Favourite Dog Stories: Shadow, Cool! and Born to Run. Michael Morpurgo
out in the open,” the interpreter went on. “The Taliban could be watching us. They have eyes everywhere. They have ambushed us on this road before. But he has to find out more about all this, about you and Polly. We must go into the village, he says. We can be safer there.”
So with Sergeant Brodie holding my hand, the soldiers behind us, and Shadow running on ahead, showing us the way as usual, we walked back into the village, the village children all around us.
“Quite a Hero”
Aman
So that’s how we all found ourselves a few minutes later sitting inside a house in the village, changed into dry clothes the villagers had found for Mother and me, and sipping glasses of tea, with the whole room crowded with people, villagers and soldiers, the interpreter and this Sergeant Brodie, all of them listening, as I told them about how Shadow had wandered into our cave all those months before, more than a year ago, and how she’d been hurt in the leg somehow and was starving, how she’d got better, and that we were now on our way to England to live in Manchester, with my Uncle Mir, who had once shaken hands with David Beckham.
The soldiers laughed at that. It turned out that one or two of them supported Manchester United, and that David Beckham was their hero too. So I knew then I was amongst friends.
All this time Shadow lay beside me, her head on my feet, eyeing everyone in the room.
When I had finished, Sergeant Brodie was the first to say anything. He spoke through his interpreter again.
“The sergeant says he’s got something to tell you about this dog,” he began. The interpreter spoke Dari with an accent I wasn’t used to, but Mother and I understood enough. “He says you’re going to find it difficult to believe this. He finds it difficult to believe it himself, but it really is true. He’s asked all the soldiers who were here a year or so ago, and they all agree. There is no doubt about it. We all know this dog. That dog, she is called Polly, and she’s sniffed out more roadside bombs – the army calls them IEDs, Improvised Explosive Devices – than any other dog in the whole army. Seventy-five. Today was the seventy-sixth. And that dog disappeared, the sergeant says, about fourteen months ago now. He was there when it happened. And so was I.
“We were out on patrol, just like today. Sergeant Brodie was with us on that patrol too. He was Polly’s handler. Polly lived with him and his family when they were back home in England. The sergeant was the one who trained her up, looked after her and lived with her on the base. The best sniffer dog he’d ever known, he says. Everyone said so. Anyway, there we were, out on patrol, Sergeant Brodie and Polly going on ahead of us, checking the roadsides for bombs as usual. When we saw Polly was on to something, we all stopped. And that’s when the Taliban ambushed us.
“The fire-fight that followed went on for an hour or so, and when it was over we found we had one man wounded, Corporal Banford it was, and Polly wasn’t there. She was nowhere to be seen. She had disappeared. We called her and we called her, but we couldn’t hang about looking for her. It was too dangerous.
“We brought in a helicopter to get Corporal Banford out of there, and off to hospital as quick as we could. Sadly, it wasn’t quick enough. He died on the way to hospital. We came back to look for Polly the next day, and told every patrol that went out after that to keep an eye out for her. But no one ever saw her again. So we all thought she’d been killed. We’d lost two soldiers that day. That’s how we thought of her, as one of us.”
The interpreter had to wait a few moments for the sergeant to begin again.
“Sergeant Brodie is saying,” he went on, “that the Taliban target our sniffer dogs if they can – they know how valuable they are to us, how many soldiers’ lives they save. That’s what he thought had happened to her. That’s what everyone thought. We put up a little memorial for her back at the base. Then, we come out here today, fourteen months later, and there you are waving us down to warn us, and there she is sniffing out a bomb just like she was when we last saw her. It’s incredible. And if I’ve understood it right, that dog wandered hundreds of miles north before she found you in Bamiyan, and then hundreds of miles back. I know it sounds silly, but I reckon she knew where she was going. She had to find someone to look after her, and that was you, and then she knew she had to come back where she belonged. Somehow she must have known the way home, sort of like a swallow does.”
When he told me that last bit about Shadow knowing the way home, I was sure he had to be right. Wherever we had been since we left Bamiyan, Shadow always seemed to know the way to go. It was us, Mother and me, who had followed her, not the other way around. And so much else was making sense to me now, how Shadow was always running on ahead of us, nose to the ground, sniffing the roadside. This was what she’d been trained to do. She was an army sniffer dog, just like that driver in the lorry had told us.
“Believe me, when they hear about this back at base,” the interpreter said, “the sergeant says you are going to be quite a hero for our lads. After all, it was you who warned us about the bomb. And it was you who rescued Polly, looked after her, and brought her back to us. They are going to be ‘over the moon’, as they say in English – and so is his daughter back home in England. She loved that dog to bits. The whole family did, the sergeant himself most of all. Yes, you’re going to be quite a hero.”
Silver, Like a Star
Aman
As we set off again, Sergeant Brodie saw that I was limping, and Mother told him through the interpreter about my bad foot. So I got a lift, a piggy-back ride on Sergeant Brodie’s back, all the way to the base. No one had done that for me since Father died. It felt so good.
And the sergeant was right. At the base, they did make a real fuss of me, of all of us, particularly Shadow. Nothing was too much trouble. We slept in a warm bed, ate all we wanted, had a shower whenever we liked. And they had a doctor there too who had a look at my blister. She said it was infected, that I’d have to stay on the base for a while, and not walk on it, not until it had healed up. They even let Mother telephone Uncle Mir in England.
So Mother and Shadow and me, we stayed there on the base – it must have been for nearly a week, I think. They gave us a little room of our own and Mother slept a lot, and when my foot was better I played football with the soldiers.
That was when I first learned to play Monopoly too. It was Sergeant Brodie who taught me. I learned to say my first words in English, and he learned some Dari too. Sergeant Brodie and me and Shadow, we’d spend a lot of time together, when he wasn’t busy, when he wasn’t out on patrol. Like all the other soldiers, he kept wanting to take photos of Shadow and me to send home on his phone.
Once, he showed me a live video of his daughter and his wife, taken on their phone. They were waving at me all the way from England, and shouting thank you to me for saving Polly. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. There was something that was troubling me. And it was troubling Shadow too, I could tell.
I knew by now we’d have to be leaving soon, as soon as my heel was better, and somehow she seemed to know it too. As the days went by Shadow wanted more and more to stay with us. But I could see she loved being with the soldiers too, particularly with Sergeant Brodie. He had even kept her favourite ball to remember her, the one she’d always liked to play with. The soldiers would throw it for her, and she’d chase it right across the compound, bringing it back, but not letting it go, till she was given something to eat in return.
But she never played with them for too long. Always she came back to sit near me, and I’d catch her looking at me, and we’d both know what it was we were thinking. Is she Polly? Is she Shadow? Would she be coming with us when we left?
I knew the answer. She knew the answer. I think we both kept hoping that both of us were wrong. I could feel she was becoming theirs again, an army dog, Sergeant Brodie’s dog. Polly, not Shadow. She still slept with us in our room, often came to lie down beside me with her head on my foot. I still hoped she would be coming with us, but I knew already deep down that it wasn’t going to happen, that she would be staying on the base with the soldiers, that she was back with Sergeant Brodie where she belonged.
She