Skidboot 'The Smartest Dog In The World' by Cathy Luchetti Read Free Book Online

school these days, pushed around.
    He scuffed his boots, disturbing a horned toad that froze in the flashlight beam and dove into the soil, only it's eyes showing, fixed and bright. Every current of life force in the tiny reptile called for quiet. Maybe Russell could learn something from a Texas horned toad, the art of camouflage and mind control. So the two cooperated, the toad lying still as winter and Russell, even though he knew it was there, pretending ignorance. He strolled by and both of them were relieved.
    Studious and extremely bright in every subject, Russell teetered between admiration for David's love of the rodeo circuit and his own more academic nature. One seemed to circumvent the other. If he chose rodeo life, it would oddly empower him, like a dam that forces a flow of water in an unnatural direction. Right or wrong, directing the channel gave him a sense of being grown up. After all, how many ways to Sunday had his parents gotten it wrong?
    On the weekend, he'd end up in Dallas with his grandparents, waiting to be picked up by his birth father. Sometimes he felt like a UPS parcel, going from one place to another, only to return back again. So it went, one week in Quinlan and the weekend elsewhere. Quinlan had backwater schools. He should be learning more.
    "Salutatorian!" His grandparents glowed with the pride of his achievements. Everyone rolled with pride when it came to Russell, the lone youngster in the group of adults. He guessed he deserved it, his grades certainly were outstanding. Junior high school beset even the most stalwart, leaving them indecisive. Since Russell was generally obedient, his efforts to change often led him right back around to what he was supposed to do.
    He was fed up with country living, fed up with Quinlan and all the jokes about it. Then he smiled, remembering one in particular.
    "You born in Quinlan?"
    "No, but I got here as soon as I could."
    He grinned, then frowned again. Distracted and daydreaming, he walked around the corner, never imagining that he was heading into trouble of a different order, something more tangible, more frightening, than anything yet.
    Inside the house, David and Barbara were head to head, trying to figure out bills, Russell, work prospects, and how to divide up the chores. David thought Barbara was too hard on the boy, Barbara thought David was too soft. For a child of divorce, Russell was surrounded by adults, who circled around, issued rules, laws, declarations and advice, who came up with game plans spilling over with conflicting moves. Agree to disagree seemed to be the style.
    Suddenly, Skidboot broke into a round of intense barking, decibels rising in a frantic, noisy pandemonium ranging wildly up the scale of canine vocals. By the time he hit howl, Both Barbara and David were so irritated they turned in unison.
    "Skidboot, shut up! ”
    "He don't like being locked up," David said. "He's mad, but we can be madder. We have to make him learn."
    Russell had been outside later than usual. Dusk had drawn softly into evening, and as he walked around behind the barn, he kicked through the hay, while listening to the horses munch and breathing in the night. He mused to himself, thinking over the day's events in school. Here he had privacy and could think his own thoughts. He watched the stars poke through the dark sky, one after another, drawing down the night. Then he heard a chilling sound, part snort, part growl—a hair raising emanation that shot out of the dark, unidentifiable, horrific and scary. Like the noises he'd heard in that werewolf movie at the cinema last month. The same guttural trapped sound, as if a huge force was pushing itself up out of the ground. Russell struggled backwards, barely able to see in the dim star shine. He flipped on his flashlight again, and waved it— my light sabre -- in the direction of the sound. The guttural sound burst out again, a sound that seemed horribly familiar, and would have caused a hunter to flip