Every friendly boot in the district has walked across the answer.
A patrol has gone into broken highland country and stopped transmitting. By the time anyone thinks of the dog, the ground has been searched to ruin by men doing their best.
Banner ended the last operation with a split pad. He is released back to work only under a written veterinary clearance designed to cost his handler something: soft ground only, never rock or grit, two casts and the day is finished — and a final clause voiding the whole document from the moment the dog's gait alters, rather than from the moment his handler decides to notice.
Gresham signs it.
Then the sign leads down into a boulder drainage. Rock. The one surface the paper forbids — and the only ground in that valley dry enough to have preserved anything worth finding.
Almost everything that follows is the story of that piece of paper meeting the ground.
