A Girl Called Dog

by Nicola Davies

  Dog felt terribly frightened and alone. Poor Carlos must be a drowned scrap of blue and gold somewhere in the huge ocean, and Esme’s life was hanging by a thread. Even Asky might have gone to the bottom of the sea in the Marilyn. She didn’t know where she was, or what to do, but she knew she wanted solid land under her feet. She picked up a bit of broken plank, and began to paddle to shore.

  The beach was gently sloping and the waves not much more than ripples, so it was easy to get the boat onto the sand. Gently Dog carried Esme up the beach and laid her down in the shade of a palm tree, then went back to the boat to see if there was anything they might find useful. Emergency rations had been washed overboard but the little box marked with a red cross was still in its place. The waves pulled at the boat; soon they might take it out to sea again, and Dog knew she hadn’t the strength to haul it far up the beach where the water wouldn’t get it. She looked around, trying to think fast. The lifeboat cover, even ripped as it was, might make a good shelter. She tugged at the ropes that Carlos had tied so tightly, and yanked at the cover’s edge to free it from the bow. It wouldn’t budge, and now the tide was definitely lifting the boat off the sand. She decided to give the cover one more good pull; if it didn’t move she’d have to abandon it. She braced her feet and pulled with all the strength she had left. The cover creaked and, with a sound like a wet pancake landing on a kitchen floor, it unravelled itself rather suddenly.

  Dog fell backwards, and something was thrown out of the folds and landed with a plop in her lap. It was a large bird, with a hooked beak and sodden ragged feathers.

  Carlos coughed mightily, spraying sea water into Dog’s face, then opened his eyes. “Next time,” he said disdainfully, “aeroplane.”

  Chapter 23

  CARLOS TOLD DOG how to open coconuts by mimicking the sound they made when they were hit with a rock. So they had coconut milk to drink, and sweet white coconut flesh to eat. Esme opened her eyes after the first sip, and was happily munching her way through huge pieces of flesh a day later. They dozed, ate and drank, while their bruises healed and their spirits recovered.

  Carlos spent a long time preening. “Salt!” he grumbled to himself. “Salt!”

  Sea water wasn’t good for parrot feathers, and for the first day he couldn’t fly at all. Heavy rain early the next morning did the trick. Carlos squawked with such delight as the fresh water soaked his plumage that Dog and Esme came out from the shelter of the trees and shared the shower, the three of them dancing in the downpour together. Then they sat in the sun, dried off, and slept some more!

  * * *

  When Dog woke again, Carlos was nowhere to be seen. She wasn’t worried – she guessed he must have missed proper flying; he’d just gone to stretch his wings.

  Esme too was feeling better. Dog had wrapped the break in her tail with a bandage from the lifeboat’s first-aid kit, and it showed like a white flag as Esme trotted up and down the beach. She was hunting the pale blue crabs that scuttled up and down the beach, batting them with her claws and reaching down into their narrow little burrows. Dog suddenly felt very, very happy, and she ran off to join Esme on her crab quest.

  The crabs danced sideways with a speed that Dog found dazzling. Secretly she thought the crabs far too beautiful to eat, and was quite pleased when Esme dropped her first catch because she didn’t expect food to bite back. After that the coati recovered some of her ratbiting fierceness, and the next crab didn’t get a chance to nip; Esme crunched it like a boiled sweet the instant she caught it. Dog didn’t like that much, but Esme’s eating habits were none of her business, and crab hunting was fun. It wasn’t until the sun sank behind the treetops that either of them noticed that Carlos hadn’t returned.

  They sat under their tree and nibbled bits of coconut flesh, scanning the fading sky for Carlos’s silhouette. At last, as the first stars started to prick the blueness, Esme curled her nose into her tail and went to sleep on the warm sand, but Dog didn’t feel sleepy at all. She stared out over the whispering sea; this beach was beautiful, but she knew it wasn’t the end of their journey.

  Chapter 24

  DOG FELL ASLEEP at last. She dreamed of Carlos flying far away over green treetops, but when she woke in the early morning, he was back. He flapped his wings above her head in great excitement.

