A Cowboy Heard a Dog Crying From the River… What He Found Left Him Weeping

Some things a man carries don’t get lighter with time. He just gets stronger shoulders or he learns to stop noticing the weight. And I never could tell which one happened to me. I’m going to tell you about the morning I heard a dog crying from the Purgatory River. And what that sound pulled out of the water and out of me.

I’ve told almost nobody this. Not because it’s a secret, but because there aren’t words that fit it right. And I’ve spent the better part of my life being a man who trusts words less than he trusts weather. But I’ll try today. Because if you’ve ever lost something you couldn’t get back, a person, a chance, a piece of who you used to be, then part of this story already belongs to you and you should hear how it ends.

So sit with me a minute. The coffee’s hot, the fire’s going, and the river is a long way off from here now. Let me take you back to the bank where it happened. I counted 431 days that morning before my boots even hit the floor. That was the habit I’d fallen into. Every dawn, before the coffee, before the cold made me a man again, my mind laid down its little tally the way some men say prayers.

431 days since the Purgatory took now. I never wrote the number down. I was afraid that if I put it on paper, it would stop being a wound and start being a fact. And I wasn’t ready to let it become a fact. The house was quiet the way it had learned to be quiet. Ada was already up. I could hear her at the stove. The small iron scrape of the skillet.

But we hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to each other since the frost broke. Grief had come into our house like a third person and taken the chair between us. And neither of us had the heart to ask it to leave. I pulled on my coat and went out to see to the horses because that was a thing I knew how to do.

And there is a mercy in doing things you know how to do. The Perdido ran high that spring. It had been running high for a week, brown and swollen and loud, fat with snowmelt from country I’d never seen and rain I’d cursed it for nine straight days. Folks in Halloway had a saying about that river, the Perdido keeps what it borrows, and they said it lightly, the way people say hard things lightly so the hardness doesn’t get inside them.

I never said it lightly. I couldn’t. The river had borrowed my daughter and had no intention of paying her back. I’d have stayed clear of it entirely that morning. God knows I’d have been happy to never stand on that bank again. But sound carries strange across water at dawn, when the air is still cold and heavy, and hasn’t yet learned the shape of the day.

And what I heard stopped me halfway to the barn with a lead rope in my hand and my heart already going wrong in my chest. A dog crying. Not barking. That’s the thing I need you to understand. A bark is a dog talking to the world. This was a dog past talking. It was a high, broken, wet sound, rising and falling, the kind of sound a creature makes when it has been making it for a long time and has stopped expecting anyone to come.

I stood there in the gray light with the rope going slack in my fingers, and I felt the hair come up on my arms. I want to tell you I ran toward it right away. I didn’t. For one whole minute I stood frozen because that sound was coming from the river, and the river was the last place on this earth I wanted to go.

Then it changed. It cracked, went thin, almost gave out, and something in me that had been dead for 431 days lurched up off the ground and started running, and my legs went after it before my mind could talk sense into either one of us. I hit the bank at a dead run and nearly went into the water myself. The Perdido was a monster that morning.

It had swallowed its own banks and was chewing at the cottonwood roots along the near side, brown and muscular, carrying whole branches past me like they were straws. The noise of it up close was enormous, a low steady roar with a hiss underneath, the sound of a thing that does not care about you at all. Mist came off the surface.

It smelled of mud and iron and something rotten and green underneath, the smell of the world turned inside out. And out there, maybe 40 ft from where I stood, caught in the crown of a drowned tree that the flood had wedged against a gravel bar, was the dog. A yellow dog, rangy, soaked black with river water, so thin I could count its ribs even at that distance.

It had gotten itself up onto the tangle of branches, half out of the current, and it was looking downstream, straight down into the churning water where the flood dug deepest against the bar. And it was crying, crying and looking, crying and looking, never at me, not once at me, though I was the only living help within a mile.

All its attention, every ounce of what it had left, was pointed at that dark water. “Hey,” I called stupidly, “Hey, dog.” It didn’t turn. And that’s when I saw the hand. I’ve gone over this a thousand times trying to decide whether I truly saw it in that first moment or whether my mind put it there later, the way a mind will.

But I believe I saw it. A small pale hand, no bigger than a biscuit, caught up in the branches just below where the dog was standing, rising and falling with the water. Rising, falling. A little white hand in all that brown. I don’t remember deciding to go in. I remember the cold hitting me like a horse’s kick, driving every breath out of my body at once.

