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there dug into the ancient lakebed, and a closed off road in from the Flats, near the dump. On the left hand side, the land is wooded and rises slowly toward Knob Lock Mountain and Giant in the southeast.
    Coming down from the Flats on the Marlowe road toward town, the greatest danger was that I would be going too slow and a lumber truck or some idiot in a car would come barreling along at seventy five or eighty, which you can easily do up there, once you’ve made the crest from the other side, and would come up on me fast and not be able to slow or pass and would run smack into me, or, more likely, first would hit Billy Ansel’s pickup truck lollygagging along behind and then the bus. As a result, since I didn’t have any more stops to make once I’d gathered the kids from the Flats, I tended to drive that stretch of road at a pretty good clip. Nothing reckless, you under stand.
    Nothing illegal. Fifty, fifty five is all. Also, if I happened to be running a few minutes late, that was the only time when I could make up for it.
    After passing through the gloom and closed in feeling of Wilmot Flats, when you turn onto the Marlowe road and start the drive toward town, you tend to feel uplifted, released. Or I should say, I always did.
    The road is straight and there is more sky than land for the first time, and the valley opens up below you and on your right, like Montana or Wyoming a large snow covered bowl with a range of distant mountains surrounding it, and beyond the mountains there are still more mountains shouldering toward the sky, as if the surface of the planet were the same every where as here. This was always the most pleasurable part of my journey with the bus in high gear and running smooth, enough pale daylight now, despite the thin gauzy snow falling, to see the entire landscape stretched out before me, and the busload of children peaceful behind me as they contentedly conversed with one another or silently prepared themselves for the next segment of their long day.
    And, yes, it was then that I saw the dog, the second dog, the one I maybe only thought I saw. It emerged from the blowing snow on the right side of the road, popped up from the ditch there, or so it seemed, and crossed to the center of the road, where it appeared to stop, as if unsure whether to continue or go back. No, I am almost sure now that it was an optical illusion or a mirage, a sort of afterimage , maybe, of the dog that I had seen on the Flats and that had frightened and moved me so. But at the time I could not tell the difference.
    And as I have always done when I’ve had two bad choices and nothing else available to me, I arranged it so that if I erred I’d come out on the side of the angels. Which is to say, I acted as though it was a real dog I saw or a small deer or possibly even a lost child from the Flats, barely a half mile away.
    For the rest of my life I will remember that red brown blur, like a stain of dried blood, standing against the road with a thin screen of blown snow suspended between it and me, the full weight of the vehicle and the thirty four children in it bearing down on me like a wall of water. And I will remember the formal clarity of my mind, beyond thinking or choosing now, for I had made my choice, as I wrenched the steering wheel to the right and slapped my foot against the brake pedal, and I wasn’t the driver any more, so I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head, as if the bus were a huge wave about to break over me.
    There was Bear Otto, and the Lamston kids, and the Walkers, the Hamiltons, and the Prescotts and the teenaged boys and girls from Bartlett Hill, and Risa and Wendell Walker’s sad little boy, Sean, and sweet Nichole Burnell, and all the kids from the valley, and the children from Wilmot Flats, and Billy Ansel’s twins, Jessica and Mason the children of my town-their wide eyed faces and fragile bodies swirling and tumbling in a tangled mass as the bus went over and the sky tipped and