  “Home! Home!” he shouted. “Get up. Go! Go!”

  Carlos didn’t offer any more explanation, and although Esme was reluctant to leave the crabs, Dog knew it was time to move on. She trusted Carlos to know which direction to take. They bundled up bits of coconut and a medicine bottle of coconut milk in the jersey that Eady had given Dog, and set off along the beach.

  They didn’t have to walk far. Just a mile or two beyond their beach a river ran muddily into the sea. The far bank was thick with huge trees, but on the nearer bank was a little village of tiny whitewashed houses with tin roofs glinting in the sun. Threads of blue smoke rose from the huts into the morning air and people were moving about in their doorways and on their rickety verandas.

  “Home, nearly,” announced Carlos, landing on a bush that wasn’t really ready to take his weight. “Home, nearly, nearly,” he said again, bouncing on a whippy branch. “Riverboat.”

  The sight of a skinny brown child, a fat coati and a talking macaw wasn’t at all unusual to the people of the village. They were mostly quite skinny and brown themselves, and wild jungle animals often became their pets. So they smiled as Dog walked between their homes with Esme trotting beside her and Carlos resting on her shoulder. They greeted her too, with words she’d never heard before, but which were somehow more familiar than the ones she’d heard every day in the pet shop.

  “Hola!”

  “Qué pasa?”

  The words were even more familiar to Carlos. He greeted them back and even asked questions. “Barco ría arriba?” he said.

  “Cobetizo orilla,” people told him.

  It seemed perfectly ordinary to them that a macaw should ask where to get a boat upriver. That was where the macaws lived.

  A wiry man with threads of grey in his hair and a neat moustache stood by a ramshackle boathouse. He wore an orange T-shirt, a voluminous pair of bright blue shorts and a faded baseball cap with the word AMAZONINO written on it. His boat was long and narrow, with faded pink paint and a little outboard motor at the back. It was already quite full of round drums of petrol, sacks of rice and woven baskets with live chickens inside. He smiled and showed two perfect front teeth when he heard Carlos speak.

  “Yes, I go upriver. You have money?” he said in Spanish.

  “Have money,” Carlos repeated in the same language.

  “No money, I take the bird,” said the man.

  “Take the bird,” Carlos said, copying the man’s voice perfectly.

  Dog didn’t understand a word, but smiling and nodding had worked with Asky, so she tried it out again here. The man grinned back. Then he helped them into the boat and cast off. In just a few minutes the jetty was far behind and the boat was puttering its way up the wide river.

  Chapter 25

  THEY CRUISED STEADILY up the middle of the mouse-brown river. The man, whose name was Hoehe, sat at the back, lazily holding the tiller and smoking little cigarettes. Dog and her friends sat in the prow, jammed in front of two sacks of rice and a huge tin of marmalade. The sky was a hazy blue and the air streamed over them, cool and heavy.

  Once or twice a day Hoehe stopped at villages, dropped off supplies, and collected passengers or small cargo and replenished their water supplies to carry to the next stop. People were interested in the child and her two companions. They gave them food, admired the bird and petted the coati but mostly left them to themselves, up there at the front of the boat.

  At night Hoehe moored the boat at little jetties or small beaches. He caught fish and cooked it over a fire, but never offered to share it. Esme found her own food, scrabbling in the muddy banks as if she’d been doing it all her life. Carlos cracked Brazil nuts lying in the b
ottom of the boat. Dog mostly went hungry.

  At first the banks on either side were so far away that they were just distant walls of bright green. Occasionally flocks of white birds erupted from sand banks, or the movement of some animal flickered between the bank and the water, too far away to see properly. But as the days went on, the river narrowed and the banks got closer. Now Dog could see huge trees, with dark dipping branches tangled in leaves and climbers. Flashes of brightly coloured wings showed in the treetops. Once they passed a muddy bank where huge caimans were sunning themselves. Uncle had once bought a tank of baby ones for the pet shop. Dog had loved them, but had almost lost a finger or two giving them their dinner! She could understand why they had been so hungry if this was how much growing they had to do!

