“We had a little trouble out of that one,” Larry Gantt tells me from his porch. 
     I don’t need to look to where he is pointing. I know who it is. I’ve been trying to catch her for twenty minutes. She broke free again. 
     “Silky!” I holler, and she ducks into the woods, ignoring me.  
     Larry lives behind us. It’s down the graveled road that leads to his house that we walk every evening. Our woods on the east, his on the west. They entwine above, a lush canopy. In the swag, a live creek cuts beneath the road and falls into a pool of stone and toppled trees. Every foot is a new adventure of smells, deer and possums and squirrels. 
     Larry is the type of man who goes to town for his mail, whose food comes primarily from the property that surrounds him, the woods and the land he has cleared. Silky had been chasing his chickens that roam free in the yard. She bursts from the woods and collapses in a panting heap at my feet. I apologize to Larry, explaining, as I clip on her lead, that Silky is still young, despite her grown-up size, and just wants to play. 
     Larry understands, he’s a kind enough man ... has had a dog or two himself. But this is a world of fair warnings and we’ve been given ours.

"What was that?" Silky asks, the way she asks when her mouth is full of stuffed animal (which it was), ears perked and tan eyebrows raised. 
     The animal in Silky's mouth was a black and white cow, acquired from an enormous bin at the local second-hand store for forty-nine cents, along with a small pink cat and a giraffe with removable legs. 
     Silky had torn a hole into the cow and was shaking the stuffing loose, as she always does, when we heard the caplink, tink, tink, of something hitting the floor. 
     We found it beneath the table, a little red heart, no bigger than an apricot's pit. 
     There's a list of stuffed animals that we never purchase at the second-hand store: puppies, bunnies, nothing with beans, and no Pooh-shaped bears, which limits the selection greatly. How it was that Silky knew what she saw lying on the floor, is beyond me. But she did. And she looked as though she might cry. She lay the black and white cow down gently and touched its red heart with her wet nose. 
     "Can you put it back?" she asked me. 
     "I think we can," I told her. 
    And we did, Silky helping me nest the little red heart back into the cow's stuffed insides. 

     No puppies no bunnies, no Pooh-shaped bears, nothing with beans ... and no cows, heart-filled or otherwise.