Tag Archives: writing

Complete, of course, does not always mean final. But it is in shape to share. Illustrations are under way.

Before he got his name, he was just a puppy in a small village near the shore. He tumbled with his brothers and sisters in the drain pipe where they were born. Then they wandered farther. They ran along the roadside and down an alley. Some of them stopped to sniff new smells around old human things that had been tossed away.

At the end of the alley the puppy turned and trotted past the backs of stores, sniffing and listening and looking. He couldn’t see the others. No matter. He had discovered the back of a restaurant, and there was good food in the garbage cans. He ate until he burped with satisfaction. Then he lay down and went to sleep.

When he woke he explored. There was a clothing store with old boxes outside. There was a bar, quiet in the morning but loud later. There was a drug store and a book store and craft store. No one paid him any attention. He wondered where his brothers and sisters were. But he didn’t worry. There was so much to explore.

That night he slept on a pile of old clothes. He woke in the morning when someone emptied a cleaning bucket from a second floor apartment. Then a truck came and collected the garbage from the cans at the back of stores. What a racket. But it didn’t collect the garbage on the ground. The puppy found a good breakfast behind the restaurant.

And so he explored for weeks, always curious and discovering new things. He grew bigger. Now he was a young dog and not a puppy anymore. Sometimes other dogs came to the alley. They were very serious. They kept to themselves. There were cats, too. They would sit on window sills or on top of old furniture and lick their paws and clean themselves.

One day, as he was minding his own business, eating behind the restaurant, a woman came out of the back door and saw him. He had never seen her before. She started yelling at him. He wagged his tail. She picked up a broom from beside the door and started chasing him. She threw an old boot at him.

He ran along the backs of the stores and stumbled into a man. The man yelled at him and picked up a long piece of wood and waved it at him. The dog was scared.

He ran and ran. He ran far away from the alley and the backs of stores. He ran through a scrubby field and across a sandy road. He ran through a thicket of bushes. Birds flew up. He came to a rocky place. And then he smelled something that had been only a faint scent behind the stores. The smell of salt in the water and the air. The smell of wet sand. The smell of the animals that lived in the sea. He walked to the end of the rocks and stood on a bluff. And he saw the sea, stretching out forever in front of him, and the sky stretching with it. It was so big. And beautiful.

The dog stared for a long time and lifted his nose for new scents. Then he was hungry again. He walked down the hill on a sand path and came to an old wooden building in a sand parking lot. He walked around back to search for food. He found enough scraps for a meal, and while he was eating a man came  through the back door. They surprised each other. The dog began to back away, but the man went back inside and came out with a bowl of food scraps.

The man did this every morning and evening and coaxed the dog inside. It was a bar. In the mornings, all was quiet. In the evenings there was music and dancing and shouting and arguing and cheering and singing. The man called the dog his guard dog. He let the dog sleep under a table. The dog was glad to have a place to live and food to eat.

One night, the bar was louder than usual. The music was loud. The people’s voices were loud. There was laughing and arguing. There were so many people that they all pushed against one another. And then people started shouting. The dog was afraid that they were shouting at him. He hid beneath a table. Then the people began to move wildly. They bumped into chairs and tables. They ran into each other. The dog knew they were scared. He was scared too. Now many people were shouting. And people started breaking things. The dog tried to scurry away. Someone fell over him. He tried to run but the room was too crowded. And then came the loud bangs of a gun. The people ran wildly. More bangs. He ran wildly too. He found the back door. And he ran and ran.

It began to rain. He ran across the rocks above the bluff. He ran through a scrub forest. He ran down a sandy street of small houses. He was very tired. And very wet. And cold.

At the end of the street of houses he came to a scrubby field. There was a shelter there. Just a roof with no walls. But when he came to it, he smelled something else. Something new. Another animal. It stood beneath the shelter, and it didn’t move. It just stood, tired and wet. The dog slunk into the far end of the shelter, just out of the rain. The other animal just stood there. Finally, so tired he could no longer stand up, the dog lay down and slept.

In the morning it still drizzled. The dog opened his eyes. He wondered where he was. He heard a sound and turned to see the other animal eating dead grass in a small field. It was a horse. It saw the dog wake up. It walked over to the shelter and looked at him.

“You’re a raggedy dog,” said the horse.

The dog didn’t know what to say.

“What happened to your tail?” the horse asked.

The dog looked at his tail. Half of it was gone. It must have broken off in the big fight.

“I’m going to call you Raggedy Dog,” said the horse.

The dog didn’t like this. He said, “I’m going to call you Skin Horse.”

