Though it was cool in the morning, it got hot quickly. Josh and Danny peeled off their flannel shirts by the time they reached Kremmling Pit, and it was hot and sweaty every inch of the way down to Camden and back to Spearfish Lake, even with all the windows and doors open in the cab of the 601. A shower would feel wonderful, Josh thought as he shut down the SD-38s back in the yard at Spearfish Lake. Even better, a jump in the lake, down at the beach.

He was in his pickup, heading home, when he came up with an even better idea. He needed to talk with Tiffany, and Mike had a pool in his back yard; he had a standing invitation, and he could kill two birds with one stone.

He made a quick stop at home, taking a quick shower -- there was no point in making Mike's pool filter work too hard, after all -- and pulled on his swim suit, then pulled on a clean pair of pants and a t-shirt. As he headed for the door, his mother stopped him. "We're having liver and onions tonight," she said. "Do you want to stay for dinner?"

"I better not," he said. "I've got to talk to Tiffany, and then Mark." That might be far enough away to avoid the smell of the fried liver, the absolute bottom of his list of least favorite foods. Well, no, there was one even lower; there had been that lutefisk supper at the Lutheran Church that time . . . "I'll grab something at the Frostee Freeze."

"When'll you be back?"

"It sorta depends," he said. "Before dark, for sure."

"I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to congratulate you," she said. "I'm proud that you made the engineer roster. That's going to make a real nice summer job for you."

"It really should be a good job," he said, not missing her subtle hint at all. "Hey, look, I've got to run."

"Have a good time," she said.

There was no way that it wasn't going to turn into an issue before long, he thought as he drove away in his pickup. Well, maybe it won't have to be one for long. At least, he could hope it wouldn't.

A couple of chintzy hamburgers from the Frostee Freeze, eaten while driving out the state road to Mike's didn't add up to a supper, but they would keep his appetite down for a while. Maybe he could raid the refrigerator when he got home, if the smell of the liver had died down.

Mike and Kirsten were out on the patio when he drove up; the three kids were in the pool, with Susan, the youngest at three, wearing water wings. As Josh walked closer, he could see that wasn't all there was in the pool: there were seven puppy heads in the midst of the commotion, too, and Bullet, the mother of five of them, sat on the deck, watching, still damp. So much for any concerns about overworking Mike's pool filter.

"How are you doing, Josh?" Kirsten asked.

"Oh, pretty good," he replied.

"Mike told me about your promotion," she said. "Congratulations."

"It makes things a little different," he said.

"Hey, the grill's still warming up," Mike told him. "We're going to have some steaks. We're sort of celebrating a little, and we can celebrate your promotion along with it. You want me to throw on one for you? We've got enough."

"I just had a couple of hamburgers, but a steak would taste just fine," he replied. "What are you celebrating?"

"The guys got visas to go and look for Henry," Kirsten said, a tear in her eye. "After all these years."

Almost twenty years before, Kirsten's fiance, Henry Toivo, the namesake of her nine-year old son, had disappeared in the jungles of Vietnam. Though she'd been living with Mike for fifteen years, they'd never married, since Kirsten couldn't quite let him go -- which was why the kids all had the last name of Langenderfer-McMahon.

For ten years, a group of Vietnam veterans from Spearfish Lake had made plans to go and search for Toivo or his remains, as soon as they could get into the country. Mark was one of them; so was Gil Evachevski, Danny's dad, an ex-green beret master sergeant.

"You mean it?" Josh said. "When do they go?"

"Not for a while, yet," Mike said. First, it's the rainy season there, not a real good time to go poking around, and they want it dry. More importantly, they're trying to get ironclad assurances that if Binky goes with them, they'll let her come back."

In 1978, Nguyen Binh Ky had climbed aboard a crowded, leaking fishing boat to escape Vietnam. After an improbable series of circumstances landed her in Albany River, the next town down the state road, Steve Augsberg, a high school pal of Henry's and one of the Vietnam veterans planning on going on the Toivo expedition searched her out, in hopes of improving on his smattering of Vietnamese; it might help if the time ever came, to keep a local interpreter honest, if nothing else. He wound up marrying her; she wound up in the real estate business, and was enormously successful at it. Until now, she had utterly refused to go back to Vietnam, under any circumstances, but the falling of the Berlin wall, followed by the fall of the red flag, had apparently thawed her reluctance, too.

"Things have sure changed," Josh said.

