Gator's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

For three days Gator had run out of scent. His master was somewhere ahead, the woman who once knelt on the pavement to put her face level with his. He remembered that day best. He held the memory the way he held everything now, through his nose. But the trail had gone cold, and a cold trail leads nowhere. He had searched every street he knew. He had smelled doorways, gutters, and the boots of strangers. One man swung a stick at him. Gator caught it in his teeth and walked on. The stick was not her. Nothing was her. So he kept moving, because stopping felt worse than failing. The wind pulled him toward the water. He had never gone this far. The ground turned to wet stone. Black rocks rose out of the gloom like broken teeth. Waves slammed them and fell back. Salt filled his nose and drowned out everything else. Here there was no scent to lose. Here there was nothing at all. Gator stopped between the rocks. He lowered his head. For the first time in three days, he did not know where to point his feet. The sea gave him nothing. He had followed his nose to the edge of the world, and the world had ended. Then something creaked. Not the water. Metal. Ahead, wedged among the stones, lay a small airplane. Its nose was crushed inward. One wing bent back like a snapped bone. The body was split open, red paint peeled to bare metal. It had come down hard. Gator's ears lifted. He crept closer, low to the ground, and pushed his nose into the torn side of the wreck. He caught it at once. Her. Faint, buried under oil and rust, but hers. The same warm smell from the day she knelt down to him. It clung to a strap inside the broken cabin. His whole body went still, then trembled. He shoved his head deeper and breathed until he was sure. She had been here. She had been in this thing when it fell. Gator backed out of the wreck. He circled it, nose down, reading the stone. The salt tried to swallow the trail, but he held it now. Faint tracks led away from the crash, up from the water, into the dark beyond the rocks. Someone had walked out of the wreck. Someone had lived. He had come to the coast with no trail left and no place to look. Now he had both. The scent was three days late, but it was moving, and it was hers. Gator turned from the sea and followed it inland.