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

She waited till we were safely out of town before telling me more. “He was cheating me in the market,” she said, “and when I argued, he told me that if I do not leave the valley, he will tell his brother, and he will have me taken to prison again. And I know his brother only too well. He was the policeman who put me in prison before. He was the one who beat me, and tortured me. It wasn’t because of the apple you stole, Aman. It was so that I would not tell anyone about what his brother had done to your father, so that I would not say he was Taliban. What can I do? I cannot leave Grandmother. She cannot look after herself. What can I do?” I held her hand to try to comfort her, but she cried all the way home. I kept telling her it would be all right, that I would look after her.

That night I heard Mother and Grandmother whispering to each other in the cave, and crying together too. When they finally went to sleep, the dog crept into the cave and lay down beside me. I buried my face in her fur and held her tight. “It will be all right, won’t it?” I said to her.

But I knew it wasn’t going to be. I knew something terrible was going to happen. I could feel it.

“Walk Tall, Aman.”

Aman

Early the next day the police came to the cave. Mother had gone down to the stream for water, so I was there alone with Grandmother when they came, three of them. The stallholder from the market was with them. They said they had come to search the place.

When Grandmother struggled to her feet and tried to stop them, they pushed her to the ground. Then they turned on me and started to beat me and kick me. That was when I saw the dog come bounding into the cave. She didn’t hesitate. She leaped up at them, barking and snarling. But they lashed out at her with their feet and their sticks and drove her out.

After that they seemed to forget about me, and just broke everything they could in the cave, kicked our things all over the place, stamped on our cooking pot, and one of them peed on the mattress before they left.

I didn’t realise at first how badly Grandmother had been hurt, not till I rolled her over on to her back. Her eyes were closed. She was unconscious. She must have hit her head when she fell. There was a great cut across her forehead. I tried to wash the blood away, kept trying to wake her. But the blood kept coming, and she wouldn’t open her eyes.

When Mother came back some time later, she did all she could to revive her, but it was no good. Grandmother died that evening. Sometimes I think she died because she just didn’t want to wake up, because she knew it was the only way to make Mother and me leave, the only way to save us. So maybe Grandmother won her argument with Mother, in her own way, the only way she could.

We left Bamiyan the next day, the day Grandmother was buried. We did as Grandmother had told us. We took Father’s donkey with us, to carry the few belongings we had, the cooking things, the blankets and the mattress, with Grandmother’s jewels and Uncle Mir’s money hidden inside it. We took some bread and apples with us, gifts from our friends for the journey, and walked out of the valley. I tried not to look back, but I did. I could not help myself.

Because of everything that had happened, I think, I had almost forgotten about the dog, which hardly seems fair when I think about it. After all, only the day before, she had tried to save my life in the cave. Anyway, she just appeared, suddenly, from out of nowhere. She was just there, walking alongside us for a while, then running on ahead, as if she was leading us, as if she knew where she was going. Every now and then, she would stop, and start sniffing at the ground busily, then turn to look back at us. I wasn’t sure whether it was to check we were coming, or to tell us everything was all right, that this was the road to Kabul, that all we had to do was follow her.

Mother and I took it in turns to ride up on the donkey. We did not talk much. We were both too sad, about Grandmother’s death, about leaving, and too tired as well. But to begin with the journey went well enough. We had plenty of food and water to keep us going. The donkey kept plodding on, and the dog stayed with us, still going on ahead of us, nose to the ground, tail wagging wildly.

Mother said it was going to take us many days of walking to reach Kabul, but we managed to find shelter somewhere each night. People were kind to us and hospitable. The country people in Afghanistan haven’t much, but what they have, they share.

At the end of each day’s walk, we were always tired out. I wasn’t exactly happy. I couldn’t be. But I was excited. I knew I was setting out on the biggest adventure of my life. I was going to see the world beyond the mountains, like Uncle Mir.

I was going to England.

As we came closer to Kabul, the road was busier than it had been, with lorries and army trucks and carts. The donkey was nervous in the traffic, so Mother and I were walking. Then we saw ahead of us the police checkpoint. I could tell at once that Mother was terrified. She reached for my hand, clutched it and did not let go. She kept telling me not to be frightened, that it would be all right, God willing. But I knew she was telling herself that, more than she was telling me.