"They sure have," Mike agreed. "The other thing is that if it drags on too long, Rod won't be available until next spring." Gil had long harbored the idea that anything they found out about Henry Toivo was going to involve digging, and his brother-in-law, Rod Matson, while not a Vietnam veteran, was a professor of archoeology. "To top it off," Mike continued," I'm thinking about going along, too, so there's a visa application in the works for me. We've waited a long time for this, but the door looks like it's opening, and we can wait long enough to do it right."

"When did all this come down?"

"Most of it today, and nothing's final. The phones have been hot all day, and the vets held an emergency meeting a couple hours ago, where they worked that much out. I was there, too. That's why supper's running a little late."

"Well, congratulations," Josh said. "I know this is big news for you, especially you, Kirsten."

"It's been worth waiting for," Kirsten said. "It's been so hard, not knowing. Don't say anything to the kids anything about it, though. Tiffany knows, but we want to be careful how we break it to Henry."

"I can understand," he said. "I won't say anything."

Mike looked at the grill. "The charcoal's about ready. You like a beer?"

Josh shook his head. "Actually, I sort of came out to borrow your pool, but I don't think there's enough room there for me."

"Oh, go on," Mike said. "It's going to be a few minutes, anyway."

Josh didn't need to be asked a second time; in seconds, he'd peeled off his t-shirt and pants, and was in the pool with the kids and puppies.

It was pretty wild. The puppies were good swimmers, and were enjoying it. The two older pups, Boxcar and Sidetrack, were quite a bit bigger than Bullet's little ones, but they fit in well. They were getting to be good-looking dogs, and Sidetrack, especially, was turning into a classic looking husky.

Boxcar and Sidetrack were a gift from Greg Mears. At some race the past winter, probably the Warsaw Run, somehow or other one of his prized purebred Siberians had been mounted. By what dog, they weren't sure, but from looking at the pups, it had to have had a lot of husky in him. More than show dogs, Greg's Siberians were pretty good runners, but he didn't want to have non-purebreds around, so he'd spread the six pups around to some of his musher friends. Josh had the feeling that sooner or later, Greg was going to be sorry about that.

It was too early to tell about the younger pups, yet, but four of the five looked like they'd have potential. The fifth one, the most playful one of the lot, was turning into a pretty dog, but with a much thinner coat than the other four. That would probably rule him out as a sled dog, although someone was clearly going to have a great pet. Tiffany had named him "Skosh," mostly because he was going to need about that much more hair.

"I saw you out with the pups yesterday," Josh said. "They looked like they were having fun."

"Thery're really good little puppies," Tiffany laughed. "We all saw you out on the engines. "When are you going to take me for a ride?"

"I'll get it in sometime," Josh promised. "Probably not real soon, until I've been doing it a while, and I'll have to ask Mr. Ellsberg before I can do it."

"That'll be fun," Tiffany smiled. "Skosh, no!" She had on a red and white striped string bikini that must have weighed all of an ounce wringing wet, and the dog was trying to use the top to climb up to lick her face, almost taking it off in the process, not that it covered much of anything, anyway, and not that Tiffany really minded. Josh knew that neither she, nor the rest of the family, had much body modesty, and he'd been in their hot tub naked with all of them. But, that bikini made Tiffany look more naked than if she really had been naked. Not for the first time, he resolved that as she grew older, he was going to have to watch his step.

Though it looked like play, and, in fact, was play, messing around with the puppies in the pool was actually a part of their training, as well, part of what made puppy training fun. Though the swimming was part of it, the swimming was good exercise that wouldn't overheat them, with their heavy fur on the hot day. More important, especially for the younger pups but still important for the older ones, was the having fun. In one of the videotapes they had, there was a clip of Susan Butcher doing much the same thing, and they'd took her words to heart: "The puppies have to learn that the time they spend with people is the funnest part of the day." When they would learn to run in harness, later, they had to see it as fun, not as work; it was the big hurdle they'd always had to get over with adult dogs, and some couldn't make it.

They didn't get much chance to talk; with all of the kids and dogs, there was too much splashing going on, but playing with the pups was the most sheer fun that Josh had had in a while. It was all too quickly that Mike called that the steaks were about done, and it was time to get out of the pool. Josh and Tiffany had a hard time getting Bullet and the pups out of the pool, not to mention Henry and Susan; Skosh especially wanted more play, and kept jumping back in the pool. It wasn't an easy chore to get all the pups, plus Bullet, over to a holding pen out by the barn, but by the time Josh was dried off, the steaks were ready, and the clan gathered around the table, out in the yard.