And then I remember the current, which is a thing you cannot understand until it has you. It isn’t like being pushed. It’s like being owned. It grabbed my legs and folded them and I went under and came up already 20 ft downstream of where I’d started, spitting river, both arms clawing. Here is where I should tell you that a wiser man would have found a rope, would have run for a horse, for a neighbor, for anything.

And a wiser man would be right. And a wiser man would have watched that little hand go under for good while he was busy being wise. I grabbed the drowned tree. I don’t know how. My hand found a branch and my whole body slammed into the tangle hard enough to crack something in my ribs that I wouldn’t feel until nightfall. And I hung there gasping with the river trying to peel me off.

And above me the yellow dog finally finally looked at me. I will never forget its eyes. There was no fear in them. There was only a question, the oldest question there is. And the dog was asking it of me the way it had probably been asking it of the empty morning for hours. Are you going to help or not? “I’ve got it.” I told it.

My voice came out in pieces. “I’ve got it. I’ve got it.” I worked myself down through the branches toward the hand. The water here was a hair calmer, held back by the bulk of the tree, but it was still strong enough to want me. And every branch I grabbed either held or didn’t with no way to know which until my weight was on it.

My fingers had gone from cold to nothing. I reached the hand and closed my ruined fingers around a wrist so small it frightened me. And I pulled. Nothing came. The child was caught. Not just held by the water, snagged, wedged, some part of her clothing or her body hooked into the drowned branches below the surface, and the river had packed her in there tight.

I pulled again and felt her give an inch and then stop hard, and I heard, over the roar, myself making a sound I didn’t know I could make. Because I had done this before. Not this, but a version of this. I had gone into this same river 431 days before on a bright, still afternoon that had no business being dangerous, and I had reached for a hand and closed my fingers on nothing at all, and the river had kept what it borrowed.

And now here was another hand, another child, and the whole cruel arithmetic of it was too much for a man to hold. I got my feet against the tree trunk under the water. I braced, and I reached down with my other hand into the black cold where I couldn’t see, feeling along the small caught body, a girl, a little girl, her dress bunched and tangled in a fork of the drowned branches, and I worked the wet cloth loose with fingers that had forgotten how to be fingers, tearing when they wouldn’t loosen.

And above me the whole time, the yellow dog stood watch and cried and cried and did not run. She came free all at once. The river tried to take her the instant she was loose, tried to snatch her out of the branches and away downstream. But I had her wrist, and I hauled with everything 431 days of grief had stored up in me.

And I got her up against my chest, and I got my arm around her, and I turned my back to the current like a wall. She was not moving. I want to be honest with you, because you’ve come this far and you deserve honesty. When I got that little girl up against me and felt how still she was, how her head lolled and her lips had gone the color of a bruise, I thought I had done it all for nothing.

I thought the river had won again, twice now, and made me watch both times. Something went out of me right there in the water. I felt it leave. And then the dog barked. Once, sharp, right in my face. It had scrambled down the branches to me, this half-drowned skeleton of a creature, and it barked at me one time hard, and I swear on everything I have that it was an order. Move. Get her out. Now.

So, I moved. Getting to the bank with her was the longest journey of my life, and I remember almost none of it. Flashes. The branch that broke in my hand. The moment my knee found the gravel bar, and I understood I could stand. The dog swimming beside us, its head barely above the water, refusing to go ahead, refusing to fall behind, staying level with the girl the whole way like it had made her a promise.

The mud of the near bank, which I have hated all my life, taking my weight like the hand of a friend. I fell onto the grass with the child, and the world tipped and spun. Cold like I had never known cold. My ribs screaming now, and the little girl in my arms not breathing. I’d seen a man drowned brought back once, years before, by an old Comanche who knew things most white men didn’t bother to learn.

I turned her over my knee, and I struck her back, hard, harder than felt right to strike a child, and water came out of her. A shocking amount of water. Brown river water pouring out of a body no bigger than a lamb, and I struck her again. And I begged her. I said please over and over, which is a thing I had not said to God or man since the day Nell went under. Please, please, please.

