Favourite Dog Stories: Shadow, Cool! and Born to Run. Michael Morpurgo

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      At that moment the whole world seemed to be standing still. I remember one of the soldiers standing up and shouting at me to stop where I was. I didn’t understand any English then, of course, but he was making it quite clear what he wanted me to do. He was telling me to move back, and to do it fast.

      So I did.

      I backed away till I found Mother’s arms around me, holding me. She was sobbing with terror, and it was only then that I began to be frightened myself, to realise at all how much danger we were in.

      The soldier was walking now towards Shadow, calling out one word over and over again, but not to us, to Shadow. “Polly? Polly? Polly?”

      Shadow turned, looked at him, wagged her tail just once, and then she was back to being a statue again, head down, nose pointing. Shadow never wagged her tail at anyone unless it was a friend. She knew this soldier, and he knew her.

      They were old friends. They had to be.

      But how? I couldn’t work it out at all. It was a weird moment. I knew the bomb might go off any time, but all I could think about was how that soldier and Shadow could possibly have known one another.

      The soldier was still shouting at us to move further away, then waving at us to get down. Mother was pulling me backwards all the time, almost dragging me, until I found myself lying down with her in the bottom of a ditch. Her arm was tight around me, her hand on top of my head, holding me down.

      “Don’t move, Aman,” she whispered in my ear. “Don’t move.” All the time we were lying there she did not stop praying.

      I don’t know how long we were lying there in the ditch, only that I was wet through, and that my foot was throbbing with pain. All the time I wanted to get up on my knees and have a look at what was going on, but Mother wouldn’t let me.

      We could hear the soldiers talking, but had no idea what was happening until we heard footsteps coming towards us along the road. We looked up to see two soldiers standing over us, one of them a foreigner, one in an Afghan uniform. Shadow was there too, panting hard, and looking very pleased with herself. The two soldiers helped us up out of the ditch, and Shadow jumped up and down at us, greeting us as if she hadn’t seen us for a month.

      “It’s all right,” the Afghan soldier told us. “The bomb is safe now.” He spoke in Pashto, but then at once repeated it in Dari. He seemed to know almost immediately that we were Hazara, that we spoke Dari.

      The foreign soldier was shaking Mother’s hand, then mine, and he was talking excitedly all the time, the Afghan soldier interpreting for him. “This is Sergeant Brodie. He’s with the British army. He says you were very brave to do what you did. You may have saved many lives today, and he wants to thank you. He wants to tell you something else too, about the dog. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he first saw this dog, none of us could. He knew it was Polly at once. We all did. I knew it too. There’s no other dog in the world like Polly. He says that Polly was always excited like this after she discovered a bomb. It’s because she knows she has done her job well, and it makes her really happy. But Sergeant Brodie wants to know, how come she seems to know you so well?”

      “Of course she knows me,” I told them. “She’s our dog, isn’t she?”

      They looked at one another, not seeming to understand what I was telling them.

      “Your dog?” the British soldier asked me, through the interpreter again. “I’m still trying to work this out. I mean, how long have you had her? Where did you find her?”

      “Bamiyan,” I said. “She came to our home. It was months ago, nearly a year maybe.”

      “Bamiyan?” The interpreter was amazed. They both were. “Sergeant Brodie says that is impossible,” said the Afghan soldier. “Bamiyan is hundreds of miles away, up north. This whole thing is impossible.”

      As the interpreter was talking, the soldier seemed suddenly to be looking about him nervously. “Sergeant Brodie says we can’t stand here chatting 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.