dogs?”  She said.  “They see more than I do.”

            “Yeah, they couldn’t help,” Angel rolled her eyes. 

            Angel lowered her head in defeat.  She and Scamp thanked the golden dog for all her help and left.  Day four was ruined.

3: The Park

            That night, Scamp and Angel decided to go to the park, figured it would make her feel better.  Scamp took her along the cement path and showed her a heart permanently embedded in the ground.  Inside the heart were two initials, but more importantly, there were two pawprints.

            “Why couldn’t my parents have been like yours, Scamp?”  Angel sighed.

            “Angel, we can’t give up.  There are other towns, trains…what if they still miss you?”

            “Then they shouldn’t have abandoned me in the first place,” she said angrily.

            She breathed in, making herself relax.

            “You can go home, Scamp, I’m done searching.  Wherever my parents are, they aren’t here anymore.”

            “What about you?”

            “I want to be alone for a little while.”

            Scamp watched her walk off deeper into the park with sad eyes.  He could do little but feel sorry for her.  He sat on the ground next to the cement heart, looked at his parent’s pawprints.

            Angel walked on a hill and looked up at the stars.  She felt so stupid being out here.  Running away from home was the last thing she wanted to do.  She was leaving a bad impression upon Jim Dear and Darling.  She shuddered at the thought of being kicked out again.  After all, Jim Dear had mentioned that having Angel around lead to “too many dogs.” 

            Scamp’s family were raised with Jim Dear and Darling, they would never give them up, but Angel was just the stray they took in.  If any dog was going to thrown out, it was her.

            She made up her mind.  She and Scamp would go home in the morning.  This was a much better idea from inside the house.

            Angel made her way back to Scamp.

            “You want to go home?”  Scamp asked as she approached.

            She nodded.

            “In the morning, I’m tired now,” she said.

            The park was too public.  By night it was pretty empty, but by the time the pups woke up in the morning, it would be crowded with people.  Angel thought of the alley where Scamp had met her (well, for the second time). 

            They made themselves comfy in the alley, wrapping themselves in newly washed sheets.  It was hilarious to see Scamp’s attempts at getting them off the clothing line.

            As Angel started to fall asleep, Scamp heard her humming to herself.

            “What are you singing?”

            Angel looked up at him.

            “What?”

            “You were singing.”

            Angel lightly chuckled to herself.

            “Oh, yeah, that old song…I guess it came back to me.  If I don’t think about it much, the words sometimes seem to come back.”

            “Where’d you hear it?”

            Angel thought about the blurred image she had, of what she guessed was a dog and the memory of the soft voice that went with it.

            “My mother.”  She paused for a moment, let her mind drift off, back to the oldest of her memories.  “By your side, in seconds if you ask it…,”

            Scamp’s short tail wagged.

            “Go on.”

            “…Arms out wide, to welcome you to stay…,” she looked at the stars, a smile widened across her face.  The memory of her mother was still blurry, but she remembered how she felt around her.  She felt safe, she felt loved, she felt home.  “Near enough to listen to your heart song, always there to help you on your way…”

            On a porch not too far away, a dog heard the distant howls.  Angela lifted her ears, tuning them in and her head immediately lifted up.  She jumped off the porch and ran in the direction of the song, turning her ears in all directions.

            “Family…”

            She was about three stores away from the alley where she was sure the sound was coming from.  Her heart raced as she neared the alley.  The song was over and she had to think and wonder if what she just heard was her imagination playing tricks on her.

            “Nice song,” a gruff voice said, coming from behind a barrel.

            Angel and Scamp jumped up and started to back away towards the alley’s exit.

            “Not nice enough to excuse you from intruding, though,” the dog said, a big, grey husky.

            “Intruding?  This alley doesn’t belong to anyone!”  Angel yipped.

            “Wrong.  It belongs to us!”

            “All right, we’ll go.  We don’t want any trouble, we’ll just leave.”

            The husky shook his head.  The mastiff and the mutt behind him snickered.

            “Nah-uh.  When dogs come into our territory, they have to be taught a lesson.”

            Angela heard the loud barks coming from the alley, barks that definitely did not belong to neither Angel or Scamp.  She ran towards the alley, to see the pups running out through the door’s crack.  Soon following them, three bigger dogs jumped over the fence, barking at them ferociously.

            Angela grabbed the brown mutt when he reached the other side of the fence.  The husky and the mastiff turned around, hearing the pitiful yip of their comrade.

            Some yellow female dog was wrestling with him, and putting up a surprisingly decent fight.

            “Angel, Scamp: RUN!”  She barked to them between breaths.

            “Get them,” the husky ordered the mastiff.  “I’ll take care of her.”

            “How she’d find us?”  Scamp asked.

            “We’ll ask later, right now, run!”  Angel said, as the mastiff quickly approached them.

            Angela fought with all her might to take care of the mutt and the husky.  They were surprised by her strength, but they knew better than the underestimate other dogs.  Once, a scruffy grey dog, smaller than all of them, had tackled them and had won, despite fighting against all three of them at the same

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