Josh felt better after he'd had a shower, and got clean clothes on. It had been a long week, but K-Pit was tied up until 7:00 Monday morning. He'd have a whole two days to catch up. He wanted to spend some time with the dogs Saturday and Sunday, partly to let Tiffany have a break, but partly because he suspected that as soon as the closing on the lot went through, he wouldn't be able to work with them much.

Their topless friend had been out sunbathing when they came back through Warsaw, but while Danny was watching, Josh only caught a glimpse, because he had been checking out the mobile home. It was indeed a "For Sale" sign he'd seen in the window. At the speed they'd been going, it was difficult to tell much more; there was no telling what kind of shape it was in, but clearly, it was worth a run to Warsaw for a closer look. Warsaw was probably the best place locally to go looking, anyway; a lot of the town had been burned out in the fire nine years before, and there'd been a lot of mobile homes around while the place got rebuilt, and more when the new plant expanded. They had been steadily replaced by new construction over the years, but there were still several around, and probably any for sale there would be cheap.

He was headed for the edge of town when the thought crossed his mind that maybe Phil might like to go along for the ride. When Brandy wasn't around, he tended to be at loose ends. He didn't have many friends in Spearfish Lake besides the Evachevskis and Josh; he'd probably appreciate the attention, and Josh would appreciate a second opinion. He'd already asked a lot of Mark. He turned the truck around, and headed back for Phil and Brandy's house.

"I heard about your promotion," Phil said when he met Josh at the door. "Congratulations."

"I really wasn't expecting it," Josh said. "But it changes things a little. Anyway, I was wondering if you were doing anything tonight."

"Not really," Phil replied. "You got anything in mind?"

"Yeah, I need to run up to Warsaw. I've got something I want to look at, and maybe have a talk with Fred Linder, as long as I'm there. You like to ride along?"

"Sure, I've got nothing better to do," he said. "Let me get some shoes and a shirt on."

A couple minutes later, they walked out to the truck. "What's the dog box for?" Phil asked.

"I had to move some dogs earlier this week," Josh explained. "It's a long story, but maybe I had a team given to me. Tiffany and I want to take some of the older dogs out for a swim tomorrow, so I just left it on the truck."

"What's this about a team being given to you?" Phil asked as they got in the truck.

As they drove out of town, Josh went over the story about Dennis Bergen and his fight with his wife. He'd had to tell the story several times now, and he'd gotten it down to a couple of paragraphs. "So, anyway," he summed up. "I'll give him a chance to figure out if he wants his dogs back. I can wait a while. If he doesn't, well, I guess I'll do a little dogtrading. That's what I want to see Fred about, to see if he's got something he wants to trade."

"He's the fire chief up there, right? I think I met him the winter before last."

"Yeah, he was just getting into dogs then," Josh said. "He ran back behind me last winter, but I know he's got some good pups coming along."

"What's this we're going up to see?"

Josh decided not to go into the background of why, but said, "I'm buying a lot out by Mark's. I plan on putting something on it to live, and this morning, I saw a mobile home up there with a `For Sale' sign on it."

"You want to watch out for them," Phil said. "Brandy lived in one for a couple years while we were at Houghton, down in `Mistake by the Lake', we called it. I was always fixing something, either on hers, or on some friends."

"I knew that," Josh said. "I figured maybe you could tell what to look out for."

"You get a decent one, one that's been cared for, it'll last pretty good," Phil explained. "But the problem is, the damn things are built out of cardboard, well, particle board, anyway, and the purchasing agents are out to save a nickle on everything they can, so a lot of the stuff is shit to begin with."

"Well, I'm not planning on living in it forever," Josh said. "I've kind of got the idea of putting up a house over the next few years, as I get the time and the money."

"You're going to be working all sorts of hours, and not jack shit in the winter, right?"

"That about sums it up."

Phil shook his head. "You want to think about that a bit. You're not going to have much time in the summer, and how are you going to like being out nailing stuff together with six feet of snow and at twenty below in the winter? That could get to be a pain in the ass, all the way around."

"I hadn't thought about that," Josh said, dismayed.

"It's not undoable," Phil said. "There are ways. There's some kit houses and modulars out now that are pretty good. If you can get a halfway decent mobile home, just live in it a few years, stick some money back, and when you've got some cash built up, go find a contractor that deals in those sort of things."

Josh shrugged. "I don't know how you'd go about that."

"Well," Phil said, as they passed Busted Axle Road on their way to Warsaw, "You'll have the time to find out. What ever happened on the ten-dog deal, anyway?"

