the hemlock thickets with a dog working in front of him.

It was like the one or two really good dogs he had owned years ago, covering an extraordinary amount of ground at a fast and steady pace, but never beyond his view. It made him feel, as he had felt with those fine dogs of the past, as though there was a sort of empathy between them. No word needed to be said: The dog acted as a part of the hunter, a more sensitive extension of the man, never out of touch.

Presently he saw how good it really was; at the edge of a witch-hopple thicket it suddenly stopped, crept forward with its belly low for a few steps and stopped again. Barlow stopped himself, for the dog was not pointing yet; either the bird was still stirring a little or the dog wasn’t quite sure of its location. Suddenly, with great caution, the dog moved off to the right and, taking a wide half circle, faced Barlow again from the other side of the thicket and froze. The bird had been running in front of them, and the dog had swung around it, headed it off and stopped it. It had been beautiful performance.

Barlow began to walk in, tingling with expectation. When he reached the middle of the thicket, a big old grouse rose from under his feet with its booming thunder of wings, angled up through an opening in the trees with its tail spread wide and disappeared. To see a grouse rise again in the autumn woods, after the dog had handled it so well, brought a lump to Barlow’s throat. With the curious dichotomy of the hunter, he loved both the bird and the hunting of it; and he had neither seen the bird nor hunted it for a long time.

He called the dog; it came without hesitation and sat down beside him. As he gently stroked its head, he knew that he wanted it more than he had wanted anything for years and that he couldn’t have it. There was no way to bind it to him; its actions in his yard had shown him plainly enough — even if Gibney, the hotelkeeper, hadn’t told him — that it would go its own way and come to him when it wanted to. He wondered if that was why he had been warned against it. Had Gibney seen people make fools of themselves over it before and warned him out of kindness, or was there more? He had a sudden, inexplicable feeling that there was, that he had been seduced by a strange, masterless dog into an experience that he would be sorry for. He put his hand under the dog’s jaw to raise its head and look into his eyes, but it broke away from him and started to hunt again. He watched it for a moment, rather disturbed but unable to leave it, and followed.

They found no other grouse, which didn’t surprise Barlow; he hadn’t expected that they would find any so close to the village. He was beginning to think of turning back when they came out onto a road, which Barlow recognized as the one which wound around the hills and finally went through the village. There was a car parked 700-800 yards away, and it started toward them. When it reached them it stopped, and Barlow recognized the driver as the man named Roberts, whom he had seen in the bar.

“Good afternoon, Barlow,” Roberts said. “I thought I’d find you about here. Someone saw you leave the village with the dog, and from your direction I guessed your course.” He smiled slightly at Barlow and then switched his attention to the dog, which turned its back on him and sat down.

“Ah, yes,” Barlow said. “Kind of you to go to all the trouble. I suppose there’s a phone call at the hotel, or someone wants me.”

“Not that I know of,” Roberts said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Barlow looked at him in surprise. He was still looking at the dog, and there wasn’t any more warmth or friendliness in his voice than there had been in the bar. “Talk to me at home then,” Barlow said in irritation. “I’m usually there in the evenings.”

“I want to talk to you here,” Roberts said, and his glance swung to Barlow, cold with hostility. “Before—” He caught himself. “I don’t want you around here, Barlow. I’ll buy you out and give you a very good profit.”

Barlow stared at him. “Will you, now?” he asked, checking his rising temper. “Good. Bring a $150,000 in cash to my house tonight at 8 o’clock, and I’ll go. Otherwise, stay out of my way. I don’t like you.”

He turned away, climbed the bank beside the road and started into the woods. The dog stood up and followed him. He had gone about 50 feet when Roberts shouted: “It’s as much for your good as mine, you fool! Go before that accursed beast — Go! Go!”

Barlow increased his pace and didn’t turn around; the dog moved out, and the shouting from the road diminished behind him and finally ceased.

The dog left him shortly before he got back to his house. One moment it was quartering about in front of him and the next it had vanished completely. He didn’t whistle or call; he knew it wouldn’t be back that day, and wondered with a pang whether it would ever be back again. The shooting season started on the morrow and, now that he had seen what the dog could do with an old grouse smart enough to make a fool of an ordinary bird dog and live for a long time so close to the village, a feeling of depression descended upon him. This depression deepened when he thought of Roberts, who had acted almost like a madman. Roberts, with his ridiculous offer — to which he had got an equally ridiculous reply — and his shouting, was certainly a disturbed character; but the more Barlow thought over what Roberts had said, the more it seemed as though the dog was the cause of it. It seemed obvious that he wanted Barlow out of the village because of the dog and had met him on the road to get ahead of the two others with an offer, but why had he called the dog an accursed beast?