As we reached the barrier the police started shouting at the dog, swearing at her, then throwing stones. One of the stones hit her and she ran off, yelping in pain. That made me really angry, angry enough to be brave. I found myself swearing back at them, telling them exactly what I thought of them, what everyone thought of the police. They were all around us then, like angry bees, shouting at us, calling us filthy Hazara dogs, threatening us with their rifles.

Then – and I couldn’t believe it at first – the dog came back. She was so brave. She just went for them, snarling and barking, and she managed to bite one of them on the leg too, before they kicked her away. Then they were shooting at her. This time when she ran away, she did not come back. After that, they took us off behind their hut, pushed us up against the wall, and demanded to see our ID papers. I thought they were going to shoot us, they were that angry.

They told Mother our papers were like us, no good, that we couldn’t have them back, unless we handed over our money. Mother refused. So they searched us both, roughly, and disrespectfully too. They found nothing, of course.

But then they searched the mattress.

They cut it open, and found the money and Grandmother’s jewellery. The policemen shared out Uncle Mir’s money and Grandmother’s jewellery there and then, right in front of our eyes. They took what food we had left, even our water.

One of them, the officer in charge I think he was, handed me back the empty envelope, and our papers. Then, with a sarcastic grin all over his horrible face, he dropped a couple of coins into my hand. “You see how generous we are,” he said. “Even if you are Hazara, we wouldn’t want you to starve, would we?”

Before we left, they decided to take Father’s donkey too. All we had in the world as we walked away from that checkpoint, with their laughter and their jeering ringing in our ears, were a couple of coins and the clothes we stood up in. Mother’s hand grasped mine tightly. “Walk tall, Aman. Do not bow your head,” she said. “We are Hazara. We will not cry. We will not let them see us cry. God will look after us.”

We both held back our tears. I was proud of her for doing that, and I was proud of me too.

An hour or so later we were sitting there by the side of the road. Mother was wailing and crying, her head in her hands. She seemed to have lost all heart, all hope. I think I was too angry to cry. I was nursing a blister on my heel, I remember, when I looked up and saw the dog come running towards us out of the desert. She leaped all over me, and then all over Mother too, wagging everything.

To my surprise, Mother did not seem to mind at all. In fact she was laughing now through her tears. “At least,” said Mother, “at least, we have one friend left in this world. She has great courage, this dog. I was wrong about her. I think maybe this dog is not like other dogs. She may be a stranger, but as such we should welcome her, and look after her. She may be a dog, but I think she is more like a friend than a dog, like a friendly shadow that does not want to leave us. You never lose your shadow.”

“That is what we should call her then,” I told her. “Shadow. We’ll call her Shadow.” The dog seemed pleased with that as she looked up at me. She was smiling. She was really smiling. Soon she was bounding on ahead of us, sniffing along the side of the road, her tail waving us on.

It was strange. We had just lost all we had in the world, and only minutes before everything had seemed completely hopeless, but now that waving tail of hers gave us new hope. And I could see Mother felt the same. I knew at that moment, that somehow we were going find a way to get to England. Shadow was going to get us there. I had no idea how. But together, we were going to do it. Some way, somehow.

Somehow

Aman

We had to sit there for a long while, until it was dark. We had only the stars for company. Every truck that went by covered us in dust. But we got a lift in the end, in the back of a pick-up truck full of melons, hundreds of them.

We were so hungry by now that we ate several of them between us, chucking the melon skins out of the back as we went along so that the driver wouldn’t find out. Then we slept. It wasn’t comfortable. But we were too tired to care. It was morning before we reached Kabul.

Mother had never in her life been to Kabul, and neither had I. We were pinning all our hopes now on the contact telephone numbers Uncle Mir had written on the back of that envelope.

The first thing we had to do was to look for a public phone. The driver dropped us off in the marketplace. It was the first time in my life I had ever been into a city. There were so many people, so many streets and shops and buildings, so many cars and trucks and carts and bicycles, and there were police and soldiers everywhere. They all had rifles, but there was nothing new or frightening for me about that. Everyone back home in Bamiyan had rifles too. I think just about every man in Afghanistan has a rifle. It was their eyes I was frightened of. Every policeman or soldier seemed to be looking right at us and only at us as we passed.

