Waggit's Tale

by Peter Howe

  There was a crack, followed by a clang as the branch snapped in two and the door slammed into place. Cal stood, with the meat in his mouth, inside the cage, with no apparent way of getting out.

  “Oh no, Cal,” said Raz. “Don’t get trapped; don’t let the Ruzelas get you. Please!”

  Cal just stood there, still holding on to the meat, bewildered.

  “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I was so stupid,” said Tazar, the anger clear in his voice. “We should have quit when we were ahead. What are we going to do about this?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “I need rocks, lots of rocks of all different sizes,” he said.

  Both he and Raz went about getting an assortment and bringing them to the front of the cage. The smaller ones they carried in their mouths, but the larger ones had to be rolled forward with their noses. When they had acquired what the leader considered to be enough he turned to Raz.

  “What we are going to do is this,” he said. “I’m going to grab hold of the bottom of the trapdoor with my teeth and try and pull it up a little way. When I do, you push one of the small rocks underneath to stop it from going back down again. Then I’ll try and pull it up a bit farther, and you push in a bigger rock, and so on until we make an opening big enough for Cal to crawl out.”

  “Okay, Tazar, let’s do it,” said Raz, desperate to get his friend free. Tazar hooked his big, curved bottom teeth around the wire of the door. He pulled as hard as he could. He felt the pressure in his mouth, but nothing moved. He uncoupled himself from the cage and looked at it, and then he spotted the problem. At the bottom there was a small latch that fell into position when the door came down. Very carefully he hooked a claw around the latch and pulled. A sharp stab of pain went up his leg as the pressure on his claw increased, but the latch clicked open.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s try again.”

  This time both Tazar from the outside and Cal from the inside hooked their teeth through the wire. Raz counted to three, and the two dogs pulled with all their might. The spring was very strong, but the door moved up slightly. As it rose Raz quickly nudged a stone under it to prevent it from coming back down. The other two released their grip, rested for a second, and then they all repeated the process, only this time Raz used a larger stone. They did this until he had put the largest stone, actually a good-size rock, under the door, which made a space just big enough for Cal to crawl through.

  Cal started to position himself for his escape, then stopped and went back for the meat.

  “Leave the meat,” ordered Tazar. “You’re more important than any meat.”

  “With all due respect, Tazar,” said Cal, “I’m not going through all this to come out empty-mouthed.”

  He grabbed the meat and, keeping close to the ground, very slowly crawled to freedom. The three dogs were joyfully reunited. They ran back to the tunnel, prizes proudly held in their mouths.

  That night the team feasted on good, fresh meat, and listened in awe to Cal’s stories of how he had escaped certain death at the hands of the Ruzelas. The rest of the team said how brave he was, while Tazar and Raz, who had seen his frightened face and therefore knew otherwise, kept quiet.

  7

  The Cold White

  The cold spell continued and got worse. The last of the leaves fell from the trees, and the sun was hidden for days on end by a thick blanket of dark gray clouds. The dogs felt their coats thickening around them as their bodies prepared for the onslaught of the winter that was just beginning.

  Waggit awoke one morning, stretched, yawned, and sniffed the air. It was very cold and damp and had a strange smell to it. As was often the case, he was the first one of the team to wake up, apart from the Lady Magica, whose turn it was to be on eyes-and-ears duty.

  Waggit got up and went to the mouth of the tunnel. He stopped dead in his tracks and gasped. The entry to their home, the bushes that surrounded it, and the trees that were near it were all covered in white. In fact as far as he could see the entire park was the same. It was as if somebody had sucked all the color out of the landscape, and yet it was incredibly beautiful. He ventured out and was amazed to find that the whiteness was deep enough to almost cover his paws. It was also very wet and cold. He struggled up the path at the side of the tunnel to go and see Magica, but his feet kept on slipping and he had to dig his claws into the ground to stop himself from sliding backward. When he finally got to the top he saw her framed by the branches all outlined in white. She looked very beautiful, with a dab of the stuff on her nose. He crawled next to her, bringing down lumps of white as he pushed the branches to get through.

