Just a Dog Read online

  JUST a DOG

  MICHAEL GERARD BAUER

  An Omnibus Book from Scholastic Australia

  For Toby, Penny, Kim and Chloe – good dogs all

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. The Stories of Mister Mosely

  2. Getting Mister Mosely

  3. Naming Mister Mosely

  4. Mister Mosely as a Puppy

  5. What Mister Mosely Looked Like

  6. Mister Mosely and Amelia

  7. Mister Mosely and Strangers

  8. Things That Scared Mister Mosely

  9. Mister Mosely and the Pink Panther

  10. Mister Mosely’s White Christmas

  11. The Weirdest Mister Mosely Story

  12. Mister Mosely at the Vet’s

  13. Mister Mosely’s One Trick

  14. Mister Mosely’s Lost Fortnight

  15. Mister Mosely’s Mystery

  16. My Favourite Mister Mosely Story

  17. Mister Mosely and the Stupid Trick

  18. Mister Mosely and the Stupid Trick – the End

  19. Mister Mosely and Mum

  20. Mister Mosely and Grace

  21. The Day Mister Mosely Changed

  22. Mister Mosely and Dad

  23. Mister Mosely and the Stairs

  24. Mister Mosely Back on the Porch

  25. Mister Mosely – Just a Dog

  26. Mister Mosely’s New Place

  27. Mister Mosely’s Bowl

  28. Toasting Mister Mosely

  29. Not Really a Mister Mosely Story

  Also by Michael Gerard Bauer

  Dinosaur Knights

  The Running Man

  Don’t Call Me Ishmael!

  Ishmael and the Return of the Dugongs

  Copyright

  1 The Stories of Mister Mosely

  The day my dad said Mister Mosely was ‘just a dog’, my mum punched him.

  Not a punch like the one Dad gave Uncle Gavin that time when Uncle Gavin’s tooth came out and there was all the blood and everything. But not a girl punch or a mucking-around punch either. Mum really meant it. You could tell by the way she scrunched her face right up and made her eyes go small.

  ‘Don’t you say that! Don’t you dare say that!’

  That’s what my mum said while she was punching my dad. She hit him about three times right on the chest and Dad didn’t try to stop her or anything. He just stood there and let her, like it was exactly what she should be doing. I guess what my dad did sounds pretty weird, but sometimes you can feel that way, you really can. I know, because that’s how I felt one time when I did something stupid to this big praying mantis I used to keep in my room as a pet.

  I called the praying mantis Goblin. I called him that because he was all green, same as the Green Goblin in Spiderman. I found him on a tree in our backyard and I made a cage for him and everything. I used an old fish tank that wasn’t any good for keeping fish in any more because it had a crack right down one side. I put in sand and a couple of rocks and some branches for Goblin to climb on and I made a lid so he couldn’t get out. It looked pretty good, like a proper cage in a zoo or something.

  It was fun having Goblin in my room. But the best part was feeding him. I used to catch insects and moths and what I’d do sometimes was, I’d tie them on the end of a long piece of cotton. Then I’d jiggle them up and down in Goblin’s tank to make him think they were still alive.

  When Goblin saw them he’d twist his head round like some kind of big-eyed robot. Then he’d start rocking and creeping closer. When he got right up close he’d grab the moths in the bendy part of his arm where all the spikes were and chomp into them. Dad made a joke about it once. He said his name was Goblin because he was always gobbling his food. I thought it was a pretty good joke. Mum didn’t. She just groaned.

  But one day I did a really dumb thing. I caught this moth, but before I gave it to Goblin I sprayed it with fly spray. That sounds pretty bad, I know, but I wasn’t trying to hurt him or anything. It was sort of an experiment. I just wanted to see what would happen. I never really thought he’d eat the stupid moth. But Goblin did eat it, all of it, and what happened was, he died.

  I thought he was going to be all right. He looked okay when I went to bed. But in the morning when I checked the tank, he was lying on the sand with his stomach all eaten away and his legs and wings pulled off and a million black ants crawling all over him. I reckon if someone wanted to punch me that day I would’ve let them.

  So, all I’m saying is, maybe that’s how my dad was feeling after he called Mister Mosely ‘just a dog’. And maybe that’s why he just stood there and let my mum punch him, even though he could have stopped her easily seeing how he’s way bigger and stronger than she is.