The horse had many bare places where its coat had worn away. It was not a very nice thing to say. They were not being very nice to each other yet.

The dog stayed all day. It rained. His tail hurt. Skin Horse just munched at dead grass and didn’t tell him to go away.

Raggedy Dog asked, “Is that all you eat?”

Skin Horse said, “There isn’t anything else.” She munched at the brown grass. “Once someone gave me an apple. That was good.”

“Don’t you go looking for food?” asked Raggedy Dog.

Skin Horse said, “I can’t get past the fence.”

Raggedy Dog looked and noticed for the first time that the field was surrounded by a broken down wire fence. He had slunk beneath it during the night. Now he went and slunk through it again and searched for food.

He found scraps behind the houses. They were not as good as the food behind the restaurant or the food the man at the bar gave him. But they filled his belly. When he was done he walked back to the field and lay down beneath the shelter.

“You can stay here,” Skin Horse said.

Raggedy Dog didn’t say anything. He was asleep.

Skin Horse and Raggedy Dog lived together. Sometimes Raggedy Dog brought scraps for her from the backs of houses. Most of it Skin Horse didn’t eat, but she liked it when Raggedy Dog brought carrots.

On day a man came to the fence and threw a bale of hay into the field. Skin Horse loved this.

“Have some,” she said to Raggedy Dog. But the dog didn’t eat hay. He went into a village to find food. When he returned to the field he saw that Skin Horse had piled some of the hay under the shelter.

Skin Horse said, “It’s a bed for you.”

One day a young boy came to the fence. He called to Skin Horse and gave her an apple core. Then he saw Raggedy Dog and called to him. Raggedy Dog was nervous about going to the boy, but Skin Horse told him it was all right. She said that every once in a while the boy came to visit, and he was a good boy. Raggedy Dog let the boy pet him. When the boy left, Raggedy Dog heard him calling excitedly to people in the house, “There’s a dog!”

Then a man came from the house. He did not look happy. He saw Raggedy Dog and yelled at him. Raggedy Dog ran to the other side of the field. The man unhooked the wire from a fence post and came into the field and ran at Raggedy Dog and yelled at him to go away. Raggedy Dog slipped under the fence and ran into the scrub trees, and then he heard a loud bang and he ran and ran until he was very far away.

He ran to a new village. He stayed away from noises and people. He found scraps to eat, but not many. He grew very skinny. He truly looked like a Raggedy Dog now.

One day he wandered down a sandy road. He just wanted to find a place in the sun to lie down and rest. There was a small house nearby. He didn’t want to go close to it. But he smelled something familiar. It was a very faint smell. Raggedy Dog raised his nose and sniffed the air. It was the smell of horse. It came from the house.

Raggedy Dog walked very slowly to the house. He heard no sounds. He came to the front porch. There was no horse, but there were a pair of tall boots and worn leather chaps that smelled like horse. Raggedy Dog carefully walked up the porch steps to sniff at the horse smell, remembering his old friend.

Then a voice from behind him said, “Hello there. You like horses?”

Raggedy Dog jumped off the porch and ran to the edge of the sand yard. He stopped and turned around. He crouched low. There was a woman standing on the porch. She didn’t yell at him. It didn’t look like she was going to chase him.

“Well you sure are a raggedy dog,” she said. “But you’re OK.”

She went into the house and returned with a bowl of food. She left it on the ground away from the house and away from the dog. Then she said, “I’m going to work now. You can eat in peace.”

The woman drove away in her truck and Raggedy Dog devoured the food quickly and then hid in the bushes. He found a warm place to sleep where the sun came through. When evening came, the woman returned. She smelled freshly of horses now. He crept carefully out of the bushes.

“You still here?” she asked. “Well, it’s your lucky day.”

She brought another bowl of food from the house and left it in the yard.

Raggedy Dog began to live in the scrub forest near the house. The woman fed him every morning and evening. He started to lie in the sun on her sandy lawn when she was gone. One day she sat on the lawn after she gave him food. He didn’t want to come too close. He was still scared. She went inside and let him eat by himself. She did this every day, and one day she said, “If you’re going to live here, you’re going to have to let me check you out. What happened to your tail?”

She held her hand out. Raggedy Dog was afraid. Then he remembered the young boy and how Skin Horse said it was OK. Raggedy Dog came to her, and she petted him. That night he started sleeping on the front porch, near the boots that smelled like horses.

One day she put a blanket in the back of her truck and asked if he wanted to ride with her. He jumped up into the truck. They rode into town. He stayed in the back of the truck when she bought groceries and talked to a friend, and then they drove home. Soon he was riding everywhere with her.

