Very dry and very serious, classic yet somewhat casual and very authoritative and warm and very alert and savvy, very grounded and stable like a business man or spokesperson, actually though he is the leaf-life book author H. C. Otterman. He speaks with weight, authority and above all Hal Otterman speaks very deliberately with authentic contemplation and precision.
Dog behavior, he had noted in the first week almost as an afterthought, turned out to matter more than weather. Dogs, it seemed, were already doing what Hal was learning to do. They moved toward certain frequencies the way water moves toward low ground — not deciding, simply going. He had mentioned this in passing to the vet on Irving, a compact, unhurried woman who listened without performing surprise and said only that dogs are reliable about bodies, which Hal wrote down verbatim because it was the most credentialed confirmation his investigation was likely to receive, and the column it belonged in was not one he had named yet.
He had already confirmed this with the vet on Irving, that compact and unhurried woman who had leaned in the doorway and said that dogs are reliable about bodies, and Hal had written that down verbatim because it had the quality of a heading that had been waiting for its column.
He wrote the name at the top of the column. He underlined it once with the ruler. The calibration, the long and undramatic kind, continued.
He passed the corner where he had once stood with his boombox in the early days of the notebook, before he had known what he was measuring, and he did not stop. That work was banked. He had nothing to prove to the corner.
