Free Angus and Sadie by Cynthia Voigt

went more slowly once it entered the cool, shady woods. In the cart, however, the two dogs and the picnic basket and the bucket and the empty cartons bounced even higher than before. Insects buzzed around them, but the noise of the tractor warned birds and animals away. The tractor lurched through the woods for a long time, climbing until it came out onto a rocky hillside.
    Missus drove up to the top of the hill and stopped. She turned off the motor.
    For a minute, in that sudden silence, Sadie and Angus couldn’t hear anything. Everybody stayed still for that minute, Missus on the tractor seat with her hands in her lap, listening, Angus staring at Missus, waiting, and Sadie hearing her own heartbeat slow down again. Then Sadie started to hear everything.
    She heard the big machines at work harvesting the fields, so far away they were just a soft humming in the distance, as friendly as the wind. She heard birds chirping songs and insects buzzing. She heard how the breeze rustled through the grass before it rattled its way through the bushes. And stretching out behind every other sound, Sadie could hear the deep silence of the boulders that pushed up through the ground, up into the air.
    Then she heard Missus speak softly. “All right,” Missus said, and she climbed down from the tractor seat. “Angus, Come!” she said. “Sadie, Come!”
    The two dogs clambered over the side of the cart, leaping down onto the ground. Sadie was so glad to be back on the ground she ran in two big circles, and then two more. Angus was not so silly. He poked all around, checking things out, sniffing for smells that could warn of trouble or danger. Missus reached into the cart for the bucket. “All right,” she said again. “You two have a good time. I’ve got work to do,” and she walked away across the hillside, then crouched down on her heels. Her fingers got to work, pulling the blueberries off their stems and dropping them into the bucket.
    I have work to do, too , Angus said, and headed back down toward the woods.
    I don’t , said Sadie, and she was not a bit sorry about that.
    Sadie looked around her, and sniffed the air. It smelled of grass and dirt, trees and undergrowth in the woods, and a delicate, sharp, sweet something. She raised her nose and smelled old, faded sheep smells, wool and manure, and then she noticed things moving through the air just over the ground, little things with wings, bigger than insects, much bigger than flies and wasps and hornets and bees, but much, much smaller than birds. She noticed all the different shapes of rocks, some tall and huge, some low and flat. She noticed the clear sky. She noticed everything.

    Angus had disappeared into the woods, so Sadie went to join Missus. Missus reached down into the grass to pick berries, and then dropped them into her bucket. When the basket was full, she went back to the tractor and gently poured the berries into one of the cartons. She gave one little round berry to Sadie, who liked being fed a treat even though she didn’t particularly care for the treat itself. But the blueberry tasted like that delicate, sharp, sweet smell, so now she knew what it was. She also knew she didn’t want any more, so she didn’t follow Missus back to the field. Instead, Sadie thought maybe she should go into the woods. That was what Angus had done and Angus did things right.
    Off in the woods, Angus barked. Sadie wondered what he was chasing after, or chasing off, and decided she’d rather explore everything in the field, in the scrub grasses, and all around the rocks. A crow sat on one of the rocks and Sadie ran up to it, Bark! Bark! When the crow flew off— Caw! Caw! —she ran barking after it, just for fun. You couldn’t catch birds, not if you were a dog. She knew that. If you were a cat, if you were Fox or Snake, you sometimes did, although you could never catch a crow. But Sadie wasn’t a cat. It was