They talked about dogs for a while, and gradually, the subject shifted over to Phil's travels. He'd had a lot of adventures, around the world, and his stories were always good. The miles to Warsaw flew by, much faster than they did on K-Pit. "There's one we ought to stop and look at," Phil said, pointing at a mobile home along the side of the road. It too was sitting unsteadly on wheels, with a "For Sale" sign on it. The railroad tracks were out of sight here, and Josh hadn't seen it.

"Let's go look at the other one, first." Josh suggested.

"Better than that, let's just drive around town a little first," Phil replied. "If there's two, there might be more."

A quick pass through town didn't reveal any more, but a stop to look at the community bulletin board at the grocery store told of yet another one. "We ought to be able to find something here," Phil said. "If there's this many, the prices might be pretty decent."

The first place they went was the one Josh had seen by the tracks. The owner was home, and Phil and Josh checked it over, while the owner went to get a ladder so they could climb inside. The interior looked pretty beat-up to Josh; there were some broken windows, and some drawers were missing. Phil went right to the bathroom and looked it over, frowning. He bounced around on the floor a bit, and gave a big shake of the head to Josh. They walked back down the narrow hall, stopping in the rooms along the way; Phil opened doors, giving things a once-over. Finally, they went back out to the living room, and climbed down the ladder. Once back on the ground, Josh asked, "What have you got to have for it?"

"I'd take a thousand," the owner said.

Josh glanced at Phil; he looked pretty negative. "Look, I want to look around a bit," he said. "This is the first place I've been. Give me a couple days."

Back in the truck, Josh said, "All right, what did you see that I didn't?"

"It'd do, I suppose, if we can't find something better," Phil said. "The big thing is that the bathroom floor is starting to rot. That's the first thing you have to look for. We had to throw a piece of plywood on Brandy's just to be able to use the john. They build these things, get the flooring down, then put the walls in over the flooring, so it'd be a bitch to have to tear the floorboards up and replace them. Besides that, it's only got a 15-amp breaker panel, which is cutting it pretty tight. On top of that, the furnace is pretty old. There are usually only two kinds you see in mobile homes, and one of them, the heat exchanger goes out after about ten or fifteen years, and you're out fifteen hundred bucks for a new furnace. That one has to be getting due."

"Jeez, I'm glad I brought you along," Josh said, shaking his head. "All I saw was the busted glass and the missing drawers, and the scratches and dents."

"Really cosmetic stuff. It'd take a couple hundred buck to fix the worst part of it," Phil said. "I didn't see any storm windows, either. You'd expect them to be in a closet, or something. You about have to have them unless you want your heating bill to get crazy, and they're not cheap. These things don't have much insulation, so it's going to be bad enough as it is."

The second mobile home, the one they'd seen the ad for on the grocery store bulletin board, was sitting on blocks out beyond the north side of town. No one was home, but a quick walk around it left Phil looking pretty negative, and Josh thought he could see why. Phil confirmed it: "No axles," he said. "You'd have to hire someone to move it, and it might cost more to move it than it would to buy it in the first place."

"I pretty well figured I'd have to do it, anyway."

"It's a hell of a lot cheaper if it already has axles and wheels and tires under it," Phil said.

Both of them shook their heads, and got back in the truck, to go and look at the one they'd seen on their way into town. It was a little smaller than the first two -- only twelve by fifty -- and at first glance, appeared to be in pretty good shape. Phil went throught it carefully, and by now, Josh had a little better idea of what to look for. It wasn't in the greatest shape, but there was evidence of care. It only had one bedroom, but it was a little bigger than the two in the first one.

"New furnace?" Phil asked the owner at one point.

"Winter before last," the man said. "I gotta tell you, though, the water heater's shot. We just put up with it, since we were getting ready to move into the new place."

The three of them walked down the hall to the bathroom. Inside were a small washer and dryer. Phil bounced on the bathroom floor a couple of times, then smiled. "Seems pretty decent,"he summed up. "Appliances go with it?"

"Yeah," the man said. "We got bigger ones to go in the house. These are OK, but the dryer's pretty slow."

"OK," Josh said. "What do you want for it?"

"I'll take five hundred for it, but mostly, I want it out of my yard," he man said. Josh glanced at Phil, who nodded with a smile.

"Well, I can give you a hundred to hold it," Josh said. "I haven't quite settled things on the lot yet, but should this week. Then, I'll have to see about moving it."

"You know anybody that's got a farm tractor?" the man suggested. "This would be too big a load for a pickup, but we moved it here with a tractor. All you need is a two-inch ball. Hell, I've got one I'll give you."

