PART 9 – The Boy Who Followed Pawprints
The cold came suddenly.
One morning, Jamie stepped outside and saw his breath curl in the air like smoke. Frost covered the grass in silver lace, and the windshield of his mother’s car was fogged white.
Winter was coming fast.
At the sanctuary, the mood shifted. The dogs moved slower. Buckshot’s fur thickened, and even Marnie started wearing two flannel shirts instead of one.
“Time to check the pipes,” Hollis grumbled, jabbing at the frost-bitten hose near the garden beds. “Last year we had to carry water in buckets for a week. Felt like the army all over again.”
Jamie kept drawing—mostly inside now, near the fire, curled up with Buckshot at his feet. His sketchpad was full of winter scenes: dogs curled in nests of blankets, steam rising from tin bowls, Marnie hammering insulation to the barn walls with her jaw clenched tight and her breath puffing like a train engine.
He was halfway through drawing Junie watching snowflakes fall through a cracked window when Marnie came in holding a letter.
“It’s for you,” she said, handing it over without fanfare.
Jamie blinked. “For me?”
His name was written in careful block letters on the front. The return address was the Clinch River Elementary School.
He opened it slowly.
Inside was a folded piece of notebook paper—and a pawprint drawn in red crayon.
Under it, in crooked handwriting:
“My mom said we can’t have a dog. But I told her about the ones you take care of. She said maybe we could visit.”
—Tommy Frazier
Jamie smiled so wide it hurt.
Marnie peered over his shoulder. “Friend of yours?”
Jamie nodded. “He used to tease me.”
“Looks like he changed his mind.”
Jamie turned the letter over. “Can we let him visit?”
“That’s not my decision.”
Jamie looked at Hollis, who was watching from the rocker by the stove.
The old man gave a slow nod. “Let the boy come.”
And so he did.
The next Saturday, Tommy arrived with his mom and little sister. He didn’t say much at first—just shoved his hands deep into his hoodie pockets and kicked at the frost.
But when Junie licked his palm and Buckshot flopped beside him like they’d known each other for years, something shifted.
Tommy laughed. Actually laughed.
That night, as Jamie and his mother drove home, she said, “You know… you’ve changed.”
Jamie looked at her, startled.
“Not in a bad way,” she added. “It’s just… you don’t look down as much. You talk more at dinner. You smile.”
Jamie was quiet a moment. Then he said, “I think I was waiting.”
“For what?”
He looked out the window, past the trees, toward where the woods waited in shadow.
“For a place that made sense.”
But even places that make sense can’t hold off the hard things forever.
It happened two weeks before Christmas.
Jamie arrived one afternoon to find the gate open again—but not from danger.
From loss.
Buckshot didn’t come to meet him.
He found Marnie in the cabin, sitting beside the stove. Her face was pale. Her hands twisted in her lap.
“He’s gone,” she said softly.
Jamie froze. “Who?”
“Hollis.”
The word hit like ice water.
Jamie felt the world tilt, then tilt again.
“No,” he whispered.
“Peacefully,” Marnie said. “In the rocker. Blanket up to his chin. Looked like he was just listening to the wind.”
Jamie staggered back, sinking to the floor. Buckshot was lying near the hearth, eyes open, head resting on Hollis’s boot like he couldn’t quite believe it either.
“He was just—he was just here yesterday,” Jamie said, tears rising. “He told me to bring more sketches for the barn.”
Marnie reached out, unsure. Then she placed her hand on Jamie’s shoulder.
“He loved you, you know,” she said. “Told me last week you were the best thing to happen to this place since Kip.”
Jamie pressed his face into Buckshot’s fur, shoulders shaking.
The cabin was so quiet, it hurt.
The funeral was held in the yard under the sycamore tree.
No church. No choir. Just wind and dogs and a sky that looked too wide for one small goodbye.
Jamie stood beside Marnie, who’d traded her usual flannel for a black coat that didn’t quite fit. Dozens of people from town came—folks Jamie had never seen before. Farmers. Teachers. A man with an oxygen tank. A woman with pink hair and a box of dog treats tucked under one arm.
And the dogs were there, too.
Gravy limped. Junie curled at Marnie’s feet. Even Elvis, old and arthritic, sat still as a stone beside Hollis’s empty rocker.
Jamie stepped forward, clutching something wrapped in cloth.
When he unwrapped it, the wind caught the corner of paper—Hollis’s portrait, drawn in charcoal, smiling faintly, eyes crinkled in the way they did when he talked about Kip.