Barlow was so engrossed in his puzzled thoughts when he entered the back door that at first he didn’t see Farley, he of the square, ruddy face in the bar, and jumped when Farley said “Hello!” from the door of the living room. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Farley went on. “I thought you saw me; I say, I’m sorry I acted such an ass the other night.”

Barlow had gathered himself and prepared to give Farley the same treatment he had given Roberts, but this approach disarmed him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Won’t you sit down?” Farley took a chair, and Barlow studied him. He was still wary, despite Farley’s belated politeness, and said, “Have you come to buy me out too?”

“Buy you out?” Farley asked. “Why would I try to buy you out?”

“Roberts offered to,” Barlow said. “He waylaid me on the road.”

Farley showed some signs of agitation; he half stood up and then sat down again. His face hardened. “Why, that— ” he began, and stopped. Then he smiled, a painful, unhappy grimace. “He obviously didn’t succeed,” he said. “He was always too jumpy, too gruff, not diplomatic enough. He probably meant, at first, to ask you what I’m going to ask you and somehow got put off it.”

“And what is that?”

“To let me shoot with you.”

Barlow simply stared at him; it was the second one of them he’d stared at. “Let you shoot with me?” he asked. “Why?”

“The dog likes you,” Farley said. “He went for a walk with you. Believe me, Barlow, I’d give almost anything. It might work. Just once, just once more.” He was almost pleading now; he leaned forward in his chair and his hands twitched on the arms of it. “Just once. Please.”

Barlow was astounded; maybe this one was mad too. “Look,” he said, “all of you treated me as though I had cholera, and I’ve got to like the people I shoot with. You all begin to show up after I’d been seen walking the dog. I don’t know what this dog’s got that any really fine dog hasn’t— ”

“You don’t?!” Farley almost shouted at him. “You don’t? You’re lying! When you came here, you were so bemused that you didn’t even see me, and that’s proof enough. Barlow, it’s worth a thousand dollars to me, I tell you!” He came out of his chair and started for Barlow, but Barlow put up one hand and stopped him.

“That’s enough,” he said. “I want no part of any of you. Go get yourselves dogs with your thousand dollars and let me alone. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

Farley got a pleading look on his face and held up his hands. “No!” he exclaimed. “You’ve got to listen to me, Barlow. I’ll give you $2000. What other use do I have for money any more? I loved grouse shooting, and it’s been 30 years since I’ve had any like that. There isn’t any like it any more. I’ve come back and come back; it won’t look at me and—”

His voice had been rising; he was like a man pleading for an extension on a loan or something else he needed very badly, and Barlow turned away from him, went out through the kitchen and headed for the woods. As he entered the edge of them he turned and saw Farley at the back door. He pointed his finger at the man and said: “Go away. I won’t talk to you. And find that other one, Deakyne, and tell him to stay away from here.”

He turned again and walked rapidly on, considerably upset by the scene, and even more confused.

The next day the grouse season opened, and Barlow was up early. He had bought a supply of meat, and he put a big pan of it out by the back porch. As he cooked his breakfast he made a number of trips to the back door to look out and see if the dog had come, but there was no sign of it; it still hadn’t appeared by the time he finished his breakfast. Feeling like a fool, he took his gun and coat out on the back porch and sat there, hoping it would come, but it didn’t. He waited for an hour, feeling more foolish all the time; then he swore, got into the jeep and drove off to where he had seen a bird or two in the past.

He hunted until the middle of the afternoon and didn’t see a grouse. Like most men who are accustomed to hunting with a good dog, he had the feeling that he was possibly passing birds that froze at his approach and that a dog would have found, or that there were birds that had run on ahead of him like the one the setter had stopped. Having seen the dog work, he missed it all the more.

It was a day of mounting frustration, and the day following was just like it except that he heard a grouse fly off and never saw it; he began to wish that he had never seen the dog. On the third morning, discouraged and glum, he slept an extra hour and finally got up as grumpy as a bear fresh out of hibernation; when he looked out the back door, more out of habit than of hope, the dog was sitting on the back porch. His grumpiness evaporated; he ran about and got the pan of meat and took it out. The dog grinned at him before it began to eat.

“Ah, you devil,” he said to it, half in delight and half in exasperation, “you should have lived in the days of the Spanish Inquisition. You’d have been the chief torturer.”

The dog had finished eating by that time; it sat down and looked at him. For a moment its eyes held an odd, cool expression of satisfaction. Just as though it has me exactly where it wants me, he thought. He had never seen a dog look quite that way before, and a little shiver went up his spine. He shook it off, went into the house and came back with his gunning coat and gun. The dog followed him to the jeep, and they drove off.

