Dog Disappeared After the Incident, Only to Reappear at the Door Six Months Later Wearing a Stranger’s CollarThe owner knelt to unfasten the collar and found a note folded inside that read, “He led us to your house.”

Victor found him by the roadside in October.

The puppy sat on the verge of the highway, wet and very small, watching the passing cars as though he were waiting for someone in particular. Victor was driving to his cottage to fetch potatoes back then; he stopped for a second, thinking he would only take a look. But the puppy lifted his head, and that was it. The potatoes stayed in the ground for another week.

He named him Mars. The neighbour, Margaret, came up with the name when she saw a reddish, floppy-eared creature with oversized paws in the hallway.

“Red, nosy, daft,” she said. “Mars. Just right.”

Victor laughed at the time.

Mars grew quickly. By spring he took up the entire left side of the sofa and considered it his rightful place. Victor grumbled at first, then stopped. Sleeping alone in the flat was worse than sleeping with a dog that snored and sometimes twitched a leg in his dreams.

They became friends not all at once but gradually, the way people who are in no hurry befriend each other. Morning walks. A bowl of food at seven in the evening. The television. Sometimes Victor talked aloud to Mars. Mars sat nearby and listened with a serious expression, only occasionally yawning to show all his teeth.

“You’re right,” Victor would say. “Enough.”

And he turned off the television.

***

The accident happened in April, when they were coming back from the evening walk.

Victor didn’t remember exactly how afterwards. Slippery road, a car veered onto the pavement from around the corner, Mars was on the lead, and then the lead snapped. Victor was thrown against the kerb. He hit his side, lay still for a few seconds, hearing only his own breathing and someone yelling far away.

When he got up, Mars was not there.

The lead lay on the asphalt. The plastic clip had cracked in two.

He searched until midnight. Walked three blocks, called the dog’s name, asked passers-by. Passers-by shook their heads. Someone said they had seen a reddish dog running towards the railway crossing, but that was about forty minutes ago, and they hadn’t seen further.

At home Victor sat in the kitchen and stared at the empty bowl for a long time.

Then he stood up. He wrote a notice, printed twenty copies. In the morning he put them up all over the neighbourhood, then called three veterinary clinics and the shelter on Mill Street.

“If a reddish dog comes in, mixed breed,” he said into the phone. “Please call. Here’s my number.”

A week passed.

Then a month.

The notices faded under the May rain, and Victor replaced them. Then he replaced them again in June. The veterinary clinics said nothing. The shelter on Mill Street called twice, both times a mistake, both times it was not the right dog.

In July Margaret said cautiously from behind her door:

“Victor, maybe get another one. There are so many at the shelter.”

“No,” Victor replied.

She never suggested it again.

The flat without Mars became different.

Not empty, no. Things were in their places, the fridge hummed, the upstairs neighbours stomped at half past nine as usual. But something had changed.

Victor picked up an old ball from the floor that Mars used to chase down the hall. He put it on the shelf. Thought about it, then put it in a drawer. Then he took it out again and left it on the shelf.

In the mornings, his hand reached automatically for the lead by the door. The lead hung there. There was no need to go anywhere.

He started going for walks alone. The same route, the same time, just without Mars. He couldn’t explain why himself. He just walked.

In August his daughter called from Birmingham.

“Dad, come visit. Stay with us, have a rest.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

He paused. Then said:

“In case he comes back.”

His daughter paused too. Then she said “okay” in that tone a person uses when they want to say something else but decide not to.

Mars came back in October.

Victor heard scratching at the door just before seven in the evening. At first he thought he imagined it. Noise from the stairwell, a draught, who knows. But the scratching came again. Insistently, with pauses, as though someone knew the door would open, they just had to wait a little.

He opened it.

Mars sat on the doormat.

Older. The fur was clipped in a few places where wounds must have been. His left side was slightly sunken. And around his neck there was a collar. A different one – brown leather with a brass buckle and a small tag that read “Buddy”.