The dog stood over us, shaking, dripping, and made that crying sound again, low now, almost a moan. And the little girl coughed. She coughed and vomited river, and dragged in a breath that whistled and rattled, and was the single most beautiful sound I have heard in this life or expect to hear in the next.

And then she began to cry, a real cry, a living child’s outraged, frightened cry. And I gathered her up against me, and I put my face down into her wet hair, and I wept. I wept the way I had not let myself weep in 14 months. I wept for her, and I wept for Nell, and I wept for the man I’d been before the river, and the man I’d become after.

And the two of them met right there on that bank and had it out. The dog pressed itself against my side, trembling, and I got an arm around it, too, and the three of us shook together in the cold, gray morning while the Perdido roared past, cheated of us, all three of us for once. I don’t know how long we stayed like that.

Long enough that the light changed. Long enough that the girl’s crying wore itself down to hiccups, and she went quiet against my chest, one small fist gripping my soaked shirt, and I understood she’d fallen into the kind of sleep that comes after the worst is over. I looked down at her. She was maybe five, maybe six.

Dark hair plastered to a face going slowly from bruise color to pink. A homespun dress, the good kind, hand-sewn, the sort a mother makes when she loves a child and can’t afford to buy her love ready-made. There was a small button sewn to the collar in the shape of a flower, mismatched from the others, and I looked at that button for a long time.

Because a child does not float down a flooding river alone. The thought came into me slow and cold, colder than the water had been. I raised my head and looked upstream at the brown Perdido coming down out of the hills, and I understood that somewhere up there, that morning or the night before, something terrible had happened.

This child had a mother who sewed flower buttons. She had in all likelihood a father and brothers or sisters and a wagon or a home and a whole life that the river had come for in the dark. And a dog, she had this dog. I looked at the yellow dog which had not left my side, which sat now with its ribs heaving and its eyes fixed on the sleeping child like she was the last warm thing in a cold world, which I would come to learn she was.

It had swum. It had climbed. It had cried on that drowned tree for hours guarding a girl it could not save alone calling into the empty dawn for someone anyone and no one had come. Until someone did. “Where did you all come from?” I asked it quietly. My voice didn’t work right yet.

“What happened up there, huh? What happened to your people?” The dog looked at me and did not answer, the way dogs never answer and always somehow do. I got to my feet. It was harder than it should have been. My ribs had decided to make themselves known and the cold had gone bone deep and I was a man past 40 who just fought a river and lost more blood to the branches than I’d noticed.

But I got up with the child in my arms and I stood swaying on the bank of the river that had taken my daughter holding another man’s daughter alive against my chest and I did not know yet what any of it meant. I only knew this. I had gone down into that water expecting to fail. Expecting the river to show me one more time exactly what kind of man I was, the kind who reaches and comes up empty.

And instead I was standing here with something warm and breathing in my arms and the arithmetic of my whole grief had just been thrown into a confusion I didn’t have the strength yet to sort. The house was a quarter mile off. I could see the smoke from the chimney. Ada was in there in the silence we’d built between us, not knowing that the world had just changed.

I started walking. The dog fell in beside me, matching my steps, its shoulder against my leg, and it did not once look back at the river. I told myself it was because there was nothing back there for it anymore. I’ve since wondered if it was because it already knew where home was going to be. Halfway to the house, the girl stirred against my chest.

Her eyes came open, dark eyes, enormous in that small pale face, and she looked up at me, at this soaked stranger carrying her across a field she’d never seen, and I braced for her to scream. She didn’t. She looked at me a long moment. Then she looked past me, down at the dog walking against my leg, and something eased in her face, some knot of terror coming loose, and she said one word, cracked and small and barely there.

Boon. The dog’s head came up. “Is that his name?” I asked, my voice shook. “Boon?” She didn’t answer. Her eyes were already closing again. But her hand came free of my shirt and reached down, groping, and the dog understood and pushed its head up under her fingers, and she got a fistful of that wet yellow fur and held on.

And only then, holding both of us, did she let herself go back under into sleep. I stopped in the middle of the field because I knew, standing there, that whatever came next, whoever this child belonged to, wherever her people were, whatever grief was waiting upstream to be discovered, I was not going to be able to hand her over easy.

I’d known her for the length of a river crossing and the walk across one field. It shouldn’t have been enough time to matter. It was enough time to matter. I looked toward the house and the smoke and Ada inside it, and I thought about the number I’d counted that morning, 431, and I understood I was going to have to stop counting now.

