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it. Although the smell when she bent over the animal told her it had been dead two days at least, there had been no buzz of flies to warn her. There were no flies at all around ole Chuck, and Anderson could not remember ever having seen such a thing. There was no obvious sign of what had killed it, either, but believing that thing in the ground had had anything to do with it was boolsheet of the purest ray serene. Ole Chuck had probably gotten some farmer’s poison bait and stumbled out here to die.
    Go home. Change your pants. You’re bloody and you stink.
    She backed away from the thing, then turned and climbed the slope back to the path, where Peter jumped clumsily on her and began to lick her hand with an eagerness that was a little pathetic. Even a year ago he would have been trying to nose at her crotch, attracted by the smell there, but not now. Now all he could do was shiver.
    â€œYour own damn fault,” Anderson said. “I told you to stay home.” All the same, she was glad Peter had come. If he hadn’t, Anderson might have worked right through until nightfall . . . and the idea of coming to in the dark, with that thing bulking close by . . . that idea didn’t fetch her.
    She looked back from the path. The height gave her a more complete view of the thing. It jutted from the ground at a slight angle, she saw. Her impression that the leading edge had a slight curve recurred.
    A plate, that’s what I thought when I first dug around it with my fingers. A steel plate, not a dinner-plate, I thought, but maybe even then, with so little of it sticking out of the ground, it was really a dinner-plate I was thinking of. Or a saucer.
    A flying fucking saucer.
4
    Back at the house, she showered and changed, using one of the Maxi-Pads even though the heavy menstrual flow already appeared to be lessening. Then she fixed herself a huge supper of canned baked beans and knockwurst. But she found herself too tired to do much more than pick at it. She put the remains—more than half—down for Peter and went over to her rocker by the window. The thesis she had been reading was still on the floor beside the chair, her place marked with a torn-off matchbook cover. Her notepad was beside it. She picked it up, turned to a fresh page, and began to sketch the thing in the woods as she had seen it when she took that last look back.
    She was no great shakes with a pen unless it was words she was making, but she had some small sketching talent. This sketch went very slowly, however, not just because she wanted it to be as exact as she could make it but because she was so tired. To make matters worse, Peter came over and nuzzled her hand, wanting to be patted.
    She stroked Peter’s head absently, erasing a jag his nose had put into the horizon-line of her sketch. “Yeah, you’re a good dog, great dog, go check the mail, why don’t you?”
    Peter trotted across the living room and nosed the screen door open. Anderson went back to work on her sketch, glancing up once to see Peter do his world-famous canine mail-retrieval trick. He put his left forepaw up on the mailbox post and then began to swipe at the door of the box. Joe Paulson, the postman, knew about Peter and always left it ajar. He got the door down, then lost his balance before he could hook the mail out with his paw. Anderson winced a little—until this year, Peter had never lost his balance. Getting the mail had been his pièce de résistance, better than playing dead Viet Cong and much better than anything mundane like sitting up or “speaking” for a dog biscuit. It wowed everyone who saw him do it, and Peter knew it . . . but these days it was a painful ritual to watch. It made Anderson feel the way she imagined she would feel if she saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as they were now, trying to do one of their old dance routines.
    The dog managed to get up on the post again, and this