The dog was in the ditch before the truck stopped rolling. The man stood on the gravel and called and the dog heard him and kept on. It was after something down there. It went in wet to the shoulder and did not look back. Nobody ever taught a dog to weigh what it wants against what it costs, or against what anyone might think. It wants, and it goes.

It made up its mind about the man early, in the first hour, before he had done anything to deserve it. The smell of his hands. The sound of his boots on the gravel. That was the whole file, and it never reopened it. It was at the door when he left and at the door when he came back, and the years did not wear on that the way they wear on everything else.

It was honest about its hungers in a way no person is. When it was hungry it said so. When it wanted out it stood at the door. It ate things in the tall grass that would have shamed a man for a week and came back proud of itself. Nobody ever had to guess what the dog wanted. That alone put it ahead of every man the man knew, himself included.

Men do it differently. A man will want something for twenty years and never say it out loud. He will ration what he loves like there is a shortage coming. He will stand at a funeral with his hat in his hands, dry-eyed in front of the other men, and cry alone in the truck on the highway home. The dog never learned any of that. What it loved it followed straight into the water, in front of everybody, and slept fine afterward.

Men keep dogs and tell themselves the dog is the simple one. The dog rides in the bed of the truck with its eyes shut and the wind in its ears, and the man drives up front rehearsing things he is never going to say to anybody. One of them is at peace.

The road is where everything is going somewhere. The ditch is where everything ends up. Cans, cottonwood fluff, rainwater the field couldn't take, the rabbit that guessed wrong. A man watches the road. A dog reads the ditch. Nothing in a ditch is pretending.

Anybody who takes a dog has agreed to bury it. Nobody says that part out loud at the shelter and nobody has to. The man had dug those graves before, out back, by himself, because that job does not get hired out. And he knew, standing there with the shovel, that in a year or so he would be back at the kennels letting some pup chew on his finger through the wire, knowing the whole cost and signing up anyway. There is no sense in it. There is not supposed to be.

A man's heart is the same animal, kept inside and told it is something better. It still comes to the door at certain sounds. It grieves people that reason settled on years ago, and it wants what it cannot explain wanting, and nothing anybody has written has ever broken it of that. Whole shelves have tried. The heart does not read. It waits at the window like the dog and takes its chances.

In the end the man went down the bank after it. The grass soaked his pants and the water came in over his boots and the dog looked up at him like he had finally caught on. There was nothing down there worth having. The dog knew that going in. It went because it wanted to go, and that was reason enough, and the man stood in the cold water beside it awhile and did not think the time wasted.