That the counting had ended somewhere back there in the brown water. That today was going to have to become day one of something, though of what I couldn’t yet say. Then the child coughed in her sleep, a small wet sound, and I remembered she was cold and I was cold, and every minute I stood there thinking was a minute she went without a fire.

So I stopped thinking. I walked, and the dog walked with me. I was almost to the door when Ada opened it. She had a dish towel in her hands. She’d heard nothing out here past the roar of the river, and she stood in the doorway in her apron with the warm light behind her, and looked at her husband coming across the field soaked to the bone and bleeding, carrying a child she had never seen, with a strange yellow dog at his heel.

And I watched 14 months of silence break across her face all at once. Her hand came up to her mouth. And I opened my own mouth to explain, to tell her everything, the crying and the water and the little caught hand, and found I could not make a single word come out. Ada took the girl from my arms in the doorway without a word.

The way you take something you’d been waiting your whole life to be handed, and she carried her to the fire while I stood dripping on my own floor and shook. I want to tell you about my wife now, because you can’t understand the rest without her. Ada had not cried at Nell’s grave, not once, not that I ever saw, and I’d held it against her in the ugly private way grief makes you hold things against the people you love most.

I decided somewhere in those 14 months that she’d gone hard. That the loss had turned her to something cold. Because she moved through our house like a woman doing a job, cooking and cleaning and mending, dry-eyed, closed up. I’d been wrong, of course. I know that now. She hadn’t gone hard. She’d gone so soft that a single crack would have taken the hold of her, and so she’d made herself into a thing with no cracks at all, because she had a husband to keep alive who was busy counting days by the river and forgetting to eat.

But when she knelt by the fire and started peeling the wet dress off that half-drowned child, I watched the thing with no cracks come apart. Her hands shook. She got the girl into one of the old quilts and rubbed the small cold limbs and murmured to her, low, steady, and there were tears running down my wife’s face and dropping off her chin, and she paid them no mind at all, like she’d forgotten what they were.

The dog, Boone, lay down against the hearthstones as close to the girl as he could get without being in the fire, and put his head on his paws, and finally, at last, closed his eyes. I built the fire up. I got out of my own wet clothes. I did the small useful things, and between them I told Ada what had happened in pieces in the flat voice you use when the thing you’re saying is too big to say any other way.

The crying from the river, the hand in the branches, the wedge of drowned tree. She listened without looking up from the child, and when I got to the part where I’d gone into the water, her hands went still for just a second and then kept moving. “You went in,” she said, not a question. I went in. She didn’t say anything about the river, or about Nell, or about the promise I’d made her the winter before that I would never, ever go back into that water, no matter what, because she could not bury two of us. She didn’t say any of it.

But it was all there in the room with us, and we both knew it. And after a while, she reached out with one hand without turning, and I crossed the floor and took it. And we stayed like that. Her kneeling by the fire and me standing over her, holding hands over a strange child, for the first time in a long time not alone in the same house.

The girl’s name was Josie. We learned it that evening when she woke enough to take some warm broth spoon by spoon from Ada’s hand. She didn’t say much. She was five, we guessed, maybe six. She knew her name, and she knew the dog’s name, and she knew, in the way small children know things they cannot possibly carry, that something had happened to her family, though she could not or would not say what.

When Ada gently asked about her mama, Josie’s face did a thing I hope to never see on a child’s face again. It just closed, like a door, and she turned it into Boone’s neck and would not come out for an hour. We didn’t ask again that night. But I knew I had to ride upstream in the morning, because somewhere up there was the truth of it, and men were maybe searching, and a family maybe waiting.

And however much my worn-out heart had already wrapped itself around that little girl, she was not mine to keep out of grief and wanting. She belonged to someone. I owed it to whoever that someone was to find them. I rode out at first light with the dog trotting ahead of me the whole way, sure of the direction in a manner that put a cold weight in my chest, because a dog that knows the way home is a dog leading you to a home.

We found it 6 mi up, where the Holloway Road forded the Perdida at the old crossing, the crossing everyone in the country knew was safe, had always been safe, was safe right up until 9 days of rain made the river a liar. There were wagon tracks going down into the water and none coming out. There was a broken wheel caught in the willows 100 yards downstream. There was a man’s hat.