Josh shook his head. "I can come up with a tractor," he said. "But I've got to take it down near Spearfish Lake. I don't know about taking it down the state road at tractor speeds with all the summer weekend traffic."

"That would be a problem," the man admitted. "You could move it in the wee small hours, though, after the drunks have gone home. Look, I don't mind it sitting here another week or two, just so I know it's going to be out of here."

"Fine with me," Josh said, reaching for his wallet.

"That was a deal and a half," Phil said as they got back out on the road. "He just wanted to get rid of it. It's worth a lot more."

"How about that water heater?" Josh asked.

"Couple of hundred bucks and an afternoon's worth of plumbing," Phil said. "I'll probably be gone by then, but any jackleg plumber can deal with it. Mark can probably do it. Just as well, anyway. The one in there is a little small, but there's space for a bigger one. It's got a new gas furnace, and the better kind, anyway. The hot water heater's gas, too, so that should be simple. You'll have to work out getting a tank from the gas company, and you ought to get a pretty big one."

"Phil, I don't know how to thank you for this," Josh said. "If I hadn't had you with me, I'd just have gone and grabbed that first one."

"It would have been OK," Phil said. "You'd just have had to dump a lot more money into it. This could last you for years, if you stay single. Once you get married, though, it's going to be on the mighty small side."

"No prospects of that right now," Josh said. "But, you never know." He glanced at his watch. "It's getting a little late to just drop by Fred's, but let's take a swing by his house. If he's out in the yard, maybe we'll stop and see him."

It turned out that Linder was out in his yard, throwing frisbees to a couple of dogs, much like Tiffany had done. "How you doing, Josh?" he asked as they got out of the truck.

"Oh, pretty good," Josh said. "You heard about the ten-dog thing, didn't you?"

"It's the logical thing to do," Linder said. "At the same time, seven to ten is a better deal than ten to twelve. It's going to leave me a little tight for this year, but next year, I should be all right."

"How's that?" Josh asked.

"I've got a pretty good pack of puppies coming along. Well, yearlings, now. They'll be green as grass this winter, but get a season under their belts, and they should be all right."

"You want to watch it about working yearlings too hard," Josh counseled. "Tiffany's dad got away with it with George, but you never know."

"Yeah, this is going to be a training year," Fred said, grabbing a frisbee from a black dog, and throwing it again. "I'm not going to be able to run with the head of the pack. Might even just do half the Run, and scratch when I get here, rather than working the yearlings too hard. That'd give `em a little experience."

"Might work," Josh agreed. "These a couple of your pups?"

"Yeah, they're still lively little buggers. The sire is one of Greg's Siberians. Buffalo, one of the malemutes I picked up the first year I was running, is the bitch. She ain't pure malemute; there's a little Heinz 57 in there. Good mix, I think. I've had `em in harness, and they're taking to it pretty good."

Josh kept his thoughts to himself. Buffalo was one of the biggest dogs running in Spearfish County. She wasn't terribly fast, but was powerful. Malemutes were pretty dogs, but large, and usually not fast; there weren't many Malemutes running in races. But, the Siberian mix could produce some good dogs, Josh knew, and was pretty sure Fred knew, too. These two dogs were bigger than he liked, but you wanted them a little big as wheel dogs. It was worth pushing Fred a little. "That'd leave you going to Warsaw with, what, five pups and maybe five older dogs?" he asked. "Seems to me you had to borrow a couple to make seven."

"Going to be worse than that," Fred replied. "Couple of my older dogs are just too old, and one of them's Indiana, my leader. I got a leader coming on, Herschel, but he's going to be green, too. I'm sort of hoping to use Indiana for leader training with Herschel, and run him. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, well, it doesn't."

Josh nodded. "Going to be an awful green team."

"Yeah," Fred agreed. "You wouldn't happen to have a leader you'd like to trade for a couple of promising pups, would you?"

"No, I got a leader problem myself," Josh said. "I've got a good leader, but not real fast, and a couple of glorified swing dogs that might train up, although one of them is getting old. I do have a couple experienced team dogs, and one of them runs swing all right." He had more than that, of course, but wasn't ready to show his hand, just yet.

"Any chance that swing dog would make a leader?"

"Might be," Josh said. "I'm gonna be honest. The dog I've got in mind, Wolf, I usually run in wheel. He's actually a pretty damn good dog, been up here two years now, but he fights. It just comes down to the fact that he thinks he wants to be the alpha male, and he hasn't proven it to me. Work with him a bit, and in a different environment, he might be a helluva dog. I'd trade you a yearling for him."

