Puppy Pirates #7

by Erin Soderberg

  She was just about to nose open a crate when a voice bellowed, “Are you sneaking food?”

  Henry and the three pups whipped around. Ruby stood behind them, her arms folded across her chest. Pete the Mighty was perched on her shoulder, like a parrot.

  “It’s none of your business,” Henry snapped, putting his finger to his lips. “And keep your voice down.”

  “It sure is my business,” Ruby said quietly. “My mates and I have been stuck in a lifeboat without food for days. If you’ve got food, we want some.”

  Henry sighed. “Fine. Keep a lookout for Steak-Eye, and we’ll share with you.”

  The pugs nudged the crate of treats open. “It’s empty!” Piggly wailed.

  Puggly pawed open another crate. “This one is empty, too!”

  Henry peered into a third crate. “In case you were wondering, they’re all empty!”

  Ruby took a deep breath. She shook her head. “The Triangle strikes again,” she said.

  “The Triangle?” Wally and the pugs yelped at the same time.

  “What does the Triangle have to do with this?” Henry asked.

  “Missing food, strange storms, no wind…,” Ruby said in a hush. “It’s all part of the legend. All we need now is a bunch of fog, some ripped sails, and a broken compass…and we’re doomed.”

  “We sailed through fog,” Henry admitted. “When we were following your SOS signal. It got very foggy all of a sudden. The ship was totally covered in fog.”

  “Uh-oh,” Ruby said. “That’s not good.”

  Then a voice rang out from the main deck. “Captain!” one of the deckhands barked. “There’s a rip in the main sail.”

  Ruby and Henry looked at each other. The pugs hopped into the empty crates. Wally’s tail drooped.

  Ruby’s eyes went wide with fear. “This is not good at all.”

  Wally and his friends raced out of the kitchen. Ruby chased after Henry and the others as they ran up the stairs. She cuddled her kitten mate safely inside her arms. The group slid across the deck just as Leo and some of the other deckhands dropped a shredded sail on the ship’s deck.

  “Well, shiver me timbers,” grumbled Captain Red Beard. “It must have ripped in the wind.”

  “Could be that,” Spike said. The chubby bulldog was trembling. “Or it could be that the legend of the Triangle is coming true. First there was the fog, then that weird storm, now we have a ripped sail—”

  “And our food is gone!” Piggly barked loudly. “The treats? They disappeared!”

  All the puppy pirates began barking at once. The kitten pirates meowed and wailed.

  “We’re doomed!” shrieked Moopsy.

  “The Triangle is trying to eat us!” hissed Boopsy.

  “I need a hug and a cuddle!” wailed Fluffy the Claw.

  “Avast! Stop being such a pack of scaredy-cats,” Curly ordered. “There has to be a good explanation for all of this nonsense.”

  Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t. Recess, Frosty, and a few of the youngest pups looked very scared. Spike was hiding under his favorite blanket. Einstein had buried himself under a pile of crumpled maps.

  Wally tried to keep his tail up. He knew it was important to be brave and strong to help his mates…even if he would rather snuggle tight inside his bunk and hide with Henry.

  “Captain!” Wayne called from the steering cabin. “Captain, you need to come quickly.”

  The whole pack followed as Captain Red Beard trotted toward the steering cabin. “What is it?” he asked.

  “The compass, sir,” said Wayne. “It’s—it’s broken. Again.”

  Wally looked at the pugs. So did many of the other puppy pirates. But both of the naughty pugs shook their heads. “It wasn’t us this time,” Puggly promised. “We were in the galley.”

  “You say it’s broken?” Red Beard asked, scratching his head. “Are you sure?”

  Wayne howled. “Aye, aye arrrr-oooo! I’m sure. How will we steer our way out of the Triangle if we don’t know where we’re going?”

  Curly pushed through the pack and stormed into the steering cabin. “Impossible,” she said. “Someone must be playing tricks on us. Someone like…”

  The tough-talking first mate glared at the kitten pirates. They were all squished together, looking like a messy pile of fur with many heads. “Someone like a cat. That sail could easily have been ripped by one of your filthy claws. Are you also responsible for this broken compass? Did you steal our food?”

