I love stories about dogs. I love McGuane’s dogs. Like in his novel Panama, the one he can’t name until he does name her. We get a few men in this story. A businessman who sends another man, his assistant, to an old man a good drive away to buy the old man’s pointer. There’s something mystical about the dog and the old man. It’s like the old man and the dog are con-men. Maybe. There’s a question of a scheme—the old man and the dog knowing the kind of person who wants to buy the dog and the kind of person who gets sent to buy the dog. A couple easy marks. Or maybe, more than anything, it’s just about the love between the old man and the dog. I just love to see a dog run.
First published in Shenandoah in 1986. Collected in To Skin a Cat, Vintage, 1986; also in Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories, Knopf, 2018
A Personal Anthology 