Jamie pinned it to the sycamore trunk with two thumbtacks. It flapped once, then settled.
“He gave me a place,” Jamie said, voice shaking. “He gave all of us one.”
No one spoke. No one needed to.
They stood together, still, held by the ache of the same shared truth:
Some people don’t leave behind monuments.
They leave pawprints.
And dogs who remember the sound of their voice.
And boys who carry their legacy in their hands.
PART 10 – The Boy Who Followed Pawprints
Winter settled in heavy after Hollis passed.
Snow came early that year—thick, quiet, the kind that softened everything it touched. Even grief.
Jamie found himself at the sanctuary almost every day. Not because he had to. Not because anyone asked. But because something in him felt tethered to the place now, like one of the old beams in the barn—weathered, necessary.
Marnie kept things going. She didn’t say much, but she was always there, hammering new shelves in the feed shed, checking paw pads for ice burns, sealing drafts in the cabin walls with old blankets and quiet resolve. She moved differently now—slower, more careful, as if she was protecting something fragile inside herself.
One morning, as Jamie shoveled snow off the porch, he asked, “Is this still his place?”
Marnie didn’t look up from where she was tying a tarp over the woodpile. “What do you mean?”
“I mean… without him.”
She straightened, stretched her back. “Hollis didn’t build this place with wood and nails, Jamie. He built it with trust. That doesn’t die with the man.”
Jamie thought about that a long time.
On the first sunny day in weeks, Jamie returned with a backpack full of nails and a sign he’d painted by hand. It was simple—whitewashed wood, black letters, and a small painted pawprint in the corner.
He waited until everyone had gathered: Marnie, the dogs, even a few of the regular volunteers who’d braved the icy roads.
Then he hammered it to the front gate, where the old “PRIVATE—NO TRESPASSING” sign had once hung, long splintered by wind and time.
THE HOLLIS SANCTUARY
A place for the ones no one else wanted—run by the ones who know better.
No one said a word. Buckshot sat at Jamie’s side, tail resting against his boot.
Marnie stepped forward, eyes red but dry, and nodded once.
“Feels right.”
Spring came slow that year, in fits and starts—patches of green breaking through the frost, robins returning like cautious travelers. One morning, Jamie arrived to find daffodils blooming wild behind the barn, where Hollis used to toss kitchen scraps for the raccoons.
The barn was finished by then. Proper insulation, thick straw beds, windows that actually opened.
Tommy and his mom had started coming every Saturday, and now there were three other kids who helped too. Jamie had taught them how to draw dog faces—how to notice the slight droop in a hound’s eye, the way light caught the fur just above a Labrador’s brow.
People brought in new rescues, too. One had three legs. One was deaf and blind. One had half a jaw and a bark like a broken toy horn.
Each one got a name, a place to sleep, and a portrait drawn by Jamie’s hand.
And each one—after some time—learned what it meant to be safe.
One afternoon, Jamie sat on the porch with Buckshot, sketching the last page of a new notebook. He was drawing a scene from memory: Hollis in his rocking chair, eyes squinting, a dog in his lap, the fire behind him glowing amber.
Jamie added one final detail: a boy sitting cross-legged nearby, looking up like he was hearing something important for the first time.
He smiled, closed the book, and held it to his chest.
Then he said aloud, “I’m not lost anymore.”
Buckshot thumped his tail.
That night, Jamie stayed late, helping Marnie wash out the bowls and lock the sheds. The stars came out sharp and clear, the moon a thin white grin.
Before he left, he walked out to the sycamore tree.
The drawing of Hollis was still tacked to the trunk, weathered now, the edges curling—but the smile was still there. Still soft. Still watching.
Jamie reached into his coat pocket and pulled out something small: Kip’s old leather collar.
Buckshot still wore it proudly, but Jamie had replaced it with a new one last week—stitched by hand with his name and the words Hollis Sanctuary on the inside.
Now, Jamie draped Kip’s collar over the lowest branch of the sycamore and tied it there with care.
It would stay, he thought.
It should stay.
A memory made into something solid.
A beginning from something that once was ending.
On his way back toward the gate, Jamie paused
Buckshot stood in the yard, just beyond the porch, staring at the tree line.
Still. Silent.
Jamie followed his gaze.
And then—he saw them.
Fresh pawprints in the snow.
Small ones. Light. Leading from the woods toward the house.
Jamie’s breath caught.
But this time, he didn’t follow.
He didn’t need to.
Because now he understood.
Some pawprints are meant to be followed.
And some?
Some just show you where you belong.
—THE END—