Free Angus and Sadie by Cynthia Voigt Page A

easy for birds to fly away from dogs, but Sadie still liked to run as fast as she could after the bird, as if she might catch it.
    The sun rose higher in the sky, and the day grew hotter. When Missus brought the bucket back to the tractor cart again, she called both dogs. “Angus, Come!” she called loudly, toward the woods. “Sadie, Come!” she called more quietly, because she could see Sadie with her nose stuck deep into the long grass. “You need water and so do I,” Missus told the dogs. She set down two bowls that she filled with water from a jug, and then she lifted the jug to her mouth and drank, too.
    I needed water , Sadie said, and Missus knew it .
    There were deer in the woods , Angus reported, and then lapped away at his bowl, five or six times. Big ones and little ones. I almost caught a raccoon . He lapped some more. I saw a fox, too, with cubs . Before Sadie had time to say anything, he told her, I didn’t see any bears, but I smelled one. I think that’s what it was .
    What do bears smell like? Sadie wondered.
    You don’t want to know , Angus told her. He didn’t like to think of what might happen to Sadie if she ran into a bear. Or a raccoon, for that matter. Stay away from raccoons, too , he warned Sadie. You better stay out of the woods .
    All right .
    Missus finished her water and the dogs finished theirs, so she went back to her berry gathering. The dogs sat in the shade of the tractor, and Angus stretched out on the cool grass to sleep.
    Sadie didn’t want to sleep. She heard Missus in the bushes, talking softly, maybe talking to the blueberries as she dropped them into her bucket. She heard Angus snuffling in his sleep, dreaming. She heard the breeze ruffling along the top of the grass. She saw some more of the little flying things, hovering there, in the breeze just above the grass.
    They didn’t fly like insects, busily hurrying someplace. They didn’t fly the way birds flew, soaring up, sweeping down, gliding across. Instead, they fluttered from anywhere to somewhere else, as if they didn’t care where they were or where they were going. Sadie went over to see them close up. They didn’t fly away from her like birds and insects did, or circle around her like the cats did. They just hovered, floating up, floating down.
    When Sadie crept even closer, they still didn’t pay any attention to her. So she jumped right into the middle of them and ran with them through the grass. Her feet ran on the grassy ground, and their wings fluttered in the air.

    Sadie turned around to follow another bunch, running to catch up with them, jumping through the grass. She couldn’t tell one from the other, and they didn’t smell at all as she moved among them, going first after one, then another, then another and another. It felt wonderful, twisting and running, jumping and turning in the sunny air. She wondered if the little flying things were afraid of her, but she didn’t think so. She wondered if they were playing with her, but she didn’t think so. She wondered if they even noticed she was there, or if they knew she wouldn’t hurt them.
    Missus told Mister about it that evening, after they had rumbled and bumped their way back home late in the afternoon, and the blueberries had been washed and put away in the icebox for the next day’s jam making. Mister was showered clean after his day in the hayfields, and the animals lay resting, the dogs on the floor, Patches on the windowsill behind the sink. Missus and Mister were eating supper. Missus said, “It was like she was dancing. Dancing with moths.”
    â€œShe was trying to catch them,” Mister decided.
    No I wasn’t .
    â€œNo she wasn’t,” Missus said. “Most of the time, her mouth wasn’t even open.”
    â€œThen what?” Mister asked. “If she won’t chase a Frisbee or a ball, you have to admit she has no fetching instinct. So