Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing Read Online Free PDF Page A

and muscular,” Belle told me. “What you’d expect a fine Lab to look like, with a handsome square head and a strong muzzle.” I told her I’d found the son of a Rock, the grandson of a Bear. She laughed and told me it sounded promising.
    I went by the bookstore and talked to Pierre for a few minutes. He’d lost the password to the computer. I wrote it on a note card and taped it to the counter underneath the laptop. While I was doing this, he said he thought I should take a couple years’ break before getting another dog. “It’s not for me,” I said. “It’ll be a family pet.”
    “Sure thing,” he said, nodding, his eyebrows raised.
    “Besides,” I said, “it could take two years to find the right dog.” He shook his head, and walked me to the door. I drove home to pick up Diana and the boys. We all piled into the Jeep and drove toward Bay Minette, a small town twenty miles north of Fairhope. Diana held the driving directions.
    “You know,” I said, as we got closer to our destination, “I had sure hoped we’d find a puppy through a reference from someone we know, not though a classified ad.”
    “But all our referrals we got came from people whose Goldens look more like Setters, and you said Belle said…”
    “I know. But this seems so, so…”
    “Like shopping for a used sofa,” Diana offered.
    “Exactly.”
    “Well, let’s just have a look. A look won’t hurt.”
    “No,” I said. I was silent for a moment. “But, you know, looking for a puppy should be that: looking. We haven’t looked at a single pup, Diana. We’ve just been talking,” I complained.
    “Just relax,” she said. “Life is good.”
    “If this is a puppy farm…”
    “Sonny!”
    “Sorry, honey,” I said. “Isn’t this my turn coming up?”
    Diana nodded, and I turned onto an unpaved side road of smoothly packed crushed white oyster shells. It was a comfortable ride up the long drive, lined with pruned azalea bushes and young live oaks. We wound our way up a low hill to a two-story brick colonial with white columns. An ebony black Chevy Silverado gleamed on a concrete parking pad.
    “Not the Deliverance setting you were imagining, huh?” Diana asked.
    “Whatever I imagined,” I said, “it wasn’t this.”
    An old man walked around the corner of the house followed by a prancing and beautiful dark-red Golden Retriever, obviously the mother, her quartet of puppies wending and stumbling at her feet. The man wore faded jeans, boots, and a cowboy shirt not tucked in. He pinched off a piece of biscuit he was eating and handed it to the mama dog. He ruffled the fur on her head.
    “How do, folks? You’ve come to look at my pups, I reckon.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said, my eyes on the puppies, not the man.
    “Tell them boys to come on up here,” the man said. “You got to get the little ones together with the little ones to get this right.”
    Diana and I exchanged looks, smiled, and nodded to the boys, who clearly understood they were being given a special invitation. John Luke and Dylan rushed forward and dropped to their knees. All four puppies surrounded them. The man in the cowboy shirt stepped forward and extended his hand. “My name’s Jack Bennett.”
    “I’m Sonny Brewer. This is my wife, Diana.”
    “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” He nodded to me, “Sir.” Then Mr. Bennett turned his attention to the dogs and the boys rolling and giggling on the grass with puppies all over them. Mr. Bennett approached the mama dog. She wrapped her body around his leg and leaned her entire weight against him.
    “Look at that,” I declared to Diana.
    “What?” she asked. “Where?”
    “At the mother dog. I swear she smiled.”
    “Of course, she’s smiling,” Mr. Bennett said. “She doesn’t always. When she does, you can be sure she okays the adoption.” I decided this was not a puppy farm where dogs are merely inventory. This man’s dogs were about as close to family as four-leggeds could