Carlos came and perched beside Dog on a log next to the fire. He bent his head towards her, delicately raising all his neck feathers. “Scratch,” he cooed softly. “Scratch.”
Very carefully, Dog scratched the dry white skin between the soft feathers. Carlos closed his eyes and purred. “Home,” he said quietly. “Home. All home.” Then he smoothed his feathers flat, and looked intently into Dog’s face with his strange eyes, each one in turn, then both together, over the curve of his beak. “Goodbye,” he said. “Goodbye.”
And then he was gone. He flew straight over the water to where a flock of macaws just like him were flapping upstream. Dog watched as Carlos drew closer and closer to them. Then, quite suddenly, he was among them, no longer separate and “Carlos” but a part of the flock. A moment later, their calls and colours were lost in the green of the forest.
Dog cried as she had never cried before. She cried because Carlos had gone, and because she too wanted a flock to fly with. She cried because Carlos had lent her a voice, and now that he was gone, she had none.
But she understood. Carlos had to be what he had never been before: a macaw amongst other macaws. He would not be coming back.
She sat there all morning and into the afternoon, staring at the river. Esme brought her three green beetles and a small yellow frog to try and cheer her up, but it didn’t work.
The sun set, turning the river the colour of blood and flowers. At last Dog stopped crying. She watched the darkness rise up with all the stars studded into it. She breathed in the warm softness of the air, and the night sounds of the forest, then she curled up beside Esme, and slept.
A voice came into Dog’s dreams. A child’s voice that burst into her mind like shafts of light into a darkened room.
Dog’s eyes shot open. It wasn’t a dream. Someone was coming through the forest towards her. It was the head man’s son, who was too young to be bothered with Spanish, so he called out greetings in the language of the village, the language that had grown from the river and the forest as naturally and easily as the trees and the fishes.
Dog’s heart raced. She knew these words – knew them in a way she’d never known the words that Uncle spoke. Inside her silent heart, words rose up like a country rising from the sea. The dream-like blur of the huts, the river, the great trees, shimmered into focus, and a memory, a real memory of a time before Uncle, grew inside her like a bright bubble.
She remembered a beach by a river, just like this. She remembered the light on the water, the dry warmth of her mother’s arms around her, the safe smell of her mother’s skin and the line of blue parrots against the green. Her mother’s voice had whispered – whispered words that named the trees, the water, the birds and herself!
The boy stepped out from under the trees into the clearing where the guest hut stood. He had been away from the village for a few days and hadn’t seen their visitor. “Hello,” he said, a little surprised to find a child rather like himself. “Who are you?”
The answer was in Dog’s heart, where her mother had put it. In a voice so tiny it seemed to come from far away, Dog spoke.
“I’m named after the blue macaw,” she said. “I’m called Mintak.”
A word from Nicola Davies on the characters in A Girl Called Dog …
Dog
The first time I saw Dog in my head, I imagined looking down on her through a skylight window on a frosty night. There she was, curled up in a dog bed with a coati whom I immediately recognized as Esme, my old friend from Sparkwell Wildlife Park.
I knew what Dog looked like right from the start: dusty-brown skin, thick black hair and deep, deep brown eyes set in a wide face. I knew where she came from too – somewhere in the Amazon Rainforest, in South America. Later I read more about native people from remote regions of the Amazon, and that was where I found Dog’s real name – which we find out right at the end of the story.
At the time I began writing A Girl Called Dog, I’d been reading about how slavery, especially child slavery, is still happening all over the world. I read about children stolen from their families and taken thousands of miles away to work for nothing as servants, on farms and in factories. I read about orphaned children, with no one to protect or care for them, treated like objects that could be bought, sold and thrown away. Dog grew out of all I’d learned about these powerless children exploited by adults who are supposed to know better. I imagined Dog to be a young girl stolen from her family and put to work in Uncle’s pet shop, like so many children in the world that this really happens to.
Dog grew out of something else, too. All my life I’ve been aware of how the world’s rainforests are being destroyed – cut down for their wood, and plundered for their valuable wildlife and natural resources. Some of the first stories I worked on as a young TV researcher were about the illegal trade in South American cat skins – jaguar and ocelot – and the importation of exotic parrot species for the pet trade. I saw photos of boxes stuffed with spotted skins from hundreds of rare cats, and of suitcases full of live parrots, packed in so tightly that many of them suffocated on their journey. For me, Dog’s situation – being stolen from the Amazon, that fabulous treasure of natural wonders – became a symbol for all that destruction.