  But it’s still kind of weird my dad doing that, because what he said was true. Mister Mosely was just a dog. I mean it wasn’t like he was a person or he could talk or anything. And he didn’t have any special super powers and he didn’t go around rescuing people or catching bad guys the way that police dog on TV does. And I guess he wasn’t the smartest dog in the world either, because he only ever learnt one trick, even though I reckon it was a pretty good one.

  So you see Dad was only telling the truth when he said what he said. Didn’t stop Mum from punching him but. Maybe there are some things you shouldn’t say, even if they are true.

  Anyway, I’m just letting you know all that so you don’t think these stories I’m writing are going to be about a superhero TV kind of dog. They’re not. They’re just going to be about a normal, everyday dog. Our dog, Mister Mosely. And they will all be true.

  Even the ones that I wish weren’t.

  2 Getting Mister Mosely

  We got Mister Mosely because of Uncle Gavin. I was only about three then. Some stuff I can remember and some stuff I only know because Mum and Dad told me about it after. Sometimes I’m not too sure which is which because it was almost seven years ago now.

  Uncle Gavin’s my dad’s brother. Dad used to call him his ‘little brother’, seeing how he’s younger than Dad. But it was kind of a joke my dad calling him that, because Uncle Gavin is taller and bigger than him.

  Whenever Uncle Gavin came over Dad used to say, ‘How’s it going, little brother?’ and Uncle Gavin would say, ‘Not bad, B. B.’ B. B. stands for ‘Big Brother’. But I haven’t heard Dad and Uncle Gavin do that for a long time, because Uncle Gavin doesn’t come around to our place the way he used to and we never go to his place any more either.

  I don’t have a little brother or a big brother. I’ve got two little sisters instead. One’s just a baby. They’re all right most of the time, I guess. Their names are Amelia and Grace. And if you want to know, my name’s Corey. Corey Ingram. But back when we got Mister Mosely there wasn’t any Amelia or Grace, just me and Mum and Dad.

  Not for long though, because Mum was pregnant. Dad took photos the day we went to Uncle Gavin’s to get Mister Mosely and you can see Mum’s belly sticking right out. Mum reckons she looks like she’s swallowed a beach ball in those photos. I really wanted Mum to have a boy baby so then me and him could be big brother and little brother same as Dad and Uncle Gavin, but it just ended up being Amelia.

  Anyway, why we got Mister Mosely from Uncle Gavin was because he owned two dogs and they had all these puppies. Uncle Gavin’s dogs were pure-bred Dalmatians. They cost a lot of money, but that wouldn’t worry Uncle Gavin because Mum reckons he’s ‘loaded’. He’s got his own business building stuff and he’s the boss of everything. That’s how come at Christmas Uncle Gavin always gives the best presents. Once he bought Dad a big tool kit that Dad was saving up for ages to get and he bought Mum some perfume that she said ‘cost the earth�
�. I’m not sure if we’ll get any presents from Uncle Gavin this year but.

  And just in case you don’t know, Dalmatians are those big spotty dogs they had in that movie 101 Dalmatians. Except Uncle Gavin didn’t have that many. He only had two – a girl dog he called Madonna and a boy dog he called Prince. He named them after his favourite singers. They’re both dead now. I mean the dogs, not the singers, except I’m not sure about the Prince guy.

  Why Uncle Gavin bought Madonna and Prince in the first place was to breed them. Then he was going to sell the puppies or maybe put them in dog shows and win heaps of prizes and trophies. But it didn’t work out that way, even though Madonna ended up having ten puppies. That was because all the puppies were ‘bitsers’, which means they weren’t real pure-bred Dalmatians like Madonna and Prince. They had ‘bits’ of other kinds of dogs mixed up in them. Uncle Gavin wasn’t happy about that, but Dad said it was his own fault.

  The puppies were bitsers because Uncle Gavin forgot to lock the gate to the kennels one time and Madonna got out. So I guess that meant Prince didn’t end up being the dad. When the puppies didn’t come out proper Dalmatians, Uncle Gavin didn’t want them any more. He reckoned they were ‘no bloody use’ to him and he was just going to give them all away. That’s when he said to Mum and Dad that if they wanted one, they could have first pick.

