Excerpt: Where Thunder Comes From

Harper was a stray dog. One of the local boys had an idea that he was going to keep him in secret. Allan They boy also wanted to keep Harper from getting into any more scrapes with the neighborhood pets so he had tied him up to an old trailer in the junkyard. He had already been in more fights than he ever should have picked and he had the deformities to prove it. One eye was bad. He walked with a limp. He panted from just walking lately. He had mange. His teeth had become too sensitive for many things these days. Years of eating what he could from where ever he could left him with a ruined digestive system and he was terribly flatulent. The tip of his tale was long since gone. The only thing fit for fighting on the old lad was his ego.
There he was tied down with a shabby rope when all the other dogs were mocking him by running around free outside the gate. They didn't have these problems with their bone health as he did. They growled and snapped at him.
Then there was a rumbling somewhere far off. All the dogs fell silent for a moment. A strong gust of wind tore through the air. There had been some gusts earlier from the storm but this one was unnatural. There was a blot of dark clouds off in the east just over the bay. Lightning flashed sporadically among that dark blot. This continued for a while. Some of the dogs had turned to run away from it but the alpha male stood fascinated. The ones who had run stopped at the end of the street looking for approval from him to continue running. He looked back at them and then back again at the clouds.