LUCKY'S LAST RUN

One dog and two complete strangers set out to run across America. Over some 3,000 miles and 101 days, the strangers shared stories of ambition, addiction, dreams, and fate. But they never discussed the worst day of the trip, which they knew was coming.

- STEVE FRIEDMAN

THE MUTT WHEEZED and shivered, but the salesman didn't panic. They had run 15 miles together that morning, west toward California. The mutt had chased rabbits and cattle, and when the mutt seemed thirsty, the salesman took a gulp from one of the four water bottles he carried and spit it into the mutt's mouth.

It was 3:45 p.m., Sunday, August 22, 2021, and the salesman and the mutt stood next to a water pump in the high country of Sweetwater County, at the intersection of U.S. 191 and Highway 28, outside the entrance of the larger of the two restaurants in Farson, Wyoming, population 211. The salesman poured cold water from the pump onto the mutt's broad back, stroked his sides, and felt fur come loose into his hands.

They'd started their journey in Georgia, 78 days and 1,926 miles ago. Watching from 30 feet away, worrying, stood the third member of their party, a chef by profession who handled driving, caring for the mutt, shopping, cooking, gassing up the RV, pulling up the jacks and stabilizing bars every morning, finding water, and dumping sewage. The chef wrote in his journal a lot, about the settlers who'd lost family to disease and violence as they traveled this way hundreds of years ago, or the genocide wrought by those settlers on the indigenous people. Everyone who knew the chef spoke of his generosity and compassion, but he did have a tendency to brood.

The salesman, whose name is David Green, was 57 years old, an ultrarunner and entrepreneur who owned five companies and had started and sold a dozen others. He lived in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife of 29 years, Monica, in a 5,000-square-foot house on the Intracoastal Waterway with an enclosed pool.