  Esme, usually so ready for a snooze at any hour, hardly slept at all during the journey. She stood on the very prow of the bow, with her ears pricked and her nose pointing forward like a quivering compass needle. Dog could see she was soaking up every smell and sound and sight.

  Carlos was excited too. He flapped his wings and even took off at times, circling the boat as if he wanted it to go faster. He seemed unable to be still for a moment. He said very little apart from mimicking Hoehe’s terrible singing or the puttering of the outboard. But at night he kept Dog company. He perched next to where she slept on the sacks of rice, so close she could hear him breathing and smell his warm, dry feathers.

  Dog could see a change coming over her friends. Esme’s tail seemed stripier, despite the missing fur; Carlos’s feathers more like sky and sunshine than ever before. The life of the river and the forest was beginning to flow through them. Dog felt it too. She was filled with a kind of fizzing sensation, a mixture of comfort and excitement. She felt as if all her insides had been arranged into new patterns and then lit up, like Asky’s shiny sky-man, Orion.

  Some nights Hoehe didn’t sleep, so they kept on going all through the warm darkness. Dog slept in fits and starts, waking to stars dancing on the water, Esme reaching her nose into the breeze or Carlos spreading his wings to the moonlight.

  Dog didn’t count all the nights and days, but at last, one evening, when the sun dipped behind the trees, Hoehe steered his baraca up to a little jetty, where a cluster of grassy huts gathered on the river bank. Hoehe tied the boat up and pointed to a worn notice on a pole:

  ZEE FOUNDATION MAOHURI RESERVE, it announced. ADMISSION STRICTLY BY PERMIT ONLY.

  “I can’t go any further,” he said. “You’re a Maohuri, aren’t you, so you can get out here.”

  Dog smiled and nodded, but of course she couldn’t read the notice. She understood, though, that this was the end of their journey.

  Stiffly she unfolded herself and, with Carlos on her shoulder and Esme at her feet, got ready to climb out of the boat. She stared about, feeling that this was the strangest, and also the most familiar place she had been. The forest pressed in all around them, dense and huge and green, as if the trees had just stepped back a little so the huts could stand. The air was soft and moist, full of scents and the sounds of insects, frogs, birds.

  But Hoehe didn’t let the little waif stare about her in that dazed way for long. He wanted his payment. It was obvious now that the child had no money and he was looking forward to the fat price that a talking macaw would make back in town.

  “Where’s my money?” he said in Spanish.

  Dog smiled and nodded, but Hoehe wasn’t smiling any more. He was tired now, and cross. He decided could probably sell the scrappy old coati too – and the girl, if it came to it.

  “Where’s my money?” He stepped up to Dog and stood over her, looking much bigger and less wiry than he had seemed before. Suddenly Hoehe’s intentions were very clear. Dog knew all the signs – she’d learned them from Uncle. She felt small and sick. She hung her head and trembled. Esme climbed into her arms, chittering in fear, and hid her face in her tail.

  Carlos stood on Dog’s shoulder and flapped his wings. “No money,” he said in Hoehe’s voice. “No money.”

  Hoehe’s face froze. “OK,” he said, “then I take my payment.” He snatched up a big black box from the bottom of the boat in one hand, and Dog’s wrist in the other. “Give me the bird or I will kill your coati and slice out your heart and feed it to the piranhas. I’ve had plenty of birds and children in this box. You won’t be the first or the last!”

  Dog didn’t understand the words, but she could see their meaning very clearly. Hoehe held the black box open. Inside were feathers of all colours – blue and gold like Carlos’s own, scarlet, green, even deep violet. There were signs of humans too – tiny hand prints and the marks of scraping nails.

  There would be no escape for any of them, even for clever Carlos, from that box.

  Dog was very, very afraid, but she had not come so far for a box like Uncle’s to swallow her or her friends at last. With all her strength she kicked the black, black box, and it spun from Hoehe’s hand, over the side, and sank. At the same moment Esme reached out from behind her tail to sink her teeth into the hand that held Dog’s wrist. Hoehe yelped in pain and let go. Dog shoved Carlos off her shoulder so that he could fly, leaped onto the jetty with Esme and ran.