  “What happened?” he inquired.

  “Nothing much,” she said. “It was a pretty quiet night.”

  “No, I meant where did all this white stuff come from?” he asked excitedly.

  “From the sky, where it always comes from,” she replied, somewhat confused by the question. Then it dawned on her. “My dear, you’ve never seen the Cold White before, have you?”

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  “It’s what we call it,” she said. “It comes during the Long Cold, but this won’t last more than a couple of days. It’s too early for it to stay.”

  “But it’s so beautiful,” protested Waggit. “I want it to stay.”

  “Don’t worry, my little one,” Magica said with amusement. “There will be plenty more before the warm days return. In fact, soon you will wish it would go away.”

  Waggit thought that this was unlikely and said so. He stood panting with his tongue hanging out, and every time a white flake hit it he felt a tingle. Suddenly Cal and Raz came hurtling out of the tunnel yelling, “The Cold White, the Cold White!” They careened around the clearing in front of the entrance, rolling over and over, laughing with excitement. Waggit ran gleefully to join them. As he got close, Raz stopped and started to dig up the snow ferociously with his front paws. This caused it to shoot out between his back legs, hit Waggit right in the face, and make him sneeze.

  “Got you! Got you!” Raz cried triumphantly.

  They made so much noise that the other dogs came out, although some, like Gruff, remained at the mouth of the tunnel.

  “That’s right, go ahead,” he grumbled. “Break your legs and expect the rest of us to feed and look after you. That’s the sort of responsible behavior we expect from you youngsters!”

  “Oh Gruff,” Magica said in her most soothing voice, “they’re just having fun.”

  Lowdown and Alicia stood next to each other, looking at the newly whitened landscape. It was always comical to see them together; she long, thin, and haughty, and he short, stocky, and with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

  “D’you know,” she shrieked, “that my ancestors came from a land where there was lots of Cold White all the time?” She looked imperiously down on the smaller dog. “Of course I don’t suppose you know where your ancestors came from, do you? That’s if you had any.”

  “Well, if I did, I bet they came from a place where the Cold White never got deeper than paw depth.” Lowdown chuckled. “If it keeps on coming down like this you’re going to have to give me a ride on your back.”

  “Yeah. In your dreams,” was her ungracious reply.

  Gordo had now lumbered up to Waggit, Raz, and Cal. There was a bank beside a nearby path, and he flopped down against it. When he got up he left a dog-shaped imprint in the snow. He turned to the others, proud of his trick, but because the snow was thick and wet it had stuck to him in a white coating.

  “Hey,” said Raz, “you look like you on one side and Waggit on the other.”

  “Actually,” corrected Cal, “you look like you on one side and about five Waggits on the other!”

  “You can’t have too much of a good thing.” Gordo grinned.

  “You always did make a good impression, Gordo,” said Tazar who had also joined the cavorting dogs, “but don’t forget, you guys, that although the Cold White is fun, it also leaves a trail wherever y
ou go that even an Upright could follow. And will follow if I’m not mistaken. I don’t think that those traps that nearly got Cal are the last we’re going to see of them trying to clear the park of dogs. They do it every year when the leaves come off the trees. They think they can see us better then. Fortunately they smell so bad and make so much noise crashing through the woods that they give us plenty of warning. Even they can follow tracks in the Cold White.”

  This certainly caused the dogs to pause and look around. Tazar was right as usual. The ground was covered in paw marks. Fortunately it was still snowing heavily, and as they watched the tracks started to fill in.

  It snowed for the rest of the day, and Lowdown’s prediction came true: it was so deep that it came halfway up his shoulders, making fast movement even more difficult for him than usual. Then as the night settled in, the snow suddenly stopped, the sky cleared, and a full moon shone. Everything was bathed in a blue light that was so bright the trees and benches cast shadows. The branches appeared to have been drawn by somebody using a big stick of chalk. It made the dogs tingle with excitement just to look at it.