"Tiffany, are you going to take the puppies back up to Mark's after we eat?" Mike asked as they started eating. Dogs, after all, were a safe subject to talk about under the circumstances.

"If they've dried off pretty good," she said. "They get so messy if we walk up the road while they're wet."

"They sure like their swimming," Kirsten commented.

"They're good little dogs," Tiffany agreed. "Josh, do you think maybe this weekend we could take some of the older dogs swimming? Maybe put them in the dog box and take them down to the lake?"

"Unless something comes up, I don't see why not," Josh said. "I need to get in more time with them, and the puppies, too. I don't think we'd better take them to the beach, though, but maybe that boat launch up the highway a ways."

"I've been taking some of the dogs down to the river for a swim," she reported. "I let them tow me on my bike, but about three dogs is about all I can take with the bike, but I can't keep a regular rotation, since I have to use the leaders too much, and I can't get Jack to lead for me very well."

"He doesn't lead very well for me, either," Josh. "He could stand more work on that. He's really only a swing dog that'll lead if he absolutely has to."

"How about the new dogs? What should I do with them?"

Josh shook his head. "For the moment, just feed them. It probably wouldn't hurt if they got a little exercise. Did your dad tell you about the deal on that?"

"He told me that Mr. Bergen gave them to you."

"He did," Josh nodded. If Tiffany didn't know the details, she could find out about them some time when the younger kids weren't around. "But I want to leave the door open for him to change his mind, at least for a few days. If I don't hear anything, I'll call him up in a couple of weeks, and check with him to make sure. If he doesn't want them back then, well, we're going to have to do some thinking about what I'm going to do with them. If nothing else, if someone wants to start a new team, we could give them a real good start."

"I was talking with Dave Stitely down at the service station today," Mike commented. "He'd like to get started, but he can't this year."

Josh shrugged. "Well, if we can't find someone who wants a whole team, then it's time to do some dog trading. There's two or three dogs there I wouldn't mind keeping, but the rest, and some of the others like Wolf, well, I'd trade two or three of them to get one good dog. That'd get me back down to about fourteen or fifteen adult dogs, maybe even less, which would be enough to fill out Tiffany's team, and still have an extra dog or two. If this race in Michigan comes off, then I'd probably want to start with twelve dogs, and that'd mean I could start with the best twelve, not just anybody who can get his eyes open."

"Do you know which dogs you'd want to trade?" Mike said. "I could stand an extra pound puppy or two, maybe more if I decide to do the Run this winter."

Josh shook his head. "I haven't had time to figure it out yet," he said. "Especially the new dogs. Tiffany, if you would, try to work with them a little in the next few days, and see what you think. I sort of promised Dennis that I'd keep Magic. She's not the world's greatest leader, but I think she'd make a good swing dog with Jack. Between them, they might add up to a lead dog, or at least the two of them could push Crosstie a bit."

It was an irritating problem. Crosstie was a great dog, friendly, and intelligent. She took commands very well; Josh could take a Crosstie-led team, and write his name on the airstrip with the sled tracks. But her natural trail pace was slower than Josh liked. In front of a fast team, she would be hurried along, and everything went better. But, in front of a slow team, she slowed down, and he'd had a slow team the winter before.

"That'd probably work," Tiffany said. "Maybe I can take the ATV and hook up some five-dog teams. I'll mix some of the new dogs with some of the good ones, and see how they work."

"Yeah, that's sort of what I had in mind," Josh said. "Maybe I can get up early Saturday and Sunday mornings, before it gets real hot, and do the same thing. But, I want your opinion too. As hot as it's been, we can't really work the dogs enough to see how they'll do at longer distances, but we should be able to get an idea of what the dogs are like. Look, with my new job, I'm just not going to be able to get out and work with the dogs as much as I'd hoped. That's going to put more load on you, especially with the new dogs."

"I don't mind," she said. "It's what we agreed on."

"Well, I mind," Josh said. "I don't want you burning out on it, especially with puppy training on top of it. Look, with the exception of the new dogs, I've got a pretty good idea of the dogs I don't intend to race again unless I absolutely have to. I want you to work up a list, too. We'll compare lists, and we just won't work with the dogs that aren't going to be run next winter. That'll keep you from having to work with them all."

"It's still going to be a lot of guessing about the new dogs."

"True," Josh said. "If I wind up keeping the new dogs, I'll try to get a little history about them from Dennis. That may help some. But, except for maybe one or two, well, he wasn't that much in front of me when we got back to Spearfish Lake last winter, and I know he'd been training better than I was."