  The puppy pirates growled and snarled at the cats.

  The kitten pirates showed their claws. They arched their backs.

  “It was you, eh?” Captain Red Beard snapped. “You think you can play tricks on us, do ya? If you mess with us, we’ll send you back to your lifeboat, and you can fend for yourselves.”

  The kitten pirates weren’t going to take the blame without fighting back. “You can’t blame us for your broken-down boat!” Fluffy the Claw said.

  “Blame the Triangle!” said Moopsy.

  “It’s trying to trap us all,” agreed Boopsy.

  “We never should have brought you stinky furballs on board our ship,” Red Beard said. “Cats can never be trusted.”

  “All of you, hush,” Old Salt barked, rapping his peg leg on the deck. “Settle in. I’m going to tell you a story.”

  Curly sighed. “Old Salt, the last thing anyone on this ship needs right now is another scary story. Don’t you think we have enough trouble as it is?”

  Old Salt coughed up another hair ball. “This story is true,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It’s the story of how I became a pirate.”

  There was a murmur of excitement. That was a story every pup wanted to hear. Even at a time like this. The cats pretended they weren’t listening, but Wally could see them all prick up their ears.

  “Many long years ago,” Old Salt began, “I was sailing through the Triangle in a ship much like this one. The ship was carrying a load of pups to a wonderful farm that had hired us to help watch over their animals and land.”

  “You were a farm dog?” Wally asked. He was excited. Wally had lived on a farm before joining the puppy pirate crew!

  “I didn’t say that,” Old Salt told him with a small, mysterious smile. “Besides, that detail is not important to this story. As I was saying, I was on a ship filled with Bernese mates and many other types of pups—all of whom were going off on adventures of their own. The ship we were traveling on was captained by…Dread Pirate Wrinkles.”

  All the puppy pirates gasped.

  Old Salt waited for everyone to settle, then continued his story. “We were crossing the Triangle when, suddenly, a storm came out of nowhere. It knocked our ship to and fro. I had never seen a storm like that. In all the tipping and turning, I was knocked overboard. The crew tried to save me. They dropped a lifeboat. But as soon as I got into the little boat, I was blown away from the main ship. I watched my mates disappear into the fog. I was alone in a lifeboat, in the middle of the Grrr-muda Triangle.”

  “So that story of the disappearing ship you told…It was your ship that disappeared?” Frosty asked, his face filled with wonder.

  “Aye,” Old Salt said. “It disappeared from view. I was left to save myself.”

  “What happened?” asked Recess, her eyes wide.

  “I floated in that boat for days,” Old Salt said. “A few other ships passed near me, but no one stopped. I don’t know if they didn’t see me…or if they chose not to see me. Many of those boats were busy doing their own thing, and they were filled with pups who were very different from me. Some were busy carrying human passengers, hauling supplies, or fishing for food. They were all focused on their own business, and none of them could stop to help a stranger. Until one day, someone did come to my rescue.”

  “Who?” Red Beard asked.

  �
��It was a pirate ship,” said Old Salt. “A pirate ship filled with both dogs and cats.”

  “Puppy pirates and kitten pirates?” Wally asked. He was surprised to hear this. He had only known kittens as the enemy. Had dogs and cats once been friends? It must have been a very long time ago.

  “Aye,” said Old Salt. “And you know what? It was one of the cats who convinced the crew to stop for me. Once they pulled me off that lifeboat, she told me why they had stopped. She said they were following the code of the sea. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t one of them. It only mattered that I was a pirate at heart. She knew I had pirate blood in me because I had fought to survive in the Triangle. And that made me one of them.”

  Old Salt gazed around at all his fellow pirates. “That’s why no one is leaving anyone anywhere. We’re pirates. No matter how different we might look from one another, we all have a little something in common. We’re all in this together, and we’re going to get out of it together.”