  I definitely remember when Mum and Dad told me we were getting a puppy. I couldn’t believe it. It was even better than getting a brand new brother or a brand new sister. And the best part was, I got to pick the one I wanted – which definitely didn’t happen with Amelia.

  3 Naming Mister Mosely

  How Mister Mosely got his name is a bit of a weird story. It all started the day we went to Uncle Gavin’s to choose our puppy.

  Dad said the puppies were a ‘real mixed bag’. He was right. When we looked in the kennel, some were spotty, some were nearly all black or brown, some were pretty big, some were little, some had short hair, some were furry. There was even one that had really long ears and it kept stepping on them and tripping over, which was pretty funny. Only a couple of the puppies looked like proper Dalmatians to me, but Uncle Gavin said even they weren’t really right.

  When Uncle Gavin opened up the gate to the kennel all the puppies came running out at us. I remember they started jumping up on me and licking and scratching my legs and trying to chew my shoes. Mum says she had to pick me up to stop me from crying. I don’t remember that bit, but maybe it was true seeing how I was only a little kid then.

  The puppies didn’t worry Dad at all. Uncle Gavin took a video that day. In the video Dad’s lying on the grass letting them climb all over him and lick his face and bite his ears. Mum and me are laughing at him. Dad’s laughing too, and you can hear him saying, ‘Help! Help! Save me! I’m being eaten alive by a pack of mad dogs!’ He used to do stupid stuff like that once.

  It must have been after Uncle Gavin stopped filming that I saw Mister Mosely for the very first time. He hadn’t run out with the other puppies. He was back up at the kennel gate, sitting beside Madonna, just sort of watching and waiting. He looked all white and the sun made his coat go shiny.

  I liked him right away. Maybe it was because he was just sitting there kind of waiting for me to see him. Mum reckons I pointed straight at him and said, ‘I want that one.’

  Dad didn’t think much of my pick. He told me I should choose a puppy with a bit more ‘get up and go’. He said my puppy looked a bit ‘dopey’ and we should get a spotty puppy, one that was almost a true Dalmatian. He kept saying stuff like, ‘You don’t want that other one. He’s no good. He’s hardly got any spots. He’s not like a real Dalmatian. He’s mostly white.’

  But I did want him, and that’s what I kept telling Dad.

  ‘I do! I want that one! The mostly one!’ That’s what Mum and Dad reckoned I kept saying over and over. ‘I want the mostly one! I want the mostly one!’

  The next bit I don’t really remember exactly, but Mum says that Dad picked up my puppy and looked him right in the face and said, ‘Well, Mister Mostly, it looks like you’re it – looks like you’re the chosen one.’ Dad always joked that he gave in ‘just to shut me up’.

  Anyway, I guess it was because I heard Dad say it that I started to call the new puppy Mister Mostly too. Only problem was, I couldn’t say it properly because I was just a little kid. I always left out the ‘t’ bit so it came out Mister Mosely. And because I called him Mister Mosely that’s what Mum and Dad started calling him too, except for sometimes when they called him Mister Moe or just plain Moe. Then Dad painted the name on the side of this big silver food bowl we bought and he spelled it M-O-S-E-L-Y because he said ‘mose’ rhymed with ‘hose’.

  So that’s the story of how Mister Mosely got his name. Now I can’t imagine him ever being called anything else. So I think it’s pretty weird how it all happened just because he was ‘mostly’ white.

  4 Mister Mosely as a Puppy

  I don’t remember that much about Mister Mosely when he was just a puppy, probably because he didn’t stay little for very long. I know he made heaps of puddles and messes on the floor, which Mum didn’t like. That’s how come we got the ‘no dogs inside’ rule.

  I do remember what happened on the first night we brought Mister Mosely home. Things didn’t go too well. What happened was, Dad made this great place for Moe to sleep downstairs in the laundry, but Mum didn’t think it was such a good idea. She reckoned Mister Mosely was a real ‘people puppy’ and he’d be too scared and lonely down there by himself.

  She was right. Every time we left Mister Mosely alone he went crazy with all this howling and whining.

  That’s why Dad tried this thing he’d read about. He got a big teddy bear I used to have when I was really little and an old wind-up clock that was his dad’s and he put them both in with Mister Mosely. The bear was so Mister Mosely wouldn’t feel alone and the clock ticking was supposed to sound like a heart beating. Dad said it would make Moe think he was still with his mum Madonna.