One morning she asked, “You want to go to work with me?”

He jumped into the back of the truck. They drove through town and to a large field surrounded by a wooden fence. Inside the fence was a large barn. They went inside. Ten horses lived there. Raggedy Dog wagged his tail and explored all of the stalls. Some of the horses greeted him cheerily, others paid no attention, but none were cruel. They knew he knew horses. Raggedy Dog rolled in the hay and roamed in the field when the horses ran and ate dinner from a bowl in the barn while the horses ate theirs. That night after he and the woman drove to the house, he slept deeper than he had slept in months.

The next morning, when the woman came outside, she saw Raggedy Dog sitting at the end of the porch with a boot in his mouth.

“Give it here,” she said.

He shook his head to tease her.

“OK,” she said. “Bring it with you if you like. We’ve got to ride into town again.”

Raggedy Dog dropped the boot and jumped into the back of the truck.

He liked to smell the scents on the wind as they drove. There was the salt breeze coming from the water, the smells of children playing, and of food cooking in backyards. When the woman parked the truck and went into a store, Raggedy Dog stayed in the back. He liked sitting up high, protecting the truck for her. He watched the cars drive up and down the street and the people walk in and out of stores. He liked to smell the things they bought and the things they ate. And just then he smelled a scent he hadn’t smelled in a long time.

He lifted his nose. The scent came from far down the road, beyond the stores, where a dirt track left the pavement.

Raggedy Dog stood up. He whined. He wanted to run to the smell but didn’t want to leave his new friend’s truck. When he saw her come from the store he jumped down and ran toward the end of the street.

The woman called, “Where the heck are you going?”

He stopped and looked at her. He barked, turned away, and then turned back. He barked again. She put away the things she’d bought at the store and started to follow. But when he began to run toward the end of the street, she went to the truck and started it.

Raggedy Dog ran past the stores, and where the paved road curved he turned and ran down the dirt track  through the scrub trees. When the woman reached him, he was standing beside a wire fence, barking into the field. And in the field stood the saddest looking horse the woman had ever seen. There were places where its fur had worn away. There were small cuts from underbrush and the fence that had never been treated. Its mane and tail were matted and tangled. She got out of the truck and walked to the fence. She called gently to the horse, but it ignored her.

Then she heard a door slam open and shut behind her. She turned and saw an angry man walking toward her. He walked unsteadily. He was shouting out her, telling her to go away. When he reached her she walked up to him quietly and said, “How much?”

She drove away with the tired old horse tied to the back of the truck. She had to drive slowly so it could keep up. They inched along the village streets, and people and animals stopped and stared. Raggedy Door sat in the back of the truck. He said, “Don’t worry. You’ll like where we’re going.” Skin Horse didn’t say anything. She walked with her head down and took one step at a time.

The woman took them to the stable. Skin Horse was too tired to pay attention to the other horses, but they all looked sadly at her as she walked by, and they nickered to each other, talking in their horse language.

The woman rubbed her gently with soft brushes. She spread ointments in her bare patches and cuts. She checked her worn hooves. She gave her the first good meal she’d had in years. At first Skin Horse ignored it, but when the woman was gone she took her time to smell it and then ate.

The woman came and tended to her every day, and Raggedy Dog came with her, lying in the stable straw or wandering and bringing back news from the other stalls and the fields.

After a month the horse’s hair had begun to grow back into the bare places and the cuts began to heal. She ate eagerly and put on the pounds he had lost.

“You were as ragged as Raggedy Dog when you came in,” the woman told her. “You know each other from somewhere don’t you? I thought about calling you Raggedy Horse, but you had so many bare spots I’m going to call you Skin Horse so I’ll never forget where you came from.”

Then one day she left her truck at the stable and rode Skin Horse  to her house in the scrub forest, with Raggedy Dog beside her. And she fed them both in her sandy front yard while she ate on the porch. And when she was done she led them through the bushes and trees until they came to a hill that overlooked the sea, and they stayed to watch the sun set above the water. The sky and the sea turned a dozen shades of orange and gold.

Skin Horse looked at Raggedy Dog, gratitude in her old eyes, and Raggedy Dog said, “Sometimes it’s hard to find a good human. When you do, you should hold on to them.”

Skin Horse nodded and shook her head. Her mane, now free of tangles, flowed freely as she did. They stood on the bluff for a long time, until the sky turned dark and the stars came out and floated in the sky. Then they walked back to a place Raggedy Dog and Skin Horse had never had before. Home.