LITTLE BOY LOST

WHEN DYLAN EHLER DISAPPEARED, THE INTERNET TURNED ON HIS PARENTS

- Katherine Laidlaw

DYLAN EHLER CAME INTO THE WORLD RUNNING.

He pummelled and squirmed his way through his mom's pregnancy. He was a boy in constant motion. Almost as soon as he was crawling, he was climbing. His parents, Ashley Brown and Jason Ehler, would walk into their living room, in a grey-green house in a place called Bible Hill, across the Salmon River from the town of Truro, Nova Scotia, to find him perched on the windowsill, grasping at the ledge above.

Dylan turned three in April 2020. In the weeks after, the atmosphere in the family home was tense. Because of the pandemic lockdown, Ashley lost her job as a detailer for a Hyundai dealer, and Jason lost his delivering water bottles for the Canadian Springs plant. Money was tighter than usual, and it was usually pretty tight. Lily, Ashley's 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, was home all day while she attended virtual school. And Dylan was Dylan, running around the house with a smile, blink-andyou'd-miss-him like always.

Three-quarters of Nova Scotia is blanketed by gnarled fir, spruce and pine. Bible Hill sits at the innermost point of an inlet off of Cobequid Bay, which is an offshoot of the Bay of Fundy. The town is a quiet, pastoral kind of place that offers little by way of excitement but ambling Holsteins.

So, in the early months of the pandemic, 32-year-old Ashley joined TikTok, the app she'd seen all over social media, as an escape. When she had time, she'd upload clips in batches. She posted a video of her swaying in a hoodie and baseball cap, backlit in red, to a Nelly song. In another, she blows puffs of smoke from a joint toward the camera. In one clip, Dylan sits beside her, smiling widely: "You ever just look at somebody," she mouths along to the meme, "and think to yourself, 'This motherfucker is going to be the reason I go to jail?".