‘Do you think an Indian dropped it?’ Silky asks of the hawk’s feather she found on our evening walk. 
     She’s been reading about Indians lately and has come to fancy herself half Cherokee, partly because of her glossy black hair and partly because of her keen ability to follow a trail, be it of cricket or mouse. 
     ‘Maybe,’ I reply. 
     ‘Or maybe ...’ 
     And I tell her the story of Tianuanaha, the Great Spirit Hawk. Of how, years ago, he let fall a single feather on to a meadow path much like the one we were walking. A path that he knew a half-Cherokee girl with a wish walked every day. A wish of becoming a whole Cherokee girl and Princess of her Tribe. And of how Tianuanaha's feather would grant the girl's wish if only her father would sew it on to her dress and then give her a true Indian name. 
     Silky’s eyes were wide. 
     I picked up the feather and touched her left ear, then her right, then the tip of her nose. 
     ‘I name you, Nautakwa,’ I said. ‘Feather Princess.’ 
     Then I stitched the feather’s quill through the eyelets of a strap on Silky’s halter, where it hung bravely until we got home and affixed it in a manner befitting a legend ... and a full-blooded, Indian Princess.




           

"How much does it say?" Silky Josephine asks. 
     She's on the scale at the Veterinarian's. 
     "You have to hold still Josie," I tell her. 
     Every day of the seven weeks she has been on her diet, Silky has looked at her reflection in the glass of the oven door and asked if she didn't look skinnier, asked if we can't go to the Veterinarian and confirm this possibility. 
     Despite her excitement, she manages to sit still on the big scale, not rabbit still, but near enough the devise can run its calculations. 
     We watch together as it sorts through numbers ... up and down, down then up, until finally it decides. 
     74, it reads. 
    "Two pounds, Josie!" I tell her. "You lost two pounds!" 
   Silky beams. "I knew it!," she says, "I knew I looked skinnier!" 

     Maybe Silky did see her loss in the oven door, but to be quite honest, I didn't. In fact, I was a little worried she had gained some. But the numbers don't lie. Two pounds down. 
     "You are skinnier, my sweet, silly girl," I say, and hug her deeply. "Light as an Angel's feather." 
     And walking through the Veterinarian's, past the other dogs and one grey cat in a box, I can see it, too, proud as Silky was, she really was light as an Angel's feather.               

“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.                  

"She's as big as a cow!" Priscilla says of Silky Josephine. 

     She and Carl have returned. They were busy the first couple of days, repairing their nest over the back porch light. There was mudding to do, before the feathering, and while the it dries, we have a moment to talk. 

     Priscilla tells me about their trip, about Anna and Luis, and I tell her what little I know about the mysterious disappearance of Bobo, and of Silky's curious growth spurt, our present topic. 

     "One hundred and forty dollars worth of tests at the Doctor," I tell Priscilla, "and all we learned was that she's just regular old fat." 

     We had suspected ... even hoped ...that Silky might have an 'issue', something glandular that could be resolved with a pill. But that wasn't the case. Silky is perfectly healthy ... other than, as Priscilla says, being 'as big as a cow' ... only a slight exaggeration. 

     We watch her chase a bumblebee, leaping and spinning and snapping, as if she were as delicate and dainty as a butterfly, which, inside, Silky truly is. 

     "She doesn't get any more treats," I tell Priscilla, "and she'll get more exercise, now that it's warmed up and she can be outside." 

     "I can help with that," Priscilla says, and like a bullet, she's in the air, swooping and tittering, and Silky, her eyes wide with delight gives chase. 

     "She'll be slim as a willow switch in no time," I hear Priscilla say. And if anyone is equipped to imagine a slender Silky Josephine, I suppose it would be me.

                        

I doubt that I will ever stop looking to that field through which he wore a path going to and from his daily adventures, or that I will ever stop hoping, that through the Timothy and Sage, be it golden or green, I will see him return.



   

If you sleep at night with your windows open ...for it's that time of year again ...and you hear something crying in the darkness that may be a dog or that may be a boy, but either way, clearly has a heart, broken by the loss of a dear and wonderful friend, go to your window, if you would, and blow gently on this sorrow as it passes, and lift it to the ears for which it was intended, the love for which it longs.