He gives her a grin, settling onto the haybale and leaving room next to him if she wants to sit. And carefully opens the book, looking for the dog-eared page.
"With no more noise than the shadow of a winging hawk, Rowdy turned and padded from sight in the folding green. Standing as still as the sy... sih... sycamores around me, I waited and listened. I didn’t have to wait long. The bell-like tones of my old dog’s voice jarred the silence around me. He was bawling treed, and his deep voice was telling me and the whole wide world that he had something up a tree.
To let Rowdy know that I was coming, I reared back and whooped as loud as I could, “Who-o-e-e, tell it to him, boy. Sing him a hound-dog song.”
And he howls along to this, though quietly, and resumes reading from Summer of the Monkeys. It has a boy, a dog, horses, and monkeys. What more could anyone ask for?