Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero by Damien Lewis Read Free Book Online

rollers rumbled past her sides. The cold, muddy, gray-yellow water was heavy with silt, and every now and again a swirling whirlpool spun across their path, sucking nameless debris into its depths.
    As the port city faded into the distance, land was barely visible. Instead of the steady hustle and bustle of Shanghai harbor life, a new sound filled the crew’s ears. It was the unearthly hollow rushing of the river as the Gnat fought her way upstream, passing over the sandbanks and mudflats that litter the Yangtze’s final approachto the sea. The noise rose to a deafening roar each time the flat-bottomed vessel clawed over the narrowest of shallows, where the depth decreased to a matter of feet, then died down again as the riverbed plunged to some 100 feet or more in depth.
    During the weeks that she’d spent living on the streets of Shanghai, Judy had become accustomed to the roar of the city—the ceaseless cacophony of engines, voices, industry, and human endeavor. But this was something entirely different. This was the throaty bellow of a wild waterway—the third longest river in the world—tantalizingly close and at its most awe-inspiring. This was the breathtaking power of nature distilled into a surging mass of water, and the wild, untamed strangeness of it all drew Judy to it . . . like a moth to the proverbial candle flame.
    Chief Petty Officer Jefferey was the first to realize the danger. He was moving aft when he caught sight of the dog that he had half paid for nosing around by the ship’s rail. As he yelled out a cry of warning, he saw her slip beneath the rail until she was poised on the polished steel plates of the outboard—the narrow outer edge of the deck. Judy gazed at the frothing water below, seemingly as unheeding of Jefferey’s cries of alarm as she had been of Lee Ming’s a few months earlier at the Shanghai Dog Kennels.
    She danced from paw to paw, uttering excited yelps and barks at the deafening gray monster that churned and roared a few dozen feet beneath her outstretched forelegs. But a moment later Judy lost her footing completely, and with a despairing yelp she plunged out of view. Whoever said that it was curiosity that killed the cat had clearly never met the ship’s dog of HMS Gnat !
    An ashen-faced Jefferey turned and yelled to the bridge, screaming at the top of his voice in an effort to make himself heard.
    “Dog overboard! Dog overboard! DOG OVERBOARD! ”
    The cry of “man overboard” is one of the last any sailor ever wants to hear at sea—but even less so on a waterway like the Yangtze. The combined speed of the river’s flow and the Gnat ’s forward progress meant that the ship’s mascot was now being carried astern at something like fourteen knots, or a little over sixteen miles anhour. Jefferey’s cry of “dog overboard” was equally unwelcome to those who caught it among a ship’s crew who were growing to love and cherish their canine companion.
    Fortunately, the captain was one of those who had heard, and he took immediate action. “Stop, and full astern! Stop, and full astern!”
    Captain Waldegrave knew for certain what would happen if his ship didn’t rapidly reverse its course. There wasn’t the slightest chance he could turn the gunboat around in time. The climate in east-central China is similar to that in Continental Europe: it is temperate, with warm springs, hot summers, cool autumns, and bitter winters. The Yangtze in November would be icy cold, conditions that would quickly sap the reserves of even the toughest dog as she fought against the vicious currents and eddies. By the time he’d turned his ship around, Judy would have been swept far downstream in the chilly waters and lost.
    She had fallen a little more than a dozen feet from the ship’s rail, but even so she would have gone under, and fresh water has far less buoyancy than seawater, providing less chance of bringing a body back to the surface. All the captain could hope for was that