Story

            Millie was a small dog, a beagle puppy of just four months old. She had been playing with her favourite soccer ball, adding more teeth holes to the flat, tattered object, when the unusually heavy wind of Nebraska stole it away from her. She chased after it, up the long, winding deserted road that was Moose Avenue, but her short, adolescent legs grew weary. Slowing to a trot she continued on until she reached the park, some three miles away from her home. Halfway through the park she came upon a squirrel waddling across the sidewalk.

            “Excuse me, sir or ma’am, but have you seen a ball anywhere?” she asked.

            “Yes,” replied the squirrel, “yes I have. I saw a ball dancing that way,” the squirrel said, pointing to the north.

            “Thank you!” said Millie, heading in the direction the squirrel had appointed her.

            “Wait,” called the squirrel. “I want to come with you. I haven’t been on an adventure all summer.”

            And with that they went prancing off across the park in search of the ball. After a while of looking, a blue jay flew down from the tall oak tree tops above, and asked what they were doing, a beagle and a squirrel together in the park.

            “The wind stole my ball, and we’re looking for it,” Millie told him.

            “Oh!” said the blue jay. “I saw one go that way a while ago, and with that he lifted his wing to the west.

            “Maybe the wind carried it that way after we started looking,” said the squirrel. And with that the three of them headed off in the direction mentioned by the blue jay.

            They searched and searched for twenty minutes, but still they could not find Millie’s ball.            “Am I ever going to find my ball?” Millie wondered aloud, sitting and dropping her head until her long snout and caramel coloured ears were just an inch about the tall, dense July grass.

            “What exactly did the ball look like?” inquired the squirrel.

            “It was a rose red soccer ball,” Millie told them. At that, a small charcoal rabbit with a little cotton tail perked her tall, pointy ears.

“You lost a red soccer ball?” she asked Millie. “I saw one earlier. It was red, but it was kind of flat, more like the top of a muffin that a ball. It was nowhere near here, though. It was more toward Tiger Boulevard, lodged under a bush.”

“That’s my ball! And that’s right near where I live!” Millie exclaimed, perking up. “I live on Moose Avenue, just two blocks down from there!”

Silently the rabbit took off hopping down the paved sidewalk, Millie scampering along clumsily at her heels. Twenty minutes and several blocks later Millie and the rabbit made it, at last, to Tiger Boulevard. The rabbit continued down the street, Millie trailing just behind, until she reached the row of bushes under which she had earlier seen Millie’s soccer ball, only when they got there, the ball was gone!

“Where’d it go?” Millie wondered aloud, her spirits sinking like the Titanic at this new discovery.

“May I help you?” a familiar voice asked.

“Olive!” Millie said to her dear friend, a poodle she met at puppy camp two months earlier. “My ball is gone. The wind took it earlier, and this rabbit here said it was under these bushes.”

“Ahh, I thought I recognized that ball,” Olive said. “I brought it inside not long ago. I was going to bring it over tomorrow and ask if it was yours. Come, both of you. It’s just upstairs. And I made a fruit pizza earlier, come have some,” she said motioning to her right at the mocha coloured apartment beside her.

Happy to have finally found her ball, Millie followed Olive up the stairs to her second story apartment, the rabbit just behind her. After they had their pizza, Millie invited them all to play with her ball with her. They had such a good time, that no one noticed the late hour until the sun began to go down, and rabbit said she had to get home to her brothers and sisters. Millie, too, had to get home, so her mama wouldn’t have to worry about where she was all day.