  As Old Salt finished his story, a light wind began to blow out of the west. The clouds lifted and the sky cleared.

  “I can try to repair this sail so we can get on our way,” Ruby said.

  “I’ll help,” offered Henry. “I guess it doesn’t matter how it ripped. What matters is that it’s fixable.”

  The two humans got to work mending the sail. Meanwhile, the pugs led a search for the missing snacks. They started by asking Steak-Eye where he saw them last.

  “I saw them exactly where I hid them,” Steak-Eye said.

  “You hid the snacks?” Puggly said, confused. “From what?”

  “From you two,” Steak-Eye said. “And I hid them where you would never find them.”

  The snacks were in the cleaning closet! The pug twins were always trying to get out of work, so Steak-Eye knew they would never look in there.

  No one could explain the strange weather—that was still a mystery. But now that the clouds had cleared, it seemed like smooth sailing from here on out. The only problem? Their compass was still broken.

  “Without our compass, we have no idea which way we’re sailing,” Einstein pointed out. “We can read our maps to see where we need to go, but we might be sailing in the exact wrong direction. If the current is strong enough, we might even sail in circles.”

  “It will be night soon,” Curly said. “We can try to use the North Star to guide us.”

  Spike shuddered. “I don’t want to be in the Triangle at night. Let’s get out of here while the sun’s still shining!”

  “Do you have an idea for how we can fix this compass, then?” Curly asked.

  “I do,” offered Fluffy the Claw.

  All the dogs spun around and stared at the kitten pirate. “You do?” asked Captain Red Beard.

  “Aye,” Fluffy the Claw said. “There’s an old, wise cat who lives on our ship. She taught us how to build our own compass. She always says, ‘If you can’t figure out which direction you are pointed in, you can’t figure out how to get to where you need to be.’ ”

  “Old Salt always says that, too!” Wally woofed. He glanced at the old pup and thought the Bernese mountain dog winked at him. But he couldn’t be sure.

  “So are you going to tell us, or what?” Red Beard barked.

  “All we need is a cork, a bowl of water, a metal pin of some kind, and a magnet,” Fluffy the Claw said. “With those four simple things, we can make a compass.”

  Pups scattered, searching for the supplies they needed. Puggly brought a couple of hairpins she used to attach her bows. “Will these work?” she asked. Fluffy the Claw nodded.

  Steak-Eye set out a bowl of water. Einstein found a cork in the galley. Piggly galloped across the deck, carrying the pugs’ magnet in her mouth.

  “I’ve got it!” Piggly cried. “The final piece!” She raced forward, her little paws pounding on the deck. But just as she drew near, she tripped on the bowl of water. It spilled, sending water everywhere. Piggly’s paws slid in four different directions. She skidded across the slippery deck. The magnet flew out of her mouth. Everyone watched in horror as the magnet tumbled through the air—and over the ship’s rail. It landed with a plop! in the water far below.

  “Nooooooo!” wailed Captain Red Beard.

  “This is it,” howled Spike. “We are going to be lost in the Triangle forever.”

  “Not so fast,” said Old Salt. “I have another idea.”

  Wally and the other pups pricked up their ears.

  Old Salt said, “Many long years ago, a very wise sailor showed me another way to build a compass. We didn’t have a magnet. So she showed me how to use fur to magnetize the compass instead. We just have to rub our compass needle with a bit of fur, and it should point north.”

  Captain Red Beard sat on one of Puggly’s metal hairpins. He wiggled his rump around. “Like this?”

  “Not exactly.” Old Salt chuckled. “Any of you kittens want to lend me a tail?”

  Moopsy volunteered. Old Salt showed Henry how to rub the hairpin along the fur, over and over, always in the same direction. “After fifty strokes, it should be magnetized.”

  The puppies and the kittens counted out loud together, all the way up to fifty.

  When the hairpin was ready, Old Salt pushed it into the cork. Finally, he dropped the cork and pin into a fresh bowl of water. Wally held his breath. Would this really work? It seemed like magic.

