After Ilse died he had sold the sheep. It had seemed like the only obvious thing in that whole spring, when he was standing in rooms not knowing why he had walked into them. The sale barn in Ogallala sent a truck, and Fly stood by the loading chute with her whole body shaking, because sheep were going somewhere and she was not being asked to take them. When the truck pulled out she followed it to the cattle guard and stood there for an hour. He had carried her back to the house like a child, forty pounds of dog with her heart going like a sewing machine against his wrist, and it was the closest he had come in that whole time to crying, and he had not cried then either.
So she was a dog without a job, and a dog without a job will make one up. That was what Arne told himself. Since the sheep went she had herded the barn cats, and his pickup when he backed it out of the shed, and him, tight on his left heel from the house to the barn and back, and when he went somewhere she did not think he ought to go she would get in front of him and lie down flat and stare at his boots until he stepped over her.
And she had been strange about the barn for two years. That was the other thing. Since that March. She would go in, most days, if he told her to, but she went in the way a person goes into a hospital room, carefully, looking at the corners. She would not lie in the straw in the alley the way she used to. She would not go near the third stall on the east side at all.
He knew why. He did not want to think about why. He had decided not to think about why some time ago and had found that if you decided it firmly enough you could go most of a day at a stretch without thinking about it. So when he went out at six to check the heifers in the gray, wet, roaring dark, and Fly came with him as far as the corner of the machine shed and then stopped dead in the snow and would not come one step farther, he only looked back at her and said, "Fine. Suit yourself," and went on.
She barked. Once, sharp, the way she would bark at a ewe that had turned to face her. Then she ran around in front of him, cut him off in the snow between the shed and the barn, and dropped flat.
"Fly. Get out of it."
She did not get out of it. She stared at his boots.
"Go on to the house, then. Go on." He stepped around her. She came up off the ground and was in front of him again, low, her eyes on him, and this time she did something she had not done to him in all the years he had known her, which was that she reached out and took the cuff of his coveralls in her teeth, very gently, the way she would take a lamb by the wool, and pulled.
He stopped. He stood there in the snow with his dog holding onto his pant leg and the wind trying to take his hat and he said, much more quietly than he meant to, "I know. I know, girl. But I got heifers in there."