  “Let’s go and see if the water’s hard yet,” suggested Cal.

  “Great idea,” said Raz, “Let’s go to the Deepwater. You coming, Waggit?”

  “Sure, but why would the water be hard?” Waggit asked.

  “It always gets hard when it’s cold. Didn’t you know that?” chimed in Raz.

  He looked at the younger dog’s puzzled expression.

  “No, I guess you didn’t,” he said. “This is all new to you, isn’t it? Come on, we’ll show you.”

  So off they all trooped in a single line. Cal led, followed by Raz, Waggit, Magica, and even Alicia, who had decided that this would be one of the rare occasions when she joined in. Gordo brought up the rear, mostly because his paws were so huge that they obliterated any tracks made by those in front of him. No one would know, looking at his prints, that more than one dog had passed that way.

  Tazar had gone off on one of his mysterious missions. Lowdown had decided to stay in the tunnel because he said he valued breathing too much to risk walking through snow that might be over his head. The thought of spending an evening alone with Gruff, however, was not one that filled him with joy. It was yet another in the many disadvantages of being, as he described it, “economically designed.”

  When they arrived at the part of the Deepwater where they swam in the summer, Waggit was astounded. It was covered in snow. How could water be covered in anything? Whatever you put on its surface sank, and yet the snow stayed on the top. Then he watched as Raz went up to where the water’s edge would be, and with his front right paw scraped away the snow to reveal—hard water! Instead of being liquid it was now milky and solid! Raz took a stone in his mouth, dropped it on the ice, and a pinging sound could be heard echoing across the lake.

  “It seems strong enough,” he said, and walked out about twenty feet. Waggit couldn’t believe his eyes. There was Raz standing where he should be swimming.

  “I know!” said Cal, as if struck by a sudden, brilliant idea. “Let’s play the sliding game.”

  “Of course we’re going to play the sliding game,” said Raz, with a condescending tone. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Okay, Mr. Smarty Hairy Pants. You start,” challenged Cal.

  “I will if you’re too scared to.” And Raz made his way up a hill that ran to the water’s edge. When he got to the top he turned to face the lake and then ran as fast as he could. By the time he got to the edge of the Deepwater he was going so fast that he couldn’t possibly have stopped, and he had no intention of doing so. Instead with a yell of excitement he leapt onto the ice and slid on all fours far out into the Deepwater. He struggled back to the shore, his feet slipping and sliding.

  “Okay. Beat that!” he said to Cal.

  “No problem whatsoever,” the other dog confidently replied, and he also ran up the hill. Cal’s descent was even faster than Raz’s. He hit the lake’s edge at a tremendous speed and shot across the ice, but he was unbalanced.

  “Whoaooooh,” was all he could say as he lost his footing and tumbled head over tail in a cloud of white.

  “I win. I win,” cried Raz triumphantly.

  “Ow, ow ow,” was Cal’s pained response.

  “Not so fast, brother, you haven’t won yet. There’s other dogs here waiting for a turn.” Lady Magica was already climbing up the hill as she said this. She bounded down the hill in long, graceful steps, quite unlike the uncontrolled gallop of both Cal and Raz. When she hit the ice she glided faster and farther, even doing two 360-degree turns as she flew across the lake’s surface, until she slid to a halt many feet farther out than Raz had been.

  “Okay, boys, anyone think they can do better than that?” she asked.

  “I betcha I can. I betcha anything you like!” said Gordo, full of excited confidence.

  He lumbered off at a fairly slow pace, but gravity started to take over, and by the time he was at the bottom it seemed to the spectators as if his legs were trying to keep up with his body. He leapt into the air with a cry of “Yipeeeeeee,” hit the ice with a crash, and completely disappeared beneath its surface, sending up a plume of freezing water that soaked the spectators.