But then I did notice that it wasn’t us they were interested in so much. It was Shadow. She was skulking along beside us, much closer to us than usual, her nose touching my leg from time to time. I could tell she wasn’t liking all the noise and bustle of the place any more than we were.

It took a while to find a public phone. Mother arranged to meet Uncle Mir’s contact, and at first he was quite welcoming. He gave us a hot meal, and I thought everything was going to be fine now. But when Mother told him we had lost all the money Uncle Mir had sent us for the journey to England, that it had been stolen from us, he was suddenly no longer so friendly.

Mother pleaded with him to help. She told him we had nowhere to go, nowhere to spend the night. That was when I began to notice that, like the police and the soldiers in the street, he too seemed to be more interested in Shadow than in us. He agreed then to let us have a room to stay in, but only for one night. It was a bare room with a bed and a carpet, but after living my whole life in a cave, this was like a palace to me.

All we wanted was to sleep, but this man hung around and wouldn’t leave us alone. He kept asking questions about Shadow, about where we had got her from, about what sort of dog she was. “This dog,” he said, “she is a foreign-looking dog, I think. Does she bite? Is she a good guard dog?”

The more I saw of the man, the more I did not trust him. Shadow didn’t much like him either, and kept her distance. He had darting eyes, and a mean and treacherous look about him. That’s why I said what I did. “Yes, she bites,” I told him. “And if anyone attacks us, she goes mad, like a wolf.”

“A good fighter then?” he asked.

“The best,” I said. “Once she bites, she never lets go.”

“Good, that’s good,” he said. The man thought for a moment or two, never taking his eye off Shadow. “Tell you what, I’ll do you a deal,” he went on. “You give me the dog, and I’ll arrange everything for you. I’ll give you enough money to get you over the border into Iran and all the way to Turkey. You won’t have to worry yourselves about anything. How’s that?”

It was Mother who understood at once what this man was after. “You want her for a fighting dog, don’t you?” she asked him.

“That’s right,” he told her. “She’s a bit on the small side. And a proper Afghan fighting dog will tear a foreign dog like her to bits. But so long as she puts up a good fight, that’s all that counts. It’s not just about size. It’s the show they come to see. Have we got a deal?”

“No, no deal. We are not selling her, are we, Aman?” Mother replied, crouching down, and putting her arm around Shadow. “Not for anything. She’s stuck by us, and we’re going to stick by her.”

That’s when the man lost his temper. He started yelling at us. “Who do you think you are? You Hazara, you’re all the same, so high and mighty. You’d better think about it. You sell me that dog, or else! I’ll be back in the morning.”

He slammed the door behind him as he left, and we heard the key turn in the lock. When I tried the door moments later, it wouldn’t budge. We were prisoners.

Counting the Stars

Aman

The window was high up, but Mother thought if we turned the bed on its side, and climbed up, we might just be able to get out. So that’s what we did. It was a small window, and there’d be a big drop on the other side, but we had no choice, we had to try. It was our only hope.

I went first, and Mother handed Shadow up to me. I dropped Shadow to the ground, saw her land safely, and then followed her. It was more difficult for Mother, and it took some time, but in the end she managed to squeeze herself out of the window and jump down.

We were in an alleyway. No one was about. I wanted us to run, but Mother said that would attract attention. So we walked out of the alley, and into the crowded streets of Kabul.

With lots of other people about, I thought we were safe enough, but Mother said we’d be better off out of Kabul altogether, as far away from that man as we could get. We had no money for food, no money for a bus fare. So we started walking, Shadow leading the way again. We just followed her through the city streets, weaving our way through the bustle of people and traffic, too exhausted to care which way she was taking us. North, south, east or west, it really did not bother us. We were leaving danger behind us, and that was all that mattered.

By the time it got dark, we were already well outside the city. The stars and the moon were out over the mountains, but it was a cold night, and we knew we’d have to find shelter soon.

