Seize the Night

length of the watercourse. The first declared that public access to the river was restricted and that anti-trespassing ordinances would be enforced. The second, directed at those lawless citizens who were undeterred by the first sign, warned that high water at a storm's peak could be so powerful and fast-moving that it would overwhelm anyone who dared to venture into it.
    In spite of all the warnings, in spite of the obvious turbulence of the treacherous currents and the well-known tragic history of the Santa Rosita, a thrill seeker with a homemade raft or a kayak—or even just a pair of water wings—is swept to his death every few years. In a single winter, not long ago, three drowned.
    Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.
    Orson stood on the levee, burly head raised, gazing east toward the Pacific Coast Highway and the serried hills beyond. He was stiff with tension, and a thin whine escaped him.
    This night, neither water nor anything else moved along the moonlit channel. Not enough of a breeze slipped off the Pacific even to stir a dust ghost from the silt.
    I checked the radiant dial of my wristwatch. Worried that every minute might be Jimmy Wing's last—if, indeed, he was still alive—I nudged Orson, “What is it?” He didn't acknowledge my question. Instead, he pricked his ears, sniffed the becalmed night almost daintily, and seemed to be transfixed by emanations of one kind or another from some quarry farther up the arid river.
    As usual, I was uncannily attuned to Orson's mood. Although I possessed only an ordinary nose and mere human senses but, to be fair to myself, a superior wardrobe and bank account I could almost detect those same emanations.
    Orson and I are closer than dog and man. I am not his master. I am his friend, his brother.
    When I said earlier that I am brother to the owl, to the bat, and to the badger, I was speaking figuratively. When I say I'm the brother of this dog, however, I mean to be taken more literally.
    Studying the riverbed as it climbed and dwindled into the hills, I asked, “Something spooking you?” Orson glanced up. In his ebony eyes floated twin reflections of the moon, which at first I mistook for me, but my face is neither that round nor that mysterious.
    Nor that pale. I am not an albino. My skin is pigmented, and my complexion somewhat dusky even though the sun has rarely touched me.
    Orson snorted, and I didn't need to understand the language of dogs to interpret his precise meaning. The pooch was telling me that he was insulted by my suggestion that he could be so easily spooked.
    Indeed, Orson is even more courageous than most of his kind.
    During the more than two and a half years that I've known him, from puppyhood to the present, I have seen him frightened of only one thing, monkeys.
    “Monkeys?” I asked.
    He chuffed, which I interpreted as no .
    Not monkeys this time.
    Not yet.
    Orson trotted to a wide concrete access ramp that descended along the levee wall to the Santa Rosita. In June and July, dump trucks and excavators would use this route when maintenance crews removed a year's worth of accumulated sediment and debris from below, restoring a flood preventing depth to the dry watercourse before the next rainy season.
    I followed the dog down to the riverbed. On the darkly mottled concrete slope, his black form was no more substantial than a shadow.
    On the faintly luminous silt, however, he appeared to be stone solid even as he drifted eastward like a homeward-bound spirit crossing a waterless Styx.
    Because the most recent rainfall had occurred three weeks in the past, the floor of the channel wasn't damp. It was still well compacted, however, and I was able to ride the bicycle without struggle.
    At least as far as the pearly moonlight revealed, the bike tires made few discernible marks in the hard-packed silt, but a heavier vehicle had passed this way earlier, leaving clear tracks. Judging by the width and depth of the tread impressions, the tires were those of a van, a light truck, or a sports utility vehicle.
    Flanked by twenty-foot-high concrete ramparts, I had no view of any of the town immediately around us. I could see only the faint angular lines of the houses on higher hills, huddled under trees or partially revealed by streetlamps. As we ascended the watercourse, the townscape ahead also fell away from sight beyond the levees, as though the night were a powerful solvent in