Like a shaken bed sheet the landscape takes her with its ripples from within reach to distances unbelievably far away. Lily is a bounding set of ears zigzagging through dips and valleys, then a speck, then gone. Then I am standing in the woods with Hershey yelping and pleading with me to throw her ball.

Lily!

Bandit follows like a brick on the end of his leash. Lily!

Back home I shove Hershey inside along with the brick and run back out to yell helplessly for Lily.

I find her tennis ball all covered in spit where she dropped it.

Lily!

I have to go find her! Following me to the driveway Jerry says, I have my keys.

What, I yell. I get in my truck and as I head up the road Jerry is standing with his keys in his hand.

I have no luck.

I run back into the woods where Jerry is riding the quad and looking looking looking at trees and stones and leaves and fallen branches, but no Lily.

I just can't drive Route 34, I tell him. I don't want to see her dead on the ground.

I'll go, he tells me.

No! What if she recognizes the truck and runs to you? Then she is definitely dead.

Don't you think that's a little unreasonable?

Nope.

He leaves. I wander in the field behind my house and cross over a tree trunk that crashed down a couple years ago. I pass a huge stone leaning into the hillside. I could crawl beneath it like a ten, but I look at the smooth dirt underneath and wonder what sleeps there.

Lily!

Old stonewalls and a shallow with smoothed stones that fills with water in the spring. A hillside where someone once plowed and harvested, but only a sea of ferns splits the soil today. It tickles my knees. Field grasses and sticks are a spongy net grabbing my shoes. Panic is getting bigger like the shadow of something looming. Lily!

I stand desperately on an outcropping of stone and whistle as long as I can hold the note. I turn my head and watch for movement. Lily!

Where does she go?

I move along an overgrown path where tractors must have dragged bundled hay and supplies and I reach another rise and another panorama filled with tangled growth.

I start home.

Ahead of me in the cage of limbs from the big fallen tree I see Lily's ears. She approaches gently and stays in the branches like she is hiding.

I go closer and she folds up in the tall grass. Did she get hit and is she hurt?

No. I think she sensed my distress and just plunked down and looked up at me.

With her red collar in my right hand I run home with her and wonder why she is wet, and where she had gone.