Paws and Whiskers (35 page)

Todd’s dog Manchee frequently has very basic needs on his canine mind. Todd doesn’t always appreciate him at first, finding him irritating, but as the book progresses he realizes that Manchee is a wonderful, valiant friend.
The Knife of Never Letting Go
is easy to read, but I think you have to be quite grown up to deal with its subject matter. Soft-hearted animal lovers might find it unbearable!

THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO

‘We gotta stop,’ I say, dropping the rucksack at the base of a tree. ‘We gotta rest.’

The girl sets her own bag down by another tree without needing any more convincing and we both just sort of collapse down, leaning on our bags like pillows.

‘Five minutes,’ I say. Manchee curls up by my legs and closes his eyes almost immediately. ‘Only five minutes,’ I call over to the girl, who’s pulled a little blanket outta her bag to cover herself with. ‘Don’t get too comfortable.’

We gotta keep going, no question of that. I’ll only close my eyes for a minute or two, just to get a little rest, and then we’ll keep on going faster than before.

Just a little rest, that’s all.

I open my eyes and the sun is up. Only a little but ruddy well up.

Crap. We’ve lost at least an hour, maybe two.

And then I realize it’s a sound that’s woken me.

It’s Noise.

I panic, thinking of men finding us and I scramble to my feet—

Only to see that it ain’t a man.

It’s a cassor, towering over me and Manchee and the girl.

Food?
says its Noise.

I
knew
they hadn’t left the swamp.

I hear a little gasp from over where the girl’s sleeping. Not sleeping no more. The cassor turns to look at her. And then Manchee’s up and barking, ‘Get! Get! Get!’ and the cassor’s neck swings back our way.

Imagine the biggest bird you ever saw, imagine it got so big that it couldn’t even fly no more, we’re talking two and a half or even three metres tall, a super long bendy neck stretching up way over yer head. It’s still got feathers but they look more
like fur and the wings ain’t good for much except stunning things they’re about to eat. But it’s the feet you gotta watch out for. Long legs, up to my chest, with claws at the end that can kill you with one kick if yer not careful.

‘Don’t worry,’ I call over to the girl. ‘They’re friendly.’

Cuz they are. Or they’re sposed to be. They’re sposed to eat rodents and only kick if you attack ’em, but if you
don’t
attack ’em, Ben says they’re friendly and dopey and’ll let you feed ’em. And they’re also good to eat, a combo which made the new settlers of Prentisstown so eager to hunt ’em for food that by the time I was born there wasn’t a cassor to be seen within miles. Yet another thing I only ever saw in a vid or Noise.

The world keeps getting bigger.

‘Get! Get!’ Manchee barks, running in a circle round the cassor.

‘Don’t bite it!’ I shout at him.

The cassor’s neck is swinging about like a vine, following Manchee around like a cat after a bug.
Food?
its Noise keeps asking.

‘Not food,’ I say, and the big neck swings my way.

Food?

‘Not food,’ I say again. ‘Just a dog.’

Dog?
it thinks and starts following Manchee around again, trying to nip him with his beak. The beak ain’t a scary thing at all, like being nipped by a goose, but Manchee’s having none of it, leaping outta the way and barking, barking, barking.

I laugh at him. It’s funny.

And then I hear a little laugh that ain’t my own.

I look over. The girl is standing by her tree, watching the giant bird chase around my stupid dog, and she’s laughing.

She’s
smiling
.

She sees me looking and she stops.

Food?
I hear and I turn to see the cassor starting to poke its beak into my rucksack.

‘Hey!’ I shout and start shooing it away.

Food?

‘Here.’ I fish out a small block of cheese wrapped in a cloth that Ben packed.

The cassor sniffs it, bites it, and gobbles it down, its neck rippling in long waves as it swallows. It snaps its beak a few times like a man might smack his lips after he ate something. But then its neck starts rippling the other way and with a loud hack, up comes the block of cheese flying right back at me, covered
in spit but not hardly even crushed, smacking me on the cheek and leaving a trail of slime across my face.

Food?
says the cassor and starts slowly walking off into the swamp, as if we’re no longer even as interesting as a leaf.

‘Get! Get!’ Manchee barks after it, but not following. I wipe the slime from my face with my sleeve and I can see the girl smiling at me while I do it.

‘Think that’s funny, do ya?’ I say and she keeps pretending like she’s not smiling but she
is
. She turns away and picks up her bag.

‘Yeah,’ I say, taking charge of things again. ‘We slept way too long. We gotta go.’

This is a lovely book, very moving and delicately moral. Opal and her dog Winn-Dixie make friends with all sorts of extraordinary and interesting characters, but my favourite is Miss Franny Block, who’s in charge of the Herman W. Block Memorial Library. When she was a little girl her father, who was very rich, said she could have anything she wanted for her birthday. Anything at all.

What would you ask for? Miss Franny loves to read so she asks for a small library. She says, ‘I wanted a little house full of nothing but books and I wanted to share them, too. And I got my wish. My father built me this house, the very one we are sitting in now. And at a very young age I became a librarian.’

I think that’s what I’d have wished for too. Miss Franny is ‘a very small, very old woman with short grey hair’ – and so am I now. And
I
have my own library of around fifteen thousand books, lovingly collected over many years.

BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE