Free The Restoration Artist by Lewis DeSoto

modelling clay to make a copy of an oyster shell, which I’d mistaken for the genuine article. What had become of that little sculpture? He’d been so proud of it.
    I picked up a couple of the shells and put them in my pocket. By now I was closer to what I’d thought was a white rowboat on the shoreline, but it struck me that the shape was wrong, and it was too small to be a boat. A person, I thought. But, coming closer, I could see it was a large dog, a Labrador breed, its colour somewhere between the beige of the sand and the white of the oyster shells. It was standing immobile, staring straight ahead.
    I veered away up the beach, keeping a cautious eye on the dog until I was on the other side of it. I’m not afraid of dogs, but a past experience had made me wary of them.
    As a boy of ten, I’d once been riding down a quiet street lined with houses behind leafy gardens—I can’t recollect the circumstances or who the bike had belonged to, maybe it was one of those unsuccessful occasions when the Guild had tried to place me in a foster home—when a large Doberman had come streaking out from an open gate and charged at me. There had been no time to react or register anything other than the bared teeth and the low rumbling growl in the dog’s throat as it leaped up and fastened its jaws on my thigh, pulling me from the bike. Before I knew it the bike was skidding across the sidewalk, I was on my back and the dog was standing over me. I could smell its foul breath and in its eyes I saw a kind of insane rage that terrified me.
    In the next instant a man was there, swinging a garden rake down across the dog’s back. With a howl the dog raced off down the street. I was basically unhurt, but so shaken that I couldn’t speak. The man took me into the house and gave me a glass of milk and calmed me down. I don’t remember anything else from that day. Just the dog and the man and the glass of milk.
    Now I stopped some distance away and looked back at the dog, intrigued by its behaviour. It hadn’t even looked at me. The waves were washing around its legs yet it seemed planted in the sand, not even lifting its chin when a crest of foam surged up around its chest, all its attention focused out to sea.
    I followed the direction of the dog’s fixed stare, but saw nothing, no bird nor boat nor swimmer, not even a piece of driftwood. Just the ocean and the sky and clouds. What had caught the dog’s attention? I clapped my hands together and whistled. The dog ignored me. Its peculiar intensity and stillness was unsettling, eerie.
    It barked, once, like a shout of recognition. And there, from behind a break in the clouds, the moon was suddenly visible in the blueness of the sky, almost full, low and white and crisp as the bleached oyster shells on the beach. The dog and the moon brought back a memory, of a Corot painting in the Musée Dubourg.
La Bête
it was called. A white bull standing on a riverbank in the morning light with its head raised to the dawning day. I remembered how the painting had touched me, as if it showed some spark of self-consciousness in the animal, some yearning after the mystery that is in all things.
    The day I’d first seen that painting was also the day I met Claudine. Ironically, it was also two days before I was scheduled to leave Paris.
    Paris had been a failure, I’d realized by then. I had no gallery, no friends—even my neighbour from the Hôtel Mistral had gone on to better things—no prospects, and if I was honest with myself, the paintings I was doing were not very good. So I’d bought my ticket back to New York on the SS Volendam. From there I would take a train across the country to Vancouver and try to start over. Maybe look for a real job.
    The visit to see the Corot was a farewell of sorts. After all, it was through his paintings that I’d come to Paris in the first place. A light drizzle had filled the September air as I made my way from La Muette station. Under the leafy