Stick Dog Wants a Hot Dog. Tom Watson

somewhere, odds are pretty good that they are playing this game.

      You should try it too. Get a friend or a sister or a brother or a grandpa and play. Hold real still and then as soon as something moves, bark real loud a couple of times. Keep score and everything. A couple things to remember when you play this game: First, don’t play it at school unless you want detention. Second, when you play this game, people are going to think you’re crazy.

      After a couple of hours of playing BARK!, the five buddies went down to the creek to get a nice cool drink of water. They walked into a shallow part of the creek, lowered their heads, and slurped away.

      “Have you ever seen little humans drink?” Karen asked the others after getting her fill. Now, Karen is a dachshund, so it didn’t take much to fill her up – several hearty mouthfuls and her thirst was quenched. “It’s kind of strange.”

      “How so?” Stripes asked.

      “They use this magic thing.”

      Mutt had now walked into a deeper part of the creek, cooling off his whole body in the slow-running water. “What do you mean?”

      “Well, the obvious way to drink is like we’re doing right now, of course,” Karen began to explain. To demonstrate, she dropped her head and took a quick lap of water in her mouth and swallowed. “You know, find some liquid, lower your head, and drink. No big deal. But the way they do it is bizarre.”

      Mutt had risen, soaking wet, from the water and began to walk to the shore. “How’s that?”

      “It’s crazy,” Karen said. “I see little humans do it at Picasso Park all the time. They have boxes that they shove magical sticks into.”

      “Magical?” Poo-Poo asked.

      “Oh, yeah! Way magical,” said Karen. “You should see them. They press their magic sticks into the boxes of liquid, then put their lips around one end of the stick and then the drink comes up! That’s why it’s magic. The liquid goes up!”

      “It doesn’t. No way,” said Stripes.

      “It does, I swear!” exclaimed Karen.

      “That’s impossible. Liquid can’t go up. It only goes down,” Mutt said. He had reached the shore now and climbed out of the creek. “Rain comes down. The creek runs from higher points to lower points. Liquids do not go up.”

      “I know that,” said Karen. “That’s what makes the sticks magical.”

      Now, this conversation would likely have continued for some time, but by now everybody had had a drink and gathered around Mutt. Stick Dog, Karen, Poo-Poo, and Stripes knew that he was soaking wet, and it was a very warm day.

      “Ready?” Mutt asked.

      They all nodded.

      And Mutt gave a lengthy and mighty shake, showering the others with water droplets and cool, wet mist.

      “That feels wonderful,” Poo-Poo said.

      “And smells even better,” added Stripes.

      As a token of gratitude for the cooling shower, everyone helped Mutt collect all the things that had sprayed out of his fur with the water. There was a pen cap, a shoelace, a broken Ping-Pong ball, and a chocolate bar wrapper.

      Now cooled off, the dogs relaxed. With the rippling of the creek water splashing across the rocks and against the muddy banks, it was a lovely and peaceful place to be.

      Until the peace and calmness were interrupted by two sounds.

      The first sound was Stick Dog’s stomach.

      Stick Dog was hungry. And Stick Dog needed some food. And when Stick Dog gets hungry, his four friends get hungry too. That’s just the way it happens.

      It’s kind of like when you’re in class and your teacher is up in the front going on and on about how red and blue make purple or three times three is nine or how neat handwriting is, like, the most important thing in the world. In fact, without neat handwriting, the whole future of the planet could be in jeopardy. If none of us knows how to put that little extra bumpy thing on a cursive Z, then the whole world is going to collapse under the horrible weight of bad penmanship. If handwriting isn’t neat, well, that’s just the end of everything. We all might as well crawl into a hole and wait for the inevitable crashing of all human life!

      My teacher and I don’t really see eye to eye on this subject.

      Anyway, when one of those teachers is giving one of those lessons and everybody in class is getting a little sleepy and droopy eyed, something happens.

      Do you know what it is?

      Somebody yawns.

      And when that somebody yawns, it sets off a gigantic chain reaction among all the students, and everybody starts yawning. And then the teacher turns around so nobody can see – and then the teacher yawns too.

      Well, that’s sort of what happened regarding Stick Dog’s stomach. When it started to rumble, then all the stomachs of all the other dogs started to rumble too.

      But that was just the first sound that interrupted their cooling break down by the creek. The other sound came from something none of the dogs had ever seen before.

      And someone else had heard it too.

      They heard a single, small bell.

      Karen asked, “What’s that jingling sound?”

      Poo-Poo answered immediately, “Woo-hoo! It’s Santa. It’s his sleigh. Reindeer! Jingling bells! Doggie treats for everybody! Woo-hoo!”

      “Umm, Poo-Poo?” said Stick Dog.

      “Yes?”

      “It’s June twentieth.”

      “So?” said Poo-Poo. He was very distracted and was barely listening to Stick Dog at all. He was looking up at the sky, swinging his head back and forth, looking for Santa and his reindeer. “So what?”

      “Umm, Christmas is in December,” said Stick Dog. “You know, December twenty-fifth, when it’s all cold and snowy and the humans have pine trees and lights up all over the place?”

      Poo-Poo looked down at the ground. It sort of looked like he expected there to be snow all the way up to his knees. “It’s not winter, is it?” Poo-Poo whispered, and looked glum. Then his voice grew louder, and he smiled a little bit. “Maybe Santa made a mistake.”

      “Does Santa ever make mistakes?” Stick Dog asked in the kind of way like everybody already knew the