  I thought Dad’s idea was a pretty good one. Except it didn’t work. When we left Mister Mosely in his bed with the teddy bear and the ticking clock he just whined and carried on the same as before. Mum wanted to go straight back downstairs and get him, but Dad said we had to give his plan more time to work. So we stayed upstairs and waited.

  We never did find out for sure if Dad’s plan would’ve worked or not. That was because he forgot to turn the clock alarm off and when Mister Mosely was in the laundry all by himself still whining and everything, it went BRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIING!

  It was really loud. Moe got such a fright he wee-ed all over the place and howled worse than ever.

  After that Mum said there was ‘no way in the world’ we could leave Mister Mosely downstairs by himself, so Dad had to make a brand new place for him. He made it on the porch at the top of the stairs just outside the back door. Dad said it was only a ‘short-term measure’, but it became Moe’s spot from then on. That’s where he always sat waiting around for us to come outside or looking in on us like he was on guard or something.

  I think the reason why Mister Mosely didn’t stay little for long was because he ate so much. Mum used to joke that he was ‘eating us out of house and home’ and Dad reckoned he had ‘hollow legs’, which meant that that’s where all the food was going.

  All I know is, Moe grew up way faster than me. I used to tie ropes to his collar and sit in a cardboard box and he could drag me across the grass no trouble at all. Sometimes I’d climb up on his back and pretend he was a horse. Mum made me stop doing that horse stuff. She said I might hurt him. I don’t think he minded one bit. Nothing ever seemed to bother Moe, not even all that terrible stuff my little sister Amelia used to do to him.

  That’s another story I’m going to tell you about. But not now. First I have to tell you what Mister Mosely looked like when he got to be a full-grown dog.

  You couldn’t miss him, that’s for sure.

  5 What M
ister Mosely Looked Like

  First of all, Mister Mosely was big.

  Not when we got him but. He was smaller than a lot of the other puppies, but Uncle Gavin said that didn’t mean he would stay small. ‘Big paws, big dog’; that’s what Uncle Gavin reckoned, and Mister Mosely’s paws were BIG all right.

  They were so big he used to get all tangled up in them. Sometimes Dad called him ‘Un-co Moe’ when he did that, which I didn’t think was fair. I figured that Moe was just born with his adult dog feet and he had to wait for the rest of him to catch up.

  He didn’t have to wait too long. Moe got big extra fast. Pretty soon he was so big he had to put his front legs apart just so he could eat from his food bowl. One time when we went to the zoo I saw a giraffe do the exact same thing. Dad ended up putting Moe’s bowl on top of some blocks so he didn’t have to bend all the way down to reach it. And we’ve got this photo of Moe standing on his back legs with his paws on Dad’s chest and Moe’s head is as high as Dad’s. That shows you how big he was.

  Uncle Gavin said Mister Mosely must’ve had some other kind of really big dog in him. Maybe a Great Dane or a Rottweiler. Uncle Gavin called it ‘Moe’s secret ingredient’, just like in that recipe for fried chicken. He reckoned a lot of ‘secret herbs and spices’ must have gone in to make Mister Mosely. Uncle Gavin always thought that was really funny.

  The second thing you couldn’t miss about Mister Mosely was his colour, which, I already told you, was mostly white. Mr Lafranchi from down the road called Moe ‘The Unholy Ghost’. That was because one night when he was walking home really late Moe came running out of the dark. Mr Lafranchi said he almost had a heart attack because all he could see was a big white shape floating towards him. Mum said knowing where Mr Lafranchi spent most of his evenings it was a wonder he didn’t see two Mister Moselys coming for him.

  But the thing is, Moe wasn’t pure white like a ghost is anyway. He had a few black bits on him too. The bits of Mister Mosely that were black were half of his left ear, his nose, some little dots you could hardly see on his back legs, a spot under his right eye that looked like a black tear coming out, and a few big black spots on his chest that all joined together and made a wonky heart shape. Mum said those spots on his chest were there because Mister Mosely’s heart was too big for all of it to fit on the inside. The only other dark bits of Mister Mosely were his big round eyes. The rest of him was white.