Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,23

It would be far from the last.

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JANET NICHOLES, the wife of one of our guides, Jeth Nicholes, had come racing onto the dock saying she’d spotted Crunch & Des in a nearby wilderness preserve being chased up a tree by a panther. We’d gone tearassing out of there, and the whole thing had been a farce—no Crunch & Des, and I’d ended up with cuts, scrapes, and bruises for my trouble.

Late that night, the moon was still high in the winter sky as I limped toward the boardwalk and my stilthouse. Then I stopped dead because an odd shape blocked my way. A solid shape . . . an immobile darkness in the shadows . . . weighty enough to be threatening, but not tall.

I stopped, squinted, took another step, then stopped again, reaching for my little flashlight. I switched it on, then immediately off again and whispered, “What the hell . . . ?”

A thousand times I had walked this trail, sober, drunk, preoccupied, dazed, and occasionally eager as hell to disrobe whatever lady I had in tow. But this was a new one.

The dog blocked my path. When I had gone running off, he’d tried to follow and I’d ordered him to stay. “Understand? Stay here!”

And here he was. Sitting exactly where I’d left him. The precise spot, as I knew better than anyone could know. The retriever’s posture straightened when I approached, he thumped the ground with his tail a couple of times, but otherwise remained a statue. Even when I switched the light on again, he didn’t budge, although his eyes revealed a mild enthusiasm that suggested he was willing to move if so ordered.

“Amazing,” I said.

The dog’s ears stiffened, possibly while its brain sorted through a vocabulary list. Then his ears relaxed, the word now rejected as unrecognizable.

In my mind, I replayed the scene prior to getting into the truck to look for that damn missing cat. I remembered telling the dog he couldn’t go. But had I also told him to stay? Yes . . . yes, I had. No doubt in my mind.

I looked at my watch—Tomlinson’s watch, actually—a Bathys Benthic with bright green numerals that told me it was ten ’till ten. More than an hour ago, I had told this dog to stay and, by god, here he was. To him, stay wasn’t just a command. It was a mandate.

Despite my throbbing knee and the scratches on my face, I smiled and said, “Who are you?” which brought the retriever to attention. The search for Crunch & Des had been more painful than productive, but the night was suddenly improving.

“Truly amazing,” I said again. Then, as a test, I walked past the dog to the boardwalk without looking back. When I did look, the retriever’s head was turned a full one-eighty, but he hadn’t moved.

Enough testing for one night. I tried the most common release command—Okay!—and watched the dog bounce to his feet. He trotted toward me, circled away, then got derailed by a buttonwood, which he sniffed with expertise. When the ideal spot was located, he hiked a leg and marked the place with an uninterrupted stream that would have put my best and beeriest night to shame.

Comfortable again, the dog’s brain returned to another subject, so he backtracked to where he had dropped—a fish? Yes, a three-pound mullet still kicking, freshly caught. Where the hell had he gotten that? By the time I’d opened the security gate, the dog was heeling to my left but slightly behind because the of narrow walkway, the mullet sideways in his mouth like a bone. The excitement of locating a spot to piss had been replaced by his dominant temperament, which seemed to vary between boredom and dutiful awareness.

I find animal behavior interesting, seldom amusing, but I was having fun with this. Well-trained dogs are a rarity, in my experience. A well-trained retriever—if he had been trained to hunt—was also a valuable commodity. How had this dog ended up in the middle of the Everglades, hunting for food and battling snakes to survive? I would know more after I spoke to Tomlinson. A valuable dog would have had an ID microchip inserted somewhere under his skin and the vet would have found it. Until then, there were a lot of unusual scenarios to imagine.

The mystery was so entertaining, my bruised knee was forgotten. Nor did I notice that I had a visitor waiting on the porch outside my lab. When I hit the