Barlow drove six miles to a very wild stretch of country he had marked long before as a likely spot, parked the jeep off the road and started into the woods. The dog began to quarter back and forth in front of him, its pale body flashing through the sunlight patches of the autumn woods, and Barlow followed happily. They went deeper into the woods, crossed a rocky, swift stream and got into a high, golden beechwoods dotted with somber patches of hemlock. It was a good place for grouse, and Barlow began to feel the fine anticipation again.

Suddenly he realized that the dog was not in front of him, that it had disappeared. He stopped to listen for it, disturbed. As he stood there a cloud covered the sun, and the woods darkened, a mean, cold little wind sprang up, rattling the dry leaves and sighing in the hemlocks. The darkness increased, and Barlow heard a distant rolling like thunder, and then suddenly the sun came out again and the wind fell. The woods were sunny and still once more, and off to his left he saw the dog again.

He followed on. Presently it was borne in upon him that he had got into an area that had never been timbered, a thing he had never expected to see. The trees were huge, towering up around him; he had never seen their like except in one or two small parks where the primitive growth had been carefully preserved. Here, all around him, as far as he could see, there was not a sign that man had ever been this way. He was so amazed by this, to find such an area in a country he knew had been thoroughly cut over 40 or 50 years ago, that he forgot for a time to watch the dog. He recalled it with a start and looked around. Forty yards in front of him, in an opening piled with a tangle of deadfall timber, he saw it standing on point.

He moved in. As he stopped a little behind the dog, a grouse got up and, although it flew straight away, he missed it. The dog didn’t move, and he took another step. A second grouse rose from the deadfall, half climbing and half flying, with its tail spread wide. As it straightened and began to fly off, he knocked it down. The dog still held steady and, as he stood there, staring, with an empty gun, 12 more birds came up in singles and twos and threes and boomed away.

He was still standing there in disbelief when the dog brought in the dead grouse and laid it in front of him. He picked it up, the bird he would rather hunt than any other, soft and beautiful, big, of a gray cast, with the wide, banded tail and the black ruffs on the neck. He held it for a moment, still unbelieving, for no one had seen 14 grouse together in that country for 30 years. He looked at the dog, which had turned away to hunt again. It seemed younger, somehow; its coat seemed shinier in the sun; it moved more smoothly and the worn ring around its neck was harder to see.

A queer feeling of unreality took hold of Barlow as he moved off after it through the great, ancient trees, a feeling that didn’t seem to have validity, because he could feel the weight of the dead grouse in his game pocket and the fading warmth of it against his back. He didn’t have much time to think about it, for the dog soon pointed again. This time he took the first bird out of a flock of 10, and watched, with the sheer pleasure of a dedicated grouse hunter who loves to see birds fly, while the remaining birds took off as the first flock had done.

The rest of the morning was like that; there were grouse everywhere, in flocks and by twos and threes and occasionally a single. It was like a grouse hunter’s dream of heaven, like the remembered days of his youth when there were still plenty of birds. Sometimes he watched them go for the pleasure of watching; occasionally he shot at a difficult single, passing up the easier ones. When he had six birds he took the shells out of his gun and stopped shooting, whistled to the dog and turned back. The dog came in and followed behind him, as though it, too, was satisfied.

It had been — with the birds, the shooting, the perfect work of the dog and the wild beauty of the country — the happiest day he had spent for many years; he had long since forgotten the feeling of unreality that had descended upon him at first. It was recalled to him suddenly, with a sense of shock, when he found a cougar’s tracks in the sand along a small stream. He had never seen the track of a cougar, the catamount of the early settlers; the beast had been gone from the country before he was born, but there was no question in his mind, from the size of the footprints, that that was what it was. He stood looking at the tracks for a long time, trying to believe that he saw the actual evidence of a living creature that he knew for a certainty had been exterminated in that country by the turn of the century. All around him grew the great trees that had been long gone, too, and, thinking confusedly of these things, he suddenly realized that he hadn’t got into a section that somehow been spared the attentions of men, but that they hadn’t got there yet. He had gone back in time.

The cold little shiver once more ran up his spine, and he looked quickly about. The woods were still, dreaming quietly in the sun, and the dog was gone. He whistled and called; a wild turkey gobbled from far away, and that was all.

