Lost! The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour Dog

Streaker, the hurricane on four legs, is lost – help!

She really has to get back home to see Trevor (he’ll be missing her)…

AND, most important of all, her puppies!

Jeremy Strong once worked in a bakery, putting the jam into three thousand doughnuts every night. Now he puts the jam in stories instead, which he finds much more exciting. At the age of three, he fell out of a first-floor bedroom window and landed on his head. His mother says that this damaged him for the rest of his life and refuses to take any responsibility. He loves writing stories because he says it is ‘the only time you alone have complete control and can make anything happen’. His ambition is to make you laugh (or at least snuffle). Jeremy Strong lives near Bath with three cats and a flying cow.

Jeremy Strong
Illustrated by Rowan Clifford

PUFFIN

This is for Dazzy Donut lovers everywhere.
May the power be with you, whether you
have two legs or four.

It wasn’t my fault. All I did was jump in the back of a van. What’s wrong with that? In fact I was being really helpful. Trevor Two-Legs – the boy who is supposed to look after me — had gone wandering off. He’s always doing that and then he gets lost. He should be kept on a lead. Trevor’s hopeless when he’s lost and he starts calling for me. ‘Streaker? STREAKER!’ What am I supposed to do? I KNOW WHERE I AM. HE’S THE ONE THAT’S LOST!

Anyhow, Trevor had disappeared as usual, leaving me all on my own. I was trotting about sniff-sniffing and there was this van with the back doors open, so I had a peep inside and guess what? It was full of pies and sausage rolls. It was!
A whole van full of pies and rolls. My favourite!

And I was thinking:
Hmmm, fancy leaving all those pies lying about like that. Someone could easily come along and steal the whole lot.

The thing is, I’ve always fancied being a super-clever-guard-dog type of dog, only I’ve never been given the chance. I’d be an extra-super-special guard dog and I’d probably have superpowers too, and an extra-special name. I’d call myself DAZZY DONUT DOG.

That’s DAZZY because Dazzy is a super-special word, and DONUT because Dazzy Donut Dog likes eating donuts. (Of course, really it’s me — I like donuts. A WHOLE LOT.) And it’s DOG because I’m a dog.

Dazzy Donut Dog lives in my head, where nobody can see her, except me. She has amazing super-special-powers, which she gets from eating SUPER-SPECIAL-POWER DAZZY DONUTS, with jam inside, or icing on the top. I keep all the donuts in my head too, but it’s a BIG SECRET, so don’t tell anyone.

Whenever there’s trouble all I have to do is eat one of the super-special-power-donuts and KER-CHING!! I become Dazzy Donut Dog and go Whizz! Whoosh! Grrrrrr! Gotcha!

But that Trevor, he’s useless. He never gives me anything to guard. I’m not complaining, because I like Trevor and his mum and dad. It’s just that they’re all a bit useless, being two-legs. Fancy having only two legs! That’s a bit naff, isn’t it?

I’ve never been given the chance to show them what I can really do. I could be the best guard dog ever, and if a robber came along I’d leap out and bark furiously and jump up and down —
boing-wuff! boing-wuff!
— like that. And if they came too close I’d dive at their ankles and bite them,
raargh-raargh, crunch-crunch!
like that. And they’d go
ow-wow-wow!
like that, and I’d go,
Huh! serves you right, rotten robber. You shouldn’t go around stealing things. Dazzy Donut Dog is on your case!
Then they’d run away, slowly, because they only have two naff legs.

So there I was, the superest, dooperest guard dog ever, and right now, right there in front of me, almost touching my nose and almost almost almost in my mouth even — there were all these pies and sausage rolls just lying there. I could almost hear them calling out to me:
Hey, we’re over here, lots of lovely pies just ready to be stolen!

STUPID PIES! So I thought, right, I will be Dazzy Donut Dog and get in the back of this van
and stand guard over it. I shall probably get a medal for doing this and meet the Queen, but I hope she doesn’t pin it on me because that would make me jump. It would have to be on a ribbon. A yellow one.