And there were two graves fresh dug on the high bank above the ford with a third started and not finished. And a party of men from a settlement I didn’t know standing around them with their hats in their hands. And when Boone saw the graves, he stopped dead in the road and made that sound again. The crying sound.

The one that had pulled me out of my kitchen and into the river. And every man there turned to look. I’ll spare you most of it. There are details a story doesn’t need and a family doesn’t deserve to have spread around. The short of it is this. A family, the Kauffmans, mother and father and three children, had tried the crossing at dusk two nights before coming through on their way to homestead land west of Holloway.

Not knowing the river the way we knew it. Not knowing that the safe old ford had turned into a killing thing in the dark. The wagon had gone over. The men from the settlement come looking when the family never arrived. Had found the wreck and recovered the mother and the father and two of the children downstream.

And had buried them there on the bank because there was no way and no reason to carry them further. They had not found the youngest, a little girl Josie. They had given her up for lost. As lost as the river’s name promised. And had been about to finish the third small grave. An empty one. A marker. So the child would have a place even without a body to put in it.

When I rode up out of the trees with her dog beside me and told them the little girl was alive. Wrapped in a quilt by my fire six miles downstream. Warm and breathing and cross about the broth. I have seen men receive good news. I had never before that day seen grown men receive news that made them sit down in the road and cover their faces.

But that’s what happened. Because they’d spent two days pulling a family out of the water and had made their peace, the grim frontier peace, with the whole of it being dead, and here was one small piece of it that wasn’t. One, alive. The math of grief had been wrong by exactly one child. And it was as though that single correction let a little air back into a world that had run entirely out of it.

That’s when the arithmetic of my own grief spoke up again, quiet and merciless, the way it always did. Because Josie had no one now. No mother, no father, no brothers, no sister. The settlement men knew of an aunt back east, maybe, somewhere in Ohio, a name on a letter they’d write, they’d try. But it might be months.

It might be nothing. And in the meantime, there was a five-year-old girl asleep by my fire who had lost every soul that belonged to her in a single night, in the same river, in the same water that had. I sat on my horse above those graves, and I understood the decision that was coming for me. And I understood that it was not really a decision at all.

I rode home slower than I’d ridden out. Here is the morally heavy part, the part I’ve never told straight to anyone, and I’ll tell it to you now and let you judge it however you judge it. Some part of me, I won’t pretend it wasn’t there, some part of me did not want them to find the aunt in Ohio. Some part of me, riding home in the cold with the dog trotting ahead, hoped the letter would come back with no such person or no answer at all.

Because I had gone into that river a hollowed-out man counting days, and I had come out of it holding a warm and living reason to stop counting, and I did not want to give it back. I wanted to keep her. I wanted it so badly and so selfishly that I was ashamed because wanting to keep a grieving orphan child to fill the hole your own dead child left is not a clean or a noble thing.

It’s just a hungry thing dressed up as love. I told Ada about it that night, all of it, including the ugly part. I made myself say the ugly part out loud that I’d hoped the aunt wouldn’t exist. I thought she might look at me differently for it. She didn’t. She was quiet a long while. Then she said, and these are close to her exact words, I’ve held on to them.

She said, “Amos, wanting to love a child isn’t the sin. The sin would be pretending you’re doing it for her sake and not your own. As long as you know which it is, you can do right by her either way.” And that, more than anything I did in the river, was the thing that started to fix me. The aunt in Ohio was real.

That’s the twist of it, if you want a twist. The real life doesn’t twist so much as it just keeps turning. The letter took 11 weeks to go and 11 weeks to come back. And in that time, Josie lived in our house and slept in Nell’s old bed with Boone on the floor beside her. And I learned that a 5-year-old who has lost everything does not get better in a straight line.

She got better and then worse and then better, waking screaming from the water some nights, laughing at the dog some mornings. And every one of those nights, and every one of those mornings put another stitch in a wife and a husband who had been coming quietly apart at the seams. We didn’t set out to heal ourselves on her.

We set out to take care of her, which is a different thing, and the healing came in through the side door while we weren’t watching, the way it does. The aunt was real and she was kind. You could tell from the letter, from the words she chose, that she was a good woman who had loved her sister and wept for her, and wanted this last living piece of the family more than anything on Earth.

