The Travels of Zoe, the Wonder Dog
By Carrie Jacobson
Chapter 10
The story so far: Zoe, a mostly blind lhasa apso, and Kaja, a big red German shepherd/chow, have crossed a bridge over the Delaware to Barryville, on their way to find James Dunning, Zoe’s owner.
Meanwhile, Samantha and Ashton Morrone, a brother and sister who live in Barryville, are finishing a project in their yard on the banks of the river.
The sun is low in the sky and Ashton and Samantha are working on the raft. Right now, it’s more like a raft than a fort, and Ashton’s glad about that, because the raft part is the part that really excites him. Anyone can have a fort, but no one that he knows has ever had a raft.
Oh, sure, the people go by on the river all the time in their rafts and canoes and kayaks, but they don’t count. This raft, he and Samantha made it with their own hands, and their dad has always told them that anything they make with their own hands is five times as good as anything they buy in a store. Even vegetables, Dad says, though as far as Ash can tell, carrots and broccoli both taste bad, and it doesn’t matter whether they come from the garden or the store or the farmer’s market.
The raft is pretty big. Most of it is two doors that washed down the river in the last flood, and then there are logs and branches and pieces of wood. They’ve nailed some of the wood together, and used rope to lash other pieces on. The raft is probably about 10 feet by 6 feet, big enough for both of them to lie down at the same time. They’ve put put a couple logs upright, to sit on, and these they’ve fastened with angle irons that they found in the barn. There’s a crate, too, that they found along the river, and they’ve nailed this into the raft, lined it with a black plastic garbage bad and found a piece of wood to cover it.
On the bank of the Delaware, below their house, they’ve hidden the raft – made it a fort – with walls of reeds and brush. Over the top is a large piece of a blue tarp, another remnant from the river. As the sun drops, Samantha is working to fasten uprights to the log seats and the box. She figures if she can do this, they can use the tarp out on the river, for shade, and also for a sail.
Samantha can hear their mother singing with the radio, in the kitchen of their house. Mosquitoes are coming out now, and it’s starting to get dark. Ashton is up in the barn looking for more nails.
Samantha hears something in the brush. She stops moving and stays still. Very still. She’s hardly breathing, she’s so still.
The noise comes again, closer this time. A scratching, a rustling. Maybe there’s a growl, but maybe not. Maybe it’s nothing. Her mother is singing some silly song from a century ago, when she was a kid, and Ash is looking for nails, and the river is making its regular noises, and this is probably not a bear. But she stays still, anyways.
And then, with a little more rustling, a dog appears. It’s a big dog, a big red dog, with big ears and huge brown eyes. Its long hair is matted in places, and there are brambles and seeds in the red coat, but it’s a pretty dog, such a pretty dog – and Samantha falls in love at that very first moment.
She watches the big red dog, and then she sees there’s another dog, a little dog with a coat of brown and tan and black and white, and the little dog is nosing close to the big dog, following the big dog out of the bushes – and then the little dog runs headlong into a tree, and falls, and tumbles down the slope until she rolls into a pine tree and that stops her. She gets up and shakes herself off, and the big dog walks down the slope – keeping an eye on Sam – and sniffs the little dog, everywhere, and pushes with her nose until the little dog is headed downriver.
“Come here!” Sam calls to them. “Come here, dogs, come here!”
The red dog looks at her, then looks away, but Sam keeps calling. Then she gets an idea. She and Ashton have been hiding food down here for when they take their trip, and Sam crosses the raft, and opens the plastic bag inside the crate, and pulls out a sugar cookie. She breaks it in half and waves it toward the dogs.
“Come here, doggies, come here! Cookies! Cookies”
The big dog looks down the river again, and then turns back toward Sam. The big dog sniffs the air, once, twice, and then nudges the little dog around, and the two of them walk toward the girl.
But what Sam doesn’t know is that the dogs aren’t the only ones watching her.
Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com
Tags: Carrie Jacobson