  “Oh Great Vinda,” cried Magica fearfully. “Are you all right? Somebody go get him before he drowns.”

  But as she said it Gordo rose from the water, pieces of broken ice bobbing all around him, water dripping from his shiny coat. The part of the lake where he’d gone through the ice was not very deep, and he could stand up in it quite easily.

  “Oooooh m-m-m-m-my, it’s s-s-so c-c-cold!” he said through chattering teeth.

  “Well whatd’ya expect,” said Alicia, “if you play stupid games like that? You ain’t no puppy anymore. You should start acting your age!”

  Gordo stepped ashore and shook himself furiously, which only added to Alicia’s annoyance, because he was standing directly in front of her. Whether this was deliberate or dumb was always hard to tell with Gordo.

  With the ice broken the game ended, and the dogs decided to return to the tunnel. On the homeward journey all attempts at covering up tracks were abandoned as the group joyfully ran through the woods, bringing down great clumps of snow from bushes and branches as they went. They all tumbled into the tunnel, laughing and jostling, energized by the cold, the snow, and the companionship. Even Alicia had lightened up somewhat.

  They were not prepared, therefore, for the sight of Lowdown, Gruff, and Tazar, all looking stern and serious.

  “I hope you all had fun,” Tazar said in his gloomiest voice.

  They all nodded.

  “Good,” the leader continued, “because it may be the last you’ll have for a while. As I suspected, the Ruzelas are having a sweep of the park to clear it of dogs that aren’t with Uprights. I was talking to some of the loners today up at the Deepwoods End, and they say that there’s been a lot of action up there. Apparently an Upright went to kick a loner, and the dog bit his ankle—purely in self-defense, you understand. But of course nobody believes that Uprights are in the wrong, so it had to be the dog’s fault. We’ve been through this before, and it’s not pleasant, I can tell you.”

  A murmur of concern went through the team.

  “What can we do, Tazar?” asked Cal.

  “What we can do, my brother, is to do as little as possible. From now on we all stay home. Only designated food parties will go out, and they’ll stay in the safest areas, avoiding all paths wherever possible. We take no risks and keep a low a profile. Next thing: while the Cold White is on the ground, anyone who goes outside, either with a food party or for any other reason, makes sure they brush away the tracks they made near the entrance. Use twigs or a branch that still has leaves on it if you can find one. Paw marks anywhere in the vicinity are like saying to the Ruzelas, ‘Welcome; come on in.’ First thing in the morning, early, Cal, Raz, Waggit, and I will get some more branches to put around the entr
ance. I want it to be so tight that if a Ruzela tripped and fell against it he wouldn’t know that dogs lived here.”

  Which, as it turned out, was what nearly happened.

  8

  Battle Plan

  The following morning the work party began covering the entrance to the tunnel with as many branches as they could find. The biggest problem was how to hide the opening while at the same time making it possible for the dogs themselves to come and go. In the end Tazar decided that the dogs would use the back entrance, which was much more difficult because it was on a slope that was too steep to climb. But with some well-placed boxes to act as steps it was workable for all the dogs except Lowdown. For him they created a hole in the camouflage large enough to get through but small enough not to be noticed.

  When they had concealed the entrance to Tazar’s satisfaction each dog took a branch in his or her mouth, and they erased all evidence of their presence by walking backward, moving their heads from side to side, raking the snow. Waggit had the honor of making the final touches. He had found a branch that must have come down before the fall, because it still had its leaves, even though now they were dry and brown. When this was used it gave a much softer and more natural appearance to the raked snow.

  Everything was now in place, and all they had to do was sit and wait it out until the rangers finished their sweep. The older members of the team knew from past experience that these operations usually only lasted a couple of days, and as it turned out they didn’t even have to wait that long. Later the same afternoon, when they were all in the tunnel either snoozing or washing themselves, Tazar suddenly sat up, his nostrils quivering.

  “D’you smell that?” he asked of no one in particular.