There was one other thing that contributed to Dog’s character, and that’s the ability of children living in poverty, danger and deprivation to still smile and play. Dog has had a terrible start in life, and yet she can still feel lucky and positive. She has a quiet strength about her and I only found out where that came from right at the end of the book … but I won’t give that away in case you haven’t read it yet!
Esme the coati
(Pronounced co-are-tee)
Of all the characters I’ve ever written about, Esme is the one closest to reality. Years ago I presented the Birthday Requests Show for West Country TV. The best thing about that job was that I had regular contact with animals from the local wildlife park, Sparkwell. One of viewers’ favourite animals – and mine too – was a ringtailed coati called Esme.
Coatis are South American relatives of racoons; they have long, turned-up noses, even longer stripy tails and dextrous paws with claws that look like elegant fingernails – well, they do to me, anyway! Coati females are very sociable and live in big bands of mothers and babies, sharing food and helping each other out. They are good climbers but mostly live on the forest floor where their snuffly noses and clever claws winkle out anything edible – insects, roots, bird eggs, lizards, mice, fruit and nuts. Coatis are often taken as pets by native people who live in the forest, and being clever and liking company, coatis settle in well with human families.
The real Esme, like the Esme in this book, was pretty old when I got to know her, with fur thinning on her stripy tail and bald patches on her body. We just took to each other immediately and whenever we met, Esme would climb onto my shoulders and push her nose under my hair. I absolutely adored her and it didn’t surprise me that she turned up here, years later, as Dog’s best friend.
Carlos the macaw
I’ve always been fascinated by animals that can talk. The idea that a human could have a real conversation with an animal enthrals me.
Children’s books are full of ‘talking’ animals, but to me, they usually seem less like real animals and more like humans in animal costumes. In reality, most talking animals are really just very clever mimics, copying human sounds and gestures without understanding their meaning. However, while I was doing the research for a book about animal communication, I found some famous exceptions. One was a chimp called Washoe, who was raised by humans and learned human sign language – chimps don’t have the right vocal chords or tongues for speech. Washoe ‘talked’ to her human carers and to other chimps in the human sign language she’d learned, and even taught another chimp to sign without human help.
The other example was Alex the African grey parrot. African greys are well-known for their ability to mimic sounds, including human voices and words, but Alex wasn’t
just a copycat. He used the words he learned to answer questions, showing that he understood their meaning, and even made up sentences on his own. I was very excited when I heard about Alex and the things he said to his human friend Dr Irene Pepperberg, including the last words he ever spoke to her: ‘I love you’.
Dr Pepperberg’s work with Alex showed me that it was possible for humans and animals to really talk, so I could have an animal character whose communication with humans was real, not magical. I was careful when I wrote Carlos’s speech to keep it within the bounds of what a real parrot like Alex might have managed.
I did stretch reality by making Carlos a blue and gold macaw, as they aren’t particularly good mimics; but I needed a parrot from the Amazon and, as a little girl, I’d dreamed of having a pet blue and gold macaw that would fly freely into the trees but come to me when I called. So Carlos was my dream come true!
As the story progressed, I thought more about Carlos and the life he had led among humans. Would he long to be just a normal parrot once again? I understood, in the end, that both Dog and Carlos were making a journey to discover their true selves. Esme too was going home, but for Esme, home was always going to be just where Dog was.
A Girl Called Dog is a fictional story, but its roots are in the real world, and run deep into my life and my own heart. I hope that makes it strong, and able to speak to everyone who reads it.
Nicola
About the Author …
Nicola Davies graduated from Cambridge with a degree in zoology before going on to become a writer and presenter of radio and television programmes such as THE REALLY WILD SHOW. Amongst her many acclaimed books for children are Big Blue Whale, One Tiny Turtle, Ice Bear, Extreme Animals and Poo, which was shortlisted for a Blue Peter Book Award. Her novel Home was shortlisted for the Branford Boase award.
A GIRL CALLED DOG
AN RHCB DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 446 45330 8
Published in Great Britain by RHCB Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2011
Copyright © Nicola Davies, 2011
Illustrations by James de la Rue. Copyright © Random House Children’s Books, 2011
First Published in Great Britain by Corgi, 2011
The right of Nicola Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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