"Well, maybe," Fred said, scratching his head. "That helps only if he works out. If he doesn't I'm still in shit."

"Actually, you've got a couple problems, the way I see it," Josh said. "Two or three experienced dogs, and a lot of yearlings. You're gonna have a hell of a time getting them all working smoothly. Now, I'll grant you, once you get a good group working, then you're all set for a few years, until they all get old all at once on you. But what if they don't work out? A malemute . . . well, damn, you know what I mean. You're gonna be lucky to get a fast dog. Spread it around a little bit, so you don't have all your eggs in one basket. What you need is an experienced dog or two more, to kind of even things out, even if you only run them a year or two."

"Yeah, then I have to replace them. Those yearlings are the future, Josh."

"So, OK, I'll tell you what. I've got a dog that just had a litter. She's a pretty good dog, nothing to write home about, came up here this year. Gentle, good with other dogs. I don't want to lose her until the pups get a little older, say a month or so. You can have her, and I'll throw in a couple of the pups. They're too young to tell much about yet, but Mark's Cumulus is the sire, so that's pretty good. They'll be too young to help you this winter, but the next winter, they'll be ready to rock and roll."

"You're talking about two of my yearlings, right? Four for two?"

"Yeah, think about it. You'll have a handful of older dogs with experience, still have a bunch of two year olds with a winter's experience for power, and a couple of yearlings to keep life interesting. That sounds like a good, young, strong, well-rounded team to me."

"Well . . ." Fred said, thinking. "All right. Which dogs of my yearlings you want? They're all still pretty young, no telling yet how any of `em is going to work out."

"Let's go have a look."

There were eight of the yearlings, the two that Fred had been playing with, and six more out back. All of them were on the big side, but beyond that, there wasn't much telling. Knowing it was a shot in the dark for everyone, Josh decided on the smallest two, although they weren't much smaller than the rest. If nothing else, they'd eat a bit less. "Sounds good," Fred said. "The one that's mostly black is Pumper; the one that's more gray is Fireplug. How do you want to handle this?"

"Like I said," Josh said. "I've got to pretty well hang onto Bullet and the pups for a month or so. Wolf, well, I've got to be up here in the next few days. I suppose you'll want to get started working with him. I can drop him off, and pick up Pumper and Fireplug. As far as that goes, I could slide up here tomorrow morning. It's not that far."

"Sounds like a deal to me," Fred said.

They stood around and gossiped about dogs for a few more minutes. The mosquitos were coming out by this time, and finally, Josh said they had to be heading back. Josh promised to come by with the dogs the next morning, and he and Phil, who hadn't said much during the whole exchange, got back in the truck and headed back for Spearfish Lake.

He did, now: "Jeez, I may know more about clunky old mobile homes, but when I get a team going someday, remind me to be damn careful around you."

"Why?" Josh said. "Everything I told him was the honest truth."

"Yeah, sure. Like I haven't seen you so mad with Wolf that you weren't ready to go out and shoot him."

"Wolf is potentially the strongest dog of the bunch," Josh said. "He does have that attitude problem, and he hasn't worked well for me. Sometimes, even often, a dog that's a problem dog in one team can be the spark plug of another team. Bullet won't give him any speed this year, but will set a good example for the younger dogs. The pups, well, who knows how they'll work out? They can go either way. Same for those dogs I got from him, except that they're potentially good wheel dogs, and I'm weak there. There's a good chance that I helped him out more than he helped me, just by getting a couple of bigger dogs out of his team."

"Yeah, right."

"It's a risk, sure," Josh said. "But it's one for both of us. We're both trading the devil we know, for the one we don't. That's why you trade a dog or two here, a dog or two there. Spreads out the risk. Between Tiffany and me, and counting the pups and Dennis' extras, we've got a dozen or so dogs we need to trade off in the next few months. That's four of them right there, and I've got a sort of a nibble on two more. Building a team is not just going out and getting a bunch of dogs. It's an ongoing process, that never ends."

"Kind of like a jigsaw puzzle," Phil observed. "With no correct answer."

"Yeah, that's part of the fun of it," Josh said. "There's a whole lot more to it than just getting on the sled and yelling `Hike'. I could have won the Warsaw Run two years from now with what we did back there. Or lost it. I may not even know that it's the reason." He let out a deep breath. "It was a lot simpler a couple years ago. Then, all we had to have was dogs that could run in team without screwing up too badly, and some that would go the distance. Didn't even have to be all of them. That first year I had the dogs I got from Woody, I had a pretty good team, but I had to fill the team out to seven, not just because I could. That was fun. We didn't even figure that out until about a month before the race, and we were hunting dogs high and low."