We had been trying to hitch a ride for hours, but nothing had stopped. Then we got lucky. A lorry was parked up ahead of us, at the side of the road. I knocked on the window of the cab and asked the driver if we could have a ride. He asked where we came from. When I told him we were from Bamiyan and we were going to England, he laughed, and told us he was from a village down the valley, that he was Hazara like us. He wasn’t going as far as England, only to Kandahar, but he was happy to take us if that would help. Mother said we would go wherever he was going, that we were hungry and tired, and just needed to rest.

He turned out to be the kindest man we could have hoped to meet. He gave us water to drink and shared his supper with us. In the warm fug of his cab, we soon shivered the cold out of us. He asked us a few questions, mostly about Shadow. He said he had only once before seen a foreign-looking dog like that, with the American soldiers or the British, he wasn’t sure which.

“They use dogs like this to find the roadside bombs, to sniff them out,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Those soldiers, the foreign soldiers, they all look much the same in their helmets, and some of them are so young. Just boys most of them, far from home, and too young to die.” After that he stopped talking, and just hummed along with the music on his radio. We were asleep before we knew it.

I don’t know how many hours later, the driver woke us up. “Kandahar,” he said. He pointed out the way to the Iranian frontier on his map. “South and West. But you’ll need papers to get across. The Iranians are very strict. Have you got any papers? You haven’t, have you? Money?”

“No,” Mother told him.

“Papers I can’t help you with,” the driver said. “But I have a little money. It’s not much, but you are Hazara, you are like family, and your need is greater than mine.”

Mother didn’t like to take it, but he insisted. So thanks to this stranger, we were at least able to eat, and to find a room to stay, while we worked out what to do and where to go next. I don’t know how much money the driver gave us, but I do know that by the time Mother had paid for the meal and the room for the night, there was very little left, enough only to buy us the bus fare out of town the next morning. But as it turned out, that didn’t get us very far.

The bus that we had taken, that was supposed to take us all the way to the frontier, broke down out in the middle of the countryside. But it was now a countryside very different from the gentle valley of Bamiyan that I was used to. There were no orchards, no fields here, just desert and rocks, as far as you could see, so hot and dusty by day that you could hardly breathe; and cold at night, sometimes too cold to sleep.

But there were always the stars. Father used to tell me you only had to try counting the stars, and you always went to sleep in the end. He was right most nights. Night or day we were always thirsty, always hungry. And the blister on my heel was getting a lot worse all the time, and was hurting me more and more.

After walking for many days – I don’t know how many – we came at last to a small village, where we had a drink from the well, and rested for a bit while Mother bathed my foot. The people there stood at their doors and looked at us warily, almost as if we were from outer space.

When Mother asked the way to the frontier, they shrugged and turned away. Again it was Shadow who seemed to interest them, not us, and she was doing what she always did, running around, exploring everywhere with her nose. As we left I saw that some of the children were following us, watching us from a distance. Just outside the village we saw a crossroads ahead of us. “Now what?” I asked Mother. “Which way?”

That was when I noticed that Shadow had suddenly stopped. She was standing stock still at the crossroads, head down, staring at the ground at the side of the road. I called out to her, and she didn’t even turn round. I knew something was wrong right away.

I looked behind me. The village children had stopped too, and one or two of them were pointing, not at Shadow, but at something further away, further down the road.

I saw then what they had seen, foreign soldiers, several of them, coming slowly towards us. The one in front had a detector – I’d seen them before in Bamiyan, and I knew what they were for. He was sweeping the road ahead of him for bombs. I think it was only then that I put two and two together and realised what Shadow was doing. She had discovered a bomb. She was pointing to it. She was showing us. And I knew somehow that she was showing the soldiers too.

But they still couldn’t see her. She was hidden from them by a boulder at the side of the road. So I just ran. I never even thought about it. I just ran, towards the soldiers, towards Shadow, towards the bomb.

Polly

Aman

I was running and running, waving at the soldiers to warn them, screaming and yelling at them that there was a bomb, pointing to where it was, to where Shadow was.

All the soldiers had stopped by now, and were crouching down, taking aim at me.

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?”