He put the pan down just outside the driver-side door, where it sat steaming in the cool late Spring afternoon with its rich burden of canned dogfood, and the dog fell to with gusto. Bannock gobbled the stuff up, licked up all the gravy vigorously, inhaled the minute scents clinging to the pan inch by inch, and then pushed the pan around in circles with his nose, backing and filling around it in an energetic dog-incantation designed to make it magically refill. But the stranger was having none of that. He filled a small plastic bown from a jerry can of water strapped to the rear bumper and put it down next to the pan. Bannock fell for the ruse, and began slurping it up with his long opposable tongue.

He sat in a folding camp chair by his tent,and lit an old briar pipe, watching sundown cast long shadows across the vale below, nursing a Guinness, and decided life was good. Or, at least, that it could be good, he thought, reflecting on the memory of the red-headed miracle he had seen earlier. Damn shame that Mounty had gotten carried away before she got to him. Knowing Dundee he would get the charges reduced to drunk and disorderly and have them laughed out of court.

A wandering soul appeared noisily from the brush on the backside of the hill, weaving perilously back and forth toward his camp. He seemed to the stranger to be intensely preoccupied with internal voices of some sort, muttering under his breath. The fellow looked lost, although his zig-zagging path seemed to be accumulating a net vector toward the folkie camp in the vale. But he veered and wandered in so many directions that the stranger thought he might be drunk. The fellow was wearing thin flip-flops, a teeshirt and tight blue hiking shorts. He was dust-coated and looked like a man deprived mightily of something he hadn't noticed was missing.

The meandering traveler passed by the stranger's site about ten yards away, cresting the hill and wandering vaguely down the other side. The stranger could hear the wanderer mumbling to himself, in a liquid susurrus of tongues which sounded like Portuguese Bantu, rhytmic, fluid, and meaningless. The lost, mad soul faded into the twilight, sloping off downhill toward the camp.

The stranger shook his head in bemused sympathy. "Another broken fool, Bannock, overwhelmed by the grinding Wheel of noisy life at the bottom of the gravity well. Jes' another well-frog, I guess." He reached over and flipped open the dusty guitar case lying nearby. He strummed gently, and sang softly, his fingers finding their way from long practice, the runs unfolding over the lengthening sundown shadows like a warm breeze at the start of night.

I didn't know his name
I didn't know his name,
Another man done gone,
I didn't know his name,
Another man done gone....

Bannock finished pushing his water bowl in circles and came over, and turned in the low grass three times around before settling in a happy lump by his chair and dozing to the soft music.