Read Ziggy for Free Online

nodded. “Exactly. Some kind of special food will look and smell extra yummy to him.” She rummaged in her van again and brought out a package of hot dogs. “He will not be able to resist these, I guarantee.”
    “But what if we don’t get another chance?” Charles asked.
    “Well, there is one other way,” said Rosie. She pointed to the back of her van, where Charles saw a big metal box. It looked sort of like the dog crates his family used for training puppies. “That’s a humane trap,” said Rosie. “ ‘Humane’ means it won’t hurt a dog at all, but if he goes into it, he won’t be able to get out until a person lets him out. If we get some more sightings, we can set it up in the area where we think Ziggy is roaming. We bait it with these”— sheheld up the hot dogs —“and wait for him to catch himself.”
    At that moment, Mom’s phone rang. She answered it, talked for a minute, then hung up. “Another sighting.” She started up the car. “Let’s go.”
    Rosie followed them to the next address, and the next, and the next. The calls kept coming in until it began to grow dark, but every time they got to a place where Ziggy had been seen, they were disappointed to find him already gone. They had driven farther and farther away from the Petersons’ house, and there was no sign anywhere of the little dachshund.
    “We might as well call it a day,” said Rosie finally, once the calls had slowed down. “Most dogs out on their own will find a safe place to rest once it gets dark.”
    They set up Rosie’s humane trap in the backyard of a nice man who had called to report seeing Ziggy drink out of his birdbath. After Rosie hadbaited it with hot dogs, she gave Charles a hug. “Don’t worry,” she said. “My Ziggy is a scrappy little guy. And it’s a real good sign that he’s been seen so many times. We’ll find him, you wait and see.”

CHAPTER NINE
    Ziggy was sure he was going the right way. He could just feel it in his bones. He was tired — but he had to keep moving. Every time he stopped somewhere, people shouted at him or tried to catch him. Once, he thought he heard a familiar voice call his name. He stopped in his tracks and listened, sniffing the air. Every one of his whiskers quivered as he sniffed and listened and looked around. There it was again, a faint voice, calling his name. It was the nice lady! Ziggy dashed toward the voice. He ran as fast as he could and soon he smelled her, too. She had walked on this ground only moments earlier. And then he could see her. Oh, joy! She had her back to him, but in a moment she would turn and smile at him andcall his name, and he would run to her and she would pick him up and take him home to that place he remembered.
    But the lady did not turn around. Instead, she climbed into her big house on wheels — Ziggy remembered riding in that — and the house moved down the road. Ziggy chased it, barking, but it did not hear him. It just ran off, much too fast for him to ever catch it.
    “Don’t worry,” Rosie had told Charles. But how could he
stop
worrying? All he could think about was Ziggy and where he might be and whether he was scared, or hungry, and how they were ever, ever going to find him. And even though Rosie kept saying that everything would work out all right, Charles was pretty sure that she was worrying, too. How could anyone
not
worry about a little puppy out there in the big world all by himself?
    At school the next day, Charles reported thelatest Ziggy news during morning meeting. All the other kids reported on what they’d been doing, too. Everybody had been putting up posters, talking to people, and handing out flyers. It made Charles feel a little better to hear that his friends were out searching for Ziggy, too.
    But as the day went on, Charles couldn’t concentrate on anything but Ziggy. He got six words wrong on his spelling quiz because he wasn’t paying attention. He could not remember his three-times table. And he