Narrated in the third person, the third story in the collection also takes place in rural Georgia, with the corpse of Old Man Teague—the protagonist’s father and the story’s consummate “man among men” (30)—as its centerpiece. Part 1 opens with the old man lying in a casket, with the “determined-to-die look on his face that he had worn throughout his final two months of decline [...] all because of a dog” (30). The story then relates the time leading up to the old man’s death through the memory of the protagonist: his son, Thomas Teague, the town’s law enforcement officer.

Thomas recalls the disappearance of and search for the dog, Smokey Dawn, and his father’s decline after the dog was found and buried. He remembers a night after the dog’s death when he was called to the scene of an accident in which a deer was hit. Before leaving, he checks in on his father, who fails to recognize Thomas, then mistakes Thomas for Thomas’s dead brother, Earl. When Thomas asks if the old man remembers him, the old man says Thomas is dead. Thomas becomes angry and wants to “shake the old man [...] but what was the use of that” (34).