  Hoehe had been sure his bullying would work on this little scrap of a girl. So it took him a moment to recover from the surprise of her sheer cheek; then he was after her, blood dripping from his hand as he gathered speed. His strong boatman’s legs worked like pistons, and his moustache set in a determined line. If he couldn’t catch the bird, he was sure he could catch the girl.

  Dog ran up the jetty and straight into the middle of the village, between the little huts made of wooden poles and grass. Something about the place made her feel instantly safer, more certain that she could escape.

  People like those in Marmalade’s photo stood in doorways or lazed in hammocks, and they all turned to watch the little girl run by with her coati at her ankles. Not such a strange sight, but the gold and blue macaw screeching just above her head was a bit unusual.

  On she ran, with Esme panting beside her and Carlos circling above, but Hoehe had longer legs. Just where the village turned again to jungle, he caught her. He clamped one hand in her hair and dragged her back towards the river.

  Carlos yelled and dived-bombed him. Esme snarled and slashed at his legs with her claws and teeth.

  Now Hoehe was really angry. He shook the brat, wanting to pull out her hair by its miserable Maohuri roots. He kicked and waved his free arm to try and ward off the bird, but Carlos was devilishly clever at avoiding his blows.

  The villagers rushed towards the commotion, their curiosity aroused. Hoehe found his way back to the river blocked, as every family had come out to see what was going on.

  “So,” said Moipa, the village head man, in Spanish, “what’s all the fuss?”

  “Step aside, Indian scum,” said Hoehe (who was sure that he was descended from the Spanish conquistadors).

  The villagers had never much cared for Hoehe – he always overcharged them for goods transported up the river – so his lack of manners drew even more attention. They closed in around him a little more: they didn’t like the way he was holding onto the child, who looked just like one of their own, or the way he had hit out at her animals.

  “I think you should let this child go,” said Moipa.

  “Child? She’s a thief. She tricked me. I brought her upriver because she said she’d pay me with that bird.” Hoehe pointed to Carlos, still trying to dive-bomb him.

  Moipa turned to Dog. “Is this true?”

  But Dog didn’t answer.

  “It’s no good asking her,” Hoehe grumbled. “She’s a mute!”

  “But you said she told you she would give you the bird,” said Moipa.

  “Yes,” added his wife, Akawo. “How did she do that if she’s a mute?”

  Hoehe opened and closed his mouth like a landed piranha. He let go of Dog’s hair, and she dropped to the floor beside Esme. Carlos swooped down onto her shoulde
r, and Esme sat at her feet.

  “Give me the bird,” said Carlos, in Hoehe’s voice, “or I will kill your coati and slice out your heart and feed it to the piranhas. I’ve had plenty of birds and children in this box.”

  Horrified gasps and murmurs spread throughout the crowd – which was now almost everyone in the village.

  “I see,” said Moipa. “I think you’d better go, and never come back.”

  “Yes!” added the villagers. “Go!”

  “You don’t have a permit to be here anyway!” added Akawo.

  Hoehe shook his fist and crossed himself, then he turned and fled. Esme chased him, snarling, her bandaged tail up, all the way back to the river.

  Chapter 26

  THE ARRIVAL OF the girl with the powerful animal companions seemed like a very good omen to the villagers. Although she looked like a child of their own tribe, she seemed rather strange, so they spoke to her, not in their own language, but in their very best and most respectful Spanish. They led her to a guest hut close to a little beach, and brought her food and lit her fire for her. Then they left her in peace.

  Dog was in a daze. The shape of the huts, the smell of the cooking fires, the faces of the people, even the sounds of frogs and insects that came from the forest as night fell were somehow things she knew, like the parts of a dream she couldn’t quite remember. With Esme curled beside her, and Carlos roosting on a perch nearby, Dog lay down to sleep.

  At first light, she stoked the fire to wake it up, and the three friends shared the food the villagers had brought them. Dog watched the sun rise over the trees and make a shining path on the river. Esme got bored with the view and started rooting about on the bank, looking for something juicy and alive for dessert.