And then there was a rising roar all about him, and the sunlight was dimmed; a dark and flickering shadow fell all around him, and he looked up to see a wide, dark river of birds, seemingly without limit or beginning or end, between him and the sky. He could pick out, here and there against the great river of bodies, some pigeon-like shapes and the swift, pigeon-like beat of their wings and knew that he was seeing what no man of his generation had ever seen: one of the great flights of the passenger pigeons that were gone from the earth.

Any remaining doubt that he may have had was wiped from his mind; a sudden fear that he would never get back again, that he was lost and alone in a world that was now gone, a fear that turned him cold all over, suddenly came upon him and he started to run. He struggled up the steep side of the stream bed under the roaring torrent of pigeons and ran up toward the crest of the mountain that he had been descending a short time before, desperately fighting his way through deadfalls and stumbling over rotting, fallen timber. When he reached the top, scratched and bruised and dripping with sweat, he had to stop, there was a pain like a knife in his side, and his heart sounded like a drum.

He leaned against a tree until his breathing returned nearly to normal and his sight cleared and saw the second-growth timber all around him; as far as he could see, back over the way that he had come, there were no more of the great ancient trees, and the pigeons had gone as if they had never existed. His sign of relief was more like a sob, and he started to walk again.

In 10 minutes, he came out on the road and saw the jeep parked where he had left it. He went up to it, thumped it to make sure that it was real and got in. His bulky game pocket pushed him forward in the seat, and he got out again. He took the six grouse out of his coat one by one and laid them carefully and unbelievingly on the floor. Only then, as he looked at them, did he recall that the limit was two a day now, and wondered what he would say if a game warden stopped him. He shook his head, got in and started the engine.

He was a good deal calmer by evening, but he had no desire to eat anything; after the dinner hour he walked to the hotel and found Gibney in the living room by himself. Gibney glanced at him. “You look shaken up,” Gibney said, “so I guess you did it.”

“Yes,” he said, “I did it. Maybe you can tell me now why you warned me.”

“Sit down,” Gibney said. “You won’t believe what I’m about to say; witchcraft isn’t very popular any more.”

“Witchcraft? I don’t—”

“I don’t know what else to call it,” Gibney said. “That’s why I never talk about it when another grouse hunter comes along. I don’t enjoy being called a fool.”

“Another grouse hunter?” Barlow said. “You mean they hear about it and come here — come here —”

He realized he was repeating himself and stopped. “I didn’t hear about it,” he said. “I wanted to hunt grouse again, and then the dog came into my yard, and then Roberts and Farley—”

“They’ve been there,” Gibney said. “And they want to get back. They’ll do anything, almost anything, to get back again.”

Barlow started at him. “You mean the dog takes them?” he asked. He was beginning to see now.

“The dog took them,” Gibney said. “He takes everybody once. Listen now. Ten years ago that dog belonged to a man named Michaels. He was a perfectionist, a strange man, mad about grouse hunting. He trained the dog, and one day the dog did something that put him in a rage. So he hanged the beast.”

“Hanged him!” Barlow exclaimed, aghast. “Good heavens, man, whoever hangs a dog?”

“Michaels had spent some time among the Eskimos, hunting polar bear, and Eskimos hang dogs they don’t want. So Michaels hanged him. Didn’t you see that ring around his neck? By the time somebody cut him down he was, to all intents, dead. But he wasn’t dead, as a matter of fact. He came around again, and six months later it was Michaels who was dead. His gun went off accidentally and killed him.”

Barlow didn’t say anything.

“Pure accident maybe. But after that the dog waited for grouse hunters. He’d appear and get into their good graces, take a walk with them and show them how good he was and then—”

“Yes,” Barlow said.

“Did the dog disappear for a while and the sky darken and all that?”

“Yes,” Barlow said again.

“And then after it had taken them into the past somewhere, on the best hunt of their lives, it would never have anything to do with them again.”

“Never?” Barlow asked. “Never?” There isn’t any way to—”

“Do you want to be like Roberts and Farley and Deakyne? Coming back and back, hoping, waiting? There’s no future in it, Barlow. Believe me, I know. I’ve heard it all.”

Barlow was silent for a long time, staring at the floor, remembering the impossible flocks of grouse, the great trees, the pigeons, the day. He wasn’t frightened of that place now; he wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to go back.

“‘Sorrow’s crown of sorrow,’” Gibney said softly, quoting Tennyson, “‘is remembering happier things.’”

“Yes,” Barlow said once more.

By a great effort of will he dispelled his longing and his hopes. “Thank you,” he said, and stood up and walked out of the hotel. The mist had come again, giving what he could see of the village an eerie and ghostlike air. He could see the diffused glow of the neon sign on the bar, where Farley and Roberts and Deakyne were doubtless sitting together, and he shivered and turned from it and walked on.