Max found him.
When Juliet unlocked the door to the jeep and opened it he leapt past her and took off down the sidewalk as if he knew exactly where the man was going and how to find him.
Juliet tried to keep up, but Max was much faster, and more determined now, and he didn’t care if she was behind him or not.
“Slower Max, slower,” she called as she turned a corner, but he paid no attention at all. He didn’t even glance back over his shoulder, not even once, and so she called out to him again. “You’re going to training school, Max!” she hollered. “You’re going to dog-training school the minute we get home.” But he didn’t care. He just kept chasing the man in the grey hat through the streets of Edmonton, and it didn’t even matter that there was no man there to chase.
He kept his head down as he ran, as if he was pursuing a rabbit or a bird, and Juliet remembered that he had the scent and she knew that he would not stop until he found the man.
Juliet caught up with Max at a busy intersection about four blocks from the jeep. He had stopped at the corner, and he was very quiet as he watched the man wait for the light to change. He seemed to understand that silence and an element of surprise were important if he was to catch his prey.
The light changed to green, and Max looked up at Juliet for the first time, as if he was asking what he was supposed to do next, and when she whispered, “Get him, Max,” he ran to the man and caught him by the pants leg, and pulled him down.
Juliet caught up then and noticed the pile of tied-up envelopes lying on the ground. She picked them up quickly and stuffed them into her jacket pocket. Then she grabbed Max and pulled him away, pulled him all the way to the jeep, and drove back to the bed and breakfast.
She spread the letters out on the bed and moved them around. Then she moved them around some more and placed them in order according to the dates on the postmarks. The earliest, it appeared, was May 15th. May 15th? It was December now, and someone had mailed a letter on May 15th in Fort Worth, Texas. And these letters might not even have been the first batch. This bird-banding thing might have been going on for years. In fact, it must have been going on for at least one year if someone had found one of the birds in Texas in May.
The letters were from people who had seen the address on the bands of birds that had come down.
The most recent letter had been sent from Puerto Rico last week. “Regarding your swallow number 18,” it said. “It was sighted on the north side of the island and seen to leave at seven a.m.”
It was too early for reports of swallow number 6 or whistling swan number 36, but Juliet searched for news of them anyway.
She opened the rest of the letters then, starting with the earliest postmark and working her way toward the most recent ones. She was looking for a pattern, any pattern at all. Perhaps there were some clues in the kinds of birds found in various locations, or the times of departure or arrival, or medical symptoms, or deaths. But it all was very random.
The birds seemed to be coming down everywhere from Virginia to Argentina, and most of them had been spotted in the very early morning or at dusk, as would be expected.
Three dead Canada geese had been discovered, and fourteen swallows appeared to be sick but well enough to fly by the next day. There was no mention of any swans, and oddly, no one seemed to notice that the birds might have been drugged.
The only pattern she could find was the fact that there were no patterns. However, three of the letters made her stop and think.
The first was the one with the May postmark. She had been so busy thinking about the behavior of the birds that she had forgotten all about the behavior of the people writing the letters, or the people picking up the mail.
Why, for instance, would a letter postmarked May 15th arrive in a mailbox seven months later? All the rest of the letters had been sent in December, so the man in the cap must have been picking up his mail on some kind of a regular basis.
So why was he receiving a letter now that was sent seven months earlier?
Juliet read the letter again. A banded Canada goose had been spotted off the coast of Guatemala in the first week of May. The person who had written the letter was so surprised to see it that she had written asking for information about the goose.
Juliet understood why the woman had been so surprised. Canada geese should have been back in Canada by May.
And Canada geese rarely, if ever, migrated farther south than the United States. So what was this one doing there?
She examined the postmark and remembered that there had been political problems in Guatemala the summer before. The letter was probably one of those rare ones that got waylayed.
But the third letter was the oddest of all.
“I discovered your swallow number 45,” it said. “And I watched it for a long time. It seemed tired, but managed to flap its wings. But it couldn’t get off the ground. The ring on its leg seemed to be causing problems, and seemed heavy, so I took it off, and at that point the bird flew away. I am enclosing the ring.”
Juliet turned the envelope upside down and shook the ring out into the palm of her hand. She had never held a band before, so she didn’t know if this one was heavier than other bands, but it seemed much too heavy for a tiny swallow to carry.
She turned it over and over in her hand and examined it carefully, until something began to come to her as concepts often do, beginning with a tiny thought, and then another, and another, until all the little thoughts had grown into a whole.
Something was wrong.
The band was too heavy.
The edges of the band had been soldered together.
There were seams along the top and the bottom of the band.
The band consisted of two pieces of light metal soldered one on top of the other.
Juliet pried open the seams with her jackknife until they came apart. Then, when they had been separated she called Max to her and said, “Look, Max. Look at this. Someone’s created an envelope out of this band, and he’s put something inside it.”
Max sat back and looked up at her with eyes filled with tolerance and curiosity.
“He’s filled this band with sand, Max. And he’s put too much into it. Either this guy’s very smart, or very dumb.
She thought about the sand and the bald eagle and the May postmark all day long. She walked around the city, shifting the pieces back and forth, trying to put them into some kind of order, and by the time she and Max returned to the bed and breakfast she had fashioned them into a wall that she thought would stand.
But there was one hole left to fill, and the piece that belonged there was being held by the man in the grey cap.
Interspersed with the bird reports was a letter with his name on it. She looked up his address in the phone book.
“Get ready,” she said to Max. “Tomorrow we’re going to visit Mr. James Dinkins, and I’m going to need you to sniff out some answers.”
Max seemed to understand. He came to her and jumped up and put his front paws on her shoulders and buried his head in her hair.
“You’re a good dog, Max,” she whispered. “And we make a very nice team.”