Lulu and the Dog from the Sea (7 page)

That night the trash can lid was left unguarded. Now that the dog from the sea had disappeared, he no longer seemed such an impossible idea to Lulu’s parents.

“I bet Sam would have gotten used to him, after a while,” they said, and they understood when Lulu put the leftovers from the Golden Lotus in a bowl beside the trash can, just in case.

They understood, too, when Mellie could not bear to pack her unflown kite. “Just let me keep it like it is until morning! Just to look at,” she begged.

“All right, Mellie.”

They even understood when Lulu insisted on keeping the bedroom window wide, wide open.

“But no getting out and camping by the trash can!” said Lulu’s father, astonishing Lulu, who had not even told Mellie of this very private idea. “Promise?”

“Promise,” said Lulu reluctantly.

“Go to sleep quickly then,” said Lulu’s parents, who kissed them and went to bed.

Going to sleep quickly was not something that Lulu and Mellie usually managed. Usually they chatted for hours.

This time, however, they went to sleep quickly.

Mellie woke with a jump in a room full of gray light.

It was dawn and it was cold, and the air was full of a thin sound. At the window the curtains were streaming like flags into the room.

“Lulu! Lulu!” whispered Mellie. “The wind is blowing!”

The wind
was
blowing, and Lulu’s watch said half past four in the morning. They had hours and hours before the grown-ups woke.

They did not pause for a moment.

Lulu put on her sandals.

Mellie picked up her kite.

First Lulu, then Mellie, climbed out of the window.

The food from the Golden Lotus was still untouched in the bowl by the trash.

“But he’ll see the kite,” said Lulu and followed Mellie across the patch of blue-green grass, into the sandy paths that wound through the sand dunes, and onto the empty beach.

A strong straight wind was blowing. A perfect flying wind. The kite, with its flock of bright seagulls, leaped into the sky.

From the moment the kite took off, Lulu and Mellie forgot everything but the need to hold on to it. It pulled on the strings like something alive. No flock of seagulls had ever soared higher.

The kite raced in front of the wind, and Lulu and Mellie raced along the beach behind it, each clinging to a kite handle.

“Hold tight with both hands!” screamed Mellie, and it lifted them as they ran, so that they hardly felt their feet touch the sand. They felt nothing but the huge tug of the strings in their hands, and they saw nothing but sky.

For a long time, an unmeasurable amount of time, it was like running in an airy dream.

Then Lulu tripped and fell.

The kite-string handle flew out of her hand, and the kite, suddenly unbalanced, spun in a spiral, poised in the air for a moment, and then dived its whole flock of rainbow seagulls headfirst into the sand dunes.

“Oh!” gasped Mellie, while Lulu picked herself up. “My kite, my kite!” She started running to where it had fallen.

Lulu followed more slowly, gathering the kite strings and feeling her bumped knees. She had time to look around and see where they were. They were on a strange part of the beach, with unknown sand dunes, far away from the little white cottage.

Mellie was nowhere in sight.

Nothing Lulu recognized was anywhere in sight.

Then, from somewhere high above, Mellie screamed.

Lulu began to run.

In those unknown sand dunes the gray-leaved, orange-berried bushes grew very close and thorny. The sandy paths were narrower, made for rabbits, not people. The hollows were deep and unexpected. The grasses grew over them and hid them, so they opened suddenly, like traps.

“Lulu!” cried Mellie, and Lulu called back, “Where are you? Where are you?” and stumbled as she hurried.

It took a long time to find Mellie.

It was like trying to find someone in a maze.

But at last, there she was. Tumbled into a hollow, clutching her kite, and trying not to cry.

“I’m all right,” she told Lulu, with her eyes screwed tight shut. “But I hurt my foot! I hurt it really...” She gave a little sob. “I don’t want to look. Is it bleeding?”

It was bleeding. Mellie had caught it on thorns, tripped, and fallen with it twisted beneath her. Already her ankle was puffy and swollen.

“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
).