Soldier Dog

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Twelve hours had passed. He’d last seen her at eight that morning. Faint with exhaustion and hunger, Stanley sank down. How on earth could he find a creature lighter and quieter than the wind? He called out to her but his voice was caught up and whisked away over the sedge grass. All day out searching he’d seen only five dogs. There were fewer dogs in Longridge now, just as there was less of everything, because of the War.

He rose and pushed his bicycle up, on beneath the tracery of a rowan, dizzyingly suffused and glowing with tarnished orange, on upward to Rocky Brow. Stanley called out again. A merlin rose and dashed away in alarm, but the sedge and the hawthorn gave no answer. Rocky Brow was Stanley’s last hope. He’d said to himself he’d go all the way there and then turn back. When he got home, it would all depend on Da’s mood. Stanley never knew what to expect any more. Living with Da was like living with a volcano.

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