YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS.

I was always pretty nimble and agile and was given a great deal of freedom to enjoy the great outdoors. I became involved in a few scraps around the neighborhood, one of which saw me have a broken jaw. I did have a big bully harm my leg, and that meant trips to the doctor to have injections every week for a month.

I remember one night, I was out later than I should have been, and my brother came out looking for me, calling my name and carrying a torch. I climbed over the brick fence at the end of the street and sidled up to him and he took me home. I was glad it was him, as the younger one, having seen his parents do it to him, wanted to smack me for being out late, and the brother who found me that night was quite upset about it and intervened to stop him.

Anyway, it was a warm winter’s day, when the oldest member of the family thought he saw me at the end of the street. There was another boy who lived at the house with the brick fence, and he looked a lot like me. The lady of the house used to call the man who lived in that house, not to his face, Mr. Poop Under His Nose, but he’d talk to the member of the family who found me. The boy who looked a lot like me, whose name I never learnt, and was wearing a coat like mine, was down towards the long grass at the end of the street and the man of the house was calling my name and the boy ignored him. The man, incensed by this, hurried to the end of the street, determined to grab me and bring me home, but I was lying out the side of the house, having a rest in the warm sun. As the man approached the boy who looked like me, the boy took a swipe at him, and it was then that he noticed something. That boy wasn’t me. Despite the coat, the tips of my paws and the lower parts of my hind legs were as white as the gloves a police officer on points duty used to wear. So, I hadn’t been a bad boy, after all, and still had eight of my nine lives intact.