Lulu and the Dog from the Sea Read online

  “Don’t touch it!” she begged when Lulu bent to look, and then she did a very strange thing.

  She yawned.

  The earliness of the morning, the fright and the pain, were suddenly too much for Mellie. She switched them off.

  She put her head on Lulu’s lap and went to sleep.

  For a long time Lulu sat thinking. She did not know what to do. She couldn’t leave Mellie and go for help. It would take ages, and besides, she was not at all sure, even with the kite strings to follow, that she would ever find Mellie again. And it was perfectly obvious that Mellie could not walk back on such a bad foot.

  Nor could Lulu carry her.

  We could shout for help, Lulu thought. She tried a small shout. “Help! Help!”

  The wind blew the words away and lost them in the grasses.

  I’ve got to think! she told herself fiercely and closed her eyes to help herself think better.

  A great brightness woke them both.

  Blue and pink and gold. The morning sky shone above their faces, edged with the dark shadows on the long sand-dune grasses.

  And high above, on the edge of the hollow, they saw something else.

  A long-legged, scruffy, wind-blown outline of a dog.

  A dog who, from far away, had seen a kite and come running.

  The dog from the sea looked down at Lulu and Mellie, dark against the bright sky, like an illustration from a fairy tale.

  The dog from the sea stared at Lulu and Mellie in great surprise. He had not expected to find them when he had come running to investigate the kite. What were they doing so far from their home? Where were their grown-ups, and what about Sam?

  The dog from the sea tilted his head with its paper-bag ears one way and then the other, trying to understand.

  They were talking. Hurriedly and worriedly.

  “Go with him! Maybe he’ll take you back to the cottage!”

  “What, and leave you here?”

  “You could.”

  “You know I wouldn’t!”

  “I’m all right, Lulu, really I am. It hardly hurts if I keep still.”

  “What if you try and stand?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, if I had a bandage for my foot. In case it bleeds again.”

  A ribbon of kite tail made a sort of bandage, and then Lulu said, “Just try. I’ll help. I’ll balance you...”

  “Ouch! Ouch! It’s too tight! Don’t pull! Let me go!”

  Mellie fell back down into the sand, peeled off the kite tail, and whimpered a little because her foot was now very painful. The whimpering worried the dog. He backed away, whining.

  “Good dog. It’s all right,” called Lulu soothingly as she hugged poor Mellie, but she did not sound all right.

  Neither did Mellie.

  “What’ll we do?” asked Mellie between very damp hiccups. “How’ll anyone ever know we are here?”

  “They’ll come and look for us,” said Lulu bravely. “As soon as they get up and see we’re not there...”

  “How’ll they know which way to look?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Lulu. “Maybe they’ll find our footprints...”

  Lulu paused.

  “They never will,” said Mellie and sobbed, a real sob, and then another and another.

  “Oh, don’t cry!” Lulu begged so miserably that the dog from the sea tumbled into the hollow to comfort them both. He licked salty fingers and rubbed his ragged head into their hands, not knowing what to do.

  And then all at once, he knew exactly what to do.

  Like a picture in his head the dog from the sea saw the white cottage and the grown-ups belonging to his two unhappy friends.

  They would have to be fetched.

  He left Lulu and Mellie as suddenly as he had found them, leaping out of the hollow and vanishing among the sand dunes. He did not want to fetch the grown-ups. He did not want to go back to where the dogcatchers had been. For all he knew they might be there still.

  But he could not think of anything else to do.

  So he did it.

  His long legs raced across the beach as fast as the cloud shadows raced across the sea. Mellie’s kite-tail bandage, picked up at the last moment as he left, streamed behind him like a banner. In minutes he was back at the cottage, and there were the grown-ups, calling and searching up and down the sand dunes and in and out the house.

  Sam saw him first.

  “RUFF!” barked Sam but not very fiercely. He was too tired to be fierce. He had been up for ages with no breakfast, trudging through the sandy paths, trying to find the girls.

  “RUFF!” barked Sam, but he didn’t really mean it.

  “WOOFF! WOOFF! WOOFF!” replied the dog from the sea.

  “Listen!” called the grown-ups, and they both came running.

  “Look! Look! It’s the dog from the sea!”

  “Oh!” cried Lulu’s mother, and she picked up the kite ribbon.

  “He knows where they are!” Lulu’s father exclaimed.

  “WOOFF!” commanded the dog from the sea.

  Anyone could tell what he wanted.

  So Mellie and Lulu were rescued.

  First came the dog from the sea.

  Next came Lulu’s father (who was very glad he had done so much training for when he might run a marathon).

  Then Lulu’s mother, keeping up very well considering she had spent the whole week reading book after book (although not War and Peace).

  Last of all, Sam.

  Sam did not run to the rescue; he walked.

  Sam was only a little way along the journey when they all came back. He stopped when he saw the dog from the sea.

  The dog from the sea stopped when he saw Sam.

  But Lulu’s father (who was carrying Mellie) said, “Don’t be silly, you two!”

  And Lulu’s mother (who was carrying the kite) said, “You might as well make friends!”

  And Lulu put them each on a kite-tail leash and led them back to the cottage, where Mellie’s sprained foot was bathed and bandaged with an ice pack.

  “There’s no time for telling you off!” said Lulu’s parents, as the bandaging took place. “But if there was...”

  Luckily there wasn’t. There was only time to fling the last things in the car and somehow find an extra place on the backseat for Sam, because...

  “You’re never going to leave with that dog!” demanded the cottage owner, arriving just in time to see the dog from the sea being coaxed into the car.

  “We are,” said Mellie, smiling up at her. “Aren’t you happy?”

  “Happy! What are you thinking? Isn’t one dog enough?”

  “The more the merrier,” said Lulu’s mother.

  “He’s been wonderful,” said Lulu’s father.

  “Well, good riddance, I say,” said the cottage owner, glaring. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you! He’s trouble, that dog! He’s a thief! He’s a menace!”

  “He’s a hero,” said Lulu, and she gave the dog from the sea one last hug before she climbed into her seat beside Mellie and Sam. “He’s ours and we love him, and we’re taking him with us!”

  Bump! went the car, through the first of the potholes, and then they were on the way home.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

>   Text copyright © 2011 by Hilary McKay,

  Illustrations © 2011 by Priscilla Lamont

  978-1-4804-1711-3

  Published by Albert Whitman & Company

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  Hilary McKay, Lulu and the Dog from the Sea

 

 

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