The Unwanted Puppy Page 4

  “Here, take another peel!” Karl laughed. “And remember, take it easy – delivering those leaflets means you’ll have to walk meels and meels!”

  “Hah!” Eva retorted, flouncing off to the surgery to find their mum.

  “Hi, Dad. Is Mum about?” Eva asked, popping her head around the office door. “Is she in the surgery?”

  Her dad looked up from his pile of papers. “She’s in the stables, vaccinating the two ponies we brought in yesterday.”

  Eva hurried on past the surgery and the row of converted barns that housed the smaller rescue animals until she came to the small block of new stables that her dad had been working on for the last few weeks. “Mum?” she called, stepping out of the sunlight into the stables.

  “Hush!” Heidi whispered. She was stroking the neck of a small brown and white pony whose shaggy mane fell over his dark eyes. “Apache didn’t like his injection, did you, boy?”

  “Aah! But it’ll make you feel better,” said Eva, scratching Apache’s nose. Quietly, she went up to the other pony, a skinny chestnut called Rosie. “Do you want a stroke, too?” she murmured.

  Rosie nuzzled Eva’s palm with her soft nose. Inside the stall, a hay-net hung from the wall and there was a bucket of feed on the floor.

  “We’ll soon feed you up and make you big and strong!” Eva promised, remembering the parched field where they had found her. A neighbour had called Animal Magic to say that the poor creature had been left without fresh water and abandoned by her owners while they took a two-week holiday in Spain.

  “Hey, Apache,” Heidi whispered, still stroking the little piebald. “Now that needle didn’t really hurt, did it?” She turned to Eva. “Did you want something?” she reminded her.

  “Oh yeah. We’ve finished the leaflets about the Open Day. I wanted to ask if I can deliver them round the village.”

  “Let me see.”

  Eva handed her mum a leaflet. Heidi read through it, nodding and finally saying, “Yes, that’s fine. It looks very good… Eva, did you hear me?”

  “Hmm?” Eva had her arms around Rosie’s neck and she was murmuring sweet nothings into the pony’s ear. “Oh, yeah. Thanks, Mum!”

  Heidi smiled. “Go!” she urged.

  “OK, I’m out of here!” Eva said. “Here I come, Okeham village!”

  Copyright

  STRIPES PUBLISHING

  An imprint of Little Tiger Press

  1 The Coda Centre, 189 Munster Road, London SW6 6AW

  First published as an eBook by Stripes Publishing in 2016

  Text copyright © Jenny Oldfield, 2006, 2016

  Inside Illustrations copyright © Artful Doodlers, 2016

  Cover illustration copyright © Anna Chernyshova, 2016

  Images courtesy of www.shutterstock.com

  eISBN: 978-1-84715-822-2

  The right of Jenny Oldfield and Artful Doodlers to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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