  “It floats!” cried Captain Red Beard. “Look at that!”

  The homemade needle slowly spun in the water. Finally, it settled in place, pointing at the starboard side of the ship.

  “In case you were wondering,” Henry said, peering over the bowl. “A magnetized needle will point north and south.” He pointed toward the bow of the ship. “And since the sun is beginning to set in front of us, we must be going west right now.”

  “So north is that way?” Wally asked, looking over the starboard rail.

  “That is correct,” said Old Salt. “It looks like it is time for us to be on our way.”

  Captain Red Beard ordered his crew to set their ship’s course due east. According to Einstein, this was the quickest path out of the Triangle. “If I am reading my maps correctly,” he said, “this route should also take us straight past Clawfish Island.”

  “Then we can get rid of these filthy kittens and be on our way,” Red Beard said joyfully.

  The wind was now blowing firmly out of the west, nudging their ship in the right direction. Wally thought it seemed as if the Triangle was helping to lead their ship to safety—and the kittens back to their crew.

  With the day turning quickly into evening, the puppy pirates sang pirate shanties as they raised their sails and set off. The ship bounced merrily on the waves. No more thunder echoed in the sky. The fog was long gone. In some ways, it felt like everything that had happened in the Triangle had been some sort of strange dream.

  The sky had shifted to a deep purple color. A full moon lit up the night, casting enough light that it looked as if thousands of diamonds were shimmering on the surface of the water.

  Steak-Eye hauled out a feast for everyone. He even offered the kitten pirates some of his famous stew. The cats sniffed it from a distance. At first, they turned up their noses, then turned and flicked their tails at the meal. But the kitten pirates were so hungry that none of them could act snobby and picky for long. Soon they were lapping up every morsel and begging for more.

  “This is the purr-fect thing to fill my belly after so many days without food,” Boopsy sighed. “Dog food isn’t half bad, you know?”

  Wally and Steak-Eye exchanged knowing looks. The two of them and Henry were the only sailors on board who knew about Steak-Eye’s secret ingredient: kitty food! It was no wonder the cats were enjoying their supper so much.

  “Don’t get used to this kindness,” Captain Red Beard growled at the cats. “Just because
our two crews teamed up to save everyone’s hides today, it doesn’t mean we’re mates now.”

  “Aye,” Fluffy the Claw hissed. “Enemies always.”

  “Always,” Red Beard vowed.

  “But,” Fluffy the Claw added quietly, “if your pack ever finds itself in a mess where you need a few extra paws…we do owe you for coming to our rescue. I’ve heard cats have nine lives. I might be willing to spare part of one to help a fellow pirate in need.”

  Red Beard and Fluffy the Claw shook on the deal.

  “This is it, mates,” Einstein said suddenly, looking up from his pile of maps. “We are just about to sail out of the Triangle.”

  “Arrrr-oooo!” Spike howled. “Arrrr-oooo!”

  Old Salt hobbled toward the ship’s stern. Wally joined him. Together, the two pups looked out over the waters they had just sailed through. With a nod of his head, Old Salt said, “Farewell, Triangle.”

  Wally sniffed at the sea air. There was something…strange in this wind. His fur rose, and his tail stiffened. He felt sure that something was going to happen. But what now?

  Suddenly, the sky lit up with a thousand colors. Scarlet, orange, yellow, teal, and emerald lights streaked across the night sky. The colors danced along the horizon, wiggling and swaying like waves. It almost seemed as if the Triangle was saying goodbye in its own mysterious way.

  “What in the name of Growlin’ Grace is going on?” barked Captain Red Beard.

  “That looks like the northern lights,” Henry said, his face filled with wonder.

  “Aye,” Curly agreed. “But we don’t usually see the northern lights this far south. Seeing them in the sky way down in warm waters like this? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “ ’Tis another mystery of the Grrr-muda Triangle,” Old Salt said quietly.

  Wally wondered if maybe there was something magical about the Triangle after all. He had a feeling he might not ever know for sure.