Victor stood in the doorway for a long time, looking at him. Mars sat and looked at Victor. The right ear drooping, a rusty patch on his forehead shaped like a lopsided star. Same eyes, amber with a dark rim.

“Where have you been?” Victor said.

Mars stood up, stepped over the threshold and walked down the hall the way animals do when they know the layout by heart. To the right, to the bowl. The bowl was still there, where it always had been. Empty, of course.

Victor closed the door. He went into the kitchen. His hands trembled slightly as he opened the fridge.

“Alright,” he said. “Alright.”

The next morning he drove to the veterinary clinic.

Mars was examined, given the necessary shots, checked for a microchip. Victor asked about the collar. The vet picked up the tag and read it aloud:

“‘Buddy’. Is that a different name?”

“Someone gave him a different name,” Victor said.

“Was he living with someone?”

“He lived somewhere for six months. I don’t know where.”

The vet looked at him, then at Mars, then back at Victor.

“It happens,” she said. “Dogs sometimes leave and then come back. Especially the clever ones.”

Victor didn’t answer. He watched Mars sit on the metal table with a calm expression, tolerating the examination.

On the back of the tag they found a phone number.

Victor called from the car while Mars sat on the back seat, staring out the window.

The phone was answered after three rings.

“Hello?”

“Good afternoon,” Victor said. “You had a dog. Reddish. You called him Buddy.”

A long silence.

“Yes,” said the voice. A woman’s, not young. “I did. He left us in September. We looked for him.”

“He’s with me. He’s my dog. His name is Mars. He got lost in April.”

Another silence. Then the woman said:

“He lived with us. We fed him, treated him. He had injuries.”

“Thank you,” Victor said.

“He’s a good dog.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Do you live far?” the woman asked. “From Birch Street?”

“A different area.”

“Good heavens. He came on his own in April. Just lay down by our fence and wouldn’t leave.”

Victor stared through the windscreen at the grey courtyard with leafless poplars.

The conversation ended by itself. Victor put the phone away. Mars snored on the back seat, lying with his head on his folded paws.

At home Victor took the strange collar off Mars. He put it on the table, looked at it for a long time. Brown leather, with the tag “Buddy”. Good quality, not cheap.

The dog had been somewhere for six months. And still he came back.

Victor thought about the woman from Birch Street. How she fed him every day, stroked him, grew attached no doubt. And then one morning in September she went out and he was gone. And she searched. Maybe she put up notices.

Victor picked up the phone.

“It’s me again,” he said when she answered. “I wanted to say. If you want to visit him, I don’t mind.”

A silence.

“Really?” she said.

“Really.”

She arrived on Saturday. Grace, sixty-four, in a grey coat and carrying a string bag with apple jam and a paper bag of dog food – the same kind Mars had got used to over those six months.

Mars saw her from the hall and didn’t rush, no. He just came over and pressed his nose into her palm. Wagged his tail happily.

They had tea. Grace told how she found him by the fence in April, how she took him to the vet, how he was afraid at first but then settled in. Victor told her about the accident, the snapped lead, the notices he put up everywhere.

Mars lay on the floor between them, dozing. Every so often he lifted his head, looked at one, looked at the other.

“He chose both of us,” Grace said.

Victor looked at the dog. Then at the woman next to him.

“Seems that way.”

Victor put the strange collar in his desk drawer. He didn’t throw it away.

Mars went back to taking up the left half of the sofa and chasing the ball down the hall at one in the morning. The notices on the lampposts got soaked by the November rain and peeled off by themselves.

Grace came on Saturdays. She brought jam, sometimes asked for advice about her currant bushes – she had a garden on Birch Street, and Victor knew his way around gardens. They talked while Mars dozed between them.

One evening Victor took the leather collar with the “Buddy” tag out of the drawer. He looked at it. The tag gleamed under the lamp.

In the hallway hung two leads. One red, old. One blue, new, the one Grace had brought one Saturday and hung up without a word, without asking permission.