Sarbi, Dog Hero

• Rebecca Mccready, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2014

I bent over the letter watching my tear drops land on the paper, silently making the words unrecognizable. She was gone. Officially missing in action. Of course she’d only been a dog I told myself. But I knew the real truth. She was more than a dog to me. She was a hero, a war hero.
My master stood beside me. The dust blew chokingly around my face, wind shrieking like a newborn poodle. Suddenly, 3 tall pieces of bacon appeared in front of us. Oops, not bacon. Pull your head in Sarbi! You are not a puppy anymore, I thought to myself. Fighter men things, enemies, that’s what they were. Without warning, not even a sound from my master, right in my ear a screeching sound crippled my lead and I was free. Except I wasn’t free as all I could see was the brown dust threatening to engulf me. I growled at the shadows approaching me and promptly collapsed onto the hard rocky ground, suddenly exhausted. The no-arms-legs-faces-bodies men kicked me and dragged me off. I saw my master fall in defeat and howled in alarm. I saw the poor weirdly speaking man being picked up in mid fire by one of master’s friends, Mark Donaldson. But it was too late. The dust covered my view and all I could see was the first peeks of the sun crawling up the mountainside like desperate rock climbers. And yet still I was dragged on into a tiny cramped mud brick prison, the door slammed in front of my snout, locked in an eternal embrace with darkness. A flurry of thoughts flashed through my mind, none of them good. That horrible scene replayed in slow motion, my master falling down with the other bodies littering the harsh dirt. My life flashed before me and the blackness crept in on the edges of my vision like a servant of night.
It seemed like an age before sunlight filtered through my eyelids. Wait, sunlight? I was in a brick prison. A startling thought occurred to me. Was I dead? I quickly blinked open my eyes and was met by a huge shrub, towering over me. Certainly puzzling I thought, trying to push the ‘Curiosity’ that was my biggest flaw down inside myself. Which to be honest was a good thing. A huge rope slithered out in front of my nose, wearing a hooded jacket. A cobra. I froze not daring move, scared of what was to become of me. The snake hurled itself at the shrub and disappeared into the bush as fast as it had come out. So I just started walking. Mountains loomed in the distance, looking like heaven on earth, covered in snow. And then I knew that was where I had to go. So I set out into the long hazy plain of bare sand the one thing on my mind being finding my Master.