She would come in the spring when the roads dried to take Josie home to Ohio, to a house with cousins and a school, and a whole family that would raise her up knowing where she came from. It was the right thing. I knew it was the right thing. Ada knew it. Even Josie, in her small way, knew it. She’d started to talk about the aunt, Aunt Martha, turning the name over like a smooth stone, and you could see her building a place in her mind to go.

That didn’t make the morning the wagon came any easier. Aunt Martha was everything her letters promised. She held Josie and cried, and thanked us in words that ran out fast because words always do. And she loaded a small trunk and a smaller girl into a rented wagon on a bright cold spring morning.

And Ada stood on the porch with her arms wrapped around herself, and I stood in the yard with my hat in my hands, doing the flower button trick of holding my face very still. Josie hugged Ada. Josie hugged me, her arms not reaching all the way around, her face pressed into my shirt in the same spot her fist had gripped a year before. Then she climbed up onto the wagon seat beside her aunt, and she looked down, and she looked around the yard, and her whole small face fell into confusion and then alarm.

And she said the thing that undid me completely. Where’s Boone? Now here is the choice, the last one, the heavy one, though it might not sound heavy to you. Boone had become mine over that winter, or I’d become his. He slept at the foot of our bed. He’d taken to walking the property line with me every evening, my shadow, my second heart, the only living thing besides Ada who’d been down in that water with me and come out the other side.

In 11 weeks he’d stitched himself into my grief the same way the girl had, and losing him was going to take a piece I wasn’t sure I had left to give. He was by every right the girl’s dog. He’d been her family’s dog. He’d guarded her in the flood, cried for her for hours on a drowned tree, refused to leave her side across a field in a winter.

He belonged to Josie in a way that had nothing to do with who fed him now. I looked at that dog sitting in the yard between the porch and the wagon, looking from the girl to me and back, and I understood he’d made a choice, too, and that he’d made it a long time before I got around to making mine, because he wasn’t moving toward the wagon and he wasn’t moving toward me.

He was waiting to be told. I knelt down in the cold spring mud, and I took his head in my two hands, and I put my forehead against his forehead the way I hadn’t done with any living thing but Nell, and I said something to him too quiet for anyone else to hear. Then I stood up and I whistled him toward the wagon and I said, loud enough for the girl, “Go on, Boone.

Go on with your girl.” He went. He jumped up onto the wagon seat and turned around three times and laid down across Josie’s small feet like he’d been doing it all her life. And the girl put both hands into that yellow fur and buried her face in it. And Aunt Martha looked at me with her eyes swimming and mouthed, “Thank you.

” And I nodded, because my own words had gone off somewhere and left me standing in the mud. The wagon pulled out. I watched it to the end of the lane. I watched it turn onto the Hallaway Road. I watched it get small and smaller, the dog’s yellow shape a bright point against the seat until the trees took it, and then it was gone, all of it, the girl and the dog both, down the same road that led to the same river.

Though they’d cross it this time on the good high bridge they’d built that winter, safe above the water. Ada came down off the porch and stood beside me in the yard. Neither of us said anything for a while. The Perdido was loud down past the field, running high with the spring melt, up to its old work, borrowing what it borrowed. “431,” Ada said finally.

I looked at her. “That’s how many days you counted,” she said. “I knew you were counting. I counted, too. I just counted different.” She wiped her face with the flat of her hand, not hiding it now, not for a long time now. “I think we ought to stop, Amos. I think we ought to start counting something else.” I put my arm around my wife and she leaned into me, and we stood in the empty yard where a girl and a dog had been.

And I did not count the days since Nell. For the first time in 14 months, I did not do the sum. I let it go, the way you finally let the current take the branch you’ve been clinging to when you realize, all at once, that it was never keeping you afloat. It was only keeping you in the river. The house was quiet behind us, but it was a different quiet now, not the quiet of a thing that’s died, the quiet of a thing resting between one hard season and whatever comes next.

We went in. Ada put the coffee on. And it was only when I sat down at the table in my own chair, across from my wife in hers, with the chair between us finally, finally empty, that I noticed the small flower button on the windowsill where Josie had left it, pressed off her collar and set there like a person leaves a thing on purpose for someone to find and remember them by.

I picked it up. I held it a long time. I didn’t tell Ada it was there. Some things a man carries don’t get lighter with time.