"That was the year Tiffany won the Pound Puppies, right?"

"Yeah, that was fun," Josh smiled. "She bugged Mike for months to let her run the Warsaw Run, and, well, Mike wasn't quite ready to turn her loose on a hundred-miler yet. So, they compromised on letting her run the Pound Puppies. He got to thinking about it, and decided that maybe he'd run the Pound Puppies, too, just to keep an eye on her. Well, I had eight dogs by then, Woody's dogs, and Headlight and Stinker and Wolf. Mike had, I think seven, counting George, and Mark had seven. That gave us like 22 dogs, and we needed a total of 24 for the four teams. So, we were hustling around to fill out the field. Mike managed to borrow a couple of dogs from somewhere, but they'd never been in harness, and he only got to run them two or three times before the race. Tiffany talked her dad out of some of his best dogs, and made a deal with Mark to run one of his dogs if I'd loan him Wolf. That eased the dog number problem a bit, but didn't help much as far as keeping an eye on Tiffany, because the last time Mike saw her was at the starting chute. She had some damn good dogs then, and I think she still has the course record."

"You almost won the Warsaw Run, didn't you?"

"It wasn't really almost," Josh said. "Mark had me by about ten minutes. There's a perfect example of how to lose a race before you start, when Tiffany talked me into letting Mark take Wolf. I wound up taking Headlight and Stinker along with Woody's dogs, and while we made it to Warsaw faster than Mark, I could see that Headlight and Stinker weren't going to make it back. They're sprint dogs, and had never gone that kind of distance before, so I dropped them there, and started back with five. Well, on the way back, down around 919, Polly started limping. I guess I had heard of dog booties by then, but I thought they just used them in Alaska, and Polly's paws were all balled up with ice and hurting. Nothing to do but put her in the dog bag in the sled and keep going. You had to finish with five dogs in harness, so I drove the four to a hundred yards of the finish line, stopped, put Polly back in line, and walked home in front of the team, to keep the speed down. With all that screwing around, Mark passed me, and he still had all seven dogs running. If I'd had Wolf, instead of Headlight or Stinker at the start, and he'd had one of them, well, I could still have finished with five dogs on line and Polly in the dog bag, and he'd have only had six. I could have held him off."

"Must have been frustrating," Phil commented.

"Oh, not really. I still won five hundred bucks, the first purse we had in the race. At that, I was glad to take second. I almost parked the dogs when we went by Mark's, but then I got the idea about putting Polly back in line. I guess you know, I learned something about keeping an eye on paws, after that. This year, you know all about that. In spite of of you working with the team, and Tiffany and Mark and Mike, they just weren't ready, so I let them pick over the best of my dogs, and I just ran the rest, took my time, decided to see what the hind end of the race looked like. I don't really want to do that again. Now that -- that was frustrating."

"We tried," Phil said. "But well, you know how it is."

"Yeah," Josh nodded. "The big thing I learned out of that is that it won't do to just take any dogs that'll go the distance. You just can't go down to the pound, grab some dogs, and expect to win with them, even in the Pound Puppies. It's going to take better teams to win in the future, and it's going to take work to build them and train them."

"Well," Phil said. "Nothing comes without work."

"I know," Josh agreed. "I just have to figure how much work I want to put into it. The competition is only going to get better. If I can keep up, and still enjoy it, well, I may stay with it a while. If I bust my ass, and still wind up with another year like this one, then there's going to be some dogs for sale, cash, no trades."

"I don't think you're going to have to worry about it," Phil said. "You're making moves to improve things."

"It's more difficult than it looks," Josh said. "You haven't listen to Tiffany and me talk about it. See, what I'm actually having to do is to build two teams, one partly hers, under her parent's noses. Mike's got about all the dogs around the place he wants, so some of the dogs that are theoretically mine are actually hers. Between us, we can build a kick-ass team, no problem. That's what won it for her this year. Two teams, well, that's harder. You don't believe me, come with us tomorrow when we take the dogs swimming, and you can listen to us pick at the problem some more. We do it every time we get together."

"I'd like to do that," Phil said. "What time?"

"Oh, I dunno. Mid-morning, I guess. I've got to go by Mark's, and tell him I found a mobile home, and then pick up Wolf and haul him up to Warsaw, and bring those two yearlings back. I guess after that."

"I'd go with you, if you like," Phil offered.

"Love to have you," Josh said. "Why don't I swing by your place about eight? It'll be nice to sleep in a little."