by Angela Robb

TOBY makes the big decisions. That’s how it should be, he says, and the other dugs agree with him, cause he’s the alpha in our pack. But lately I’ve been wondering, y’know? Cause sometimes Toby says things and does things that don’t make heaps of sense. But then, I don’t know very much. I’m only Alfie.

Toby is a bulldog. Actually he says he’s a Great British bulldog, but I don’t know if that’s a real thing. As for me, well I’m a wee heinz 57. At least, that’s what Daddy says. He’ll say, ‘Aww, where’s ma wee heinz 57?’ and he always gives me hugs when he says it, so I’m pretty sure that being a wee heinz 57 is just super. When I told Toby what I am his face was all screwed up, but then, that’s just his face.

Toby is also my next-door neighbour. Our houses are semidetached. Daddy and me live on one side, and Toby and his mum and dad live on the other side. Toby’s side is a lot bigger though, because it has an extension and a conservatory. Toby says this means if my house wasn’t joined on to his house, my house would fall down. He also says his house would be totally fine if my house wasn’t there any more. I’m not so sure that small houses are more likely to fall down than bigger ones, so I guess that’s one thing Toby says that doesn’t make heaps of sense.

The thing is, something happened recently that just doesn’t feel right to me at all. It all started when a bunch of us were digging about in my back garden, and we found a load of old bones. Toby said that because he’s the alpha, he’d have control over the bones, and I thought, Yeah, okay, cause that’s how it works. Now Toby prefers biscuits to bones, and he let the other neighbourhood dugs dig up those bones, as long as they paid him in biscuits.

But every time he got some biscuits, he’d go crazy, scoffing the whole lot. Now I thought maybe we should set some of the biscuits aside – save them up, like – because I knew the good times wouldn’t last forever and then there’d be no more biscuits, just a rainy day or whatever. But Toby thought that was a silly idea. I told him I thought there were a lot of biscuits to be got from those bones, but he did that snorty laugh that he does and told me the bones would run out soon anyway.

Then, this one day, I got talking to Wee Johnny, who was in charge of all the digging cause he’s some kind of terrier. And he told me he’d made an estimate of the total biscuit-value of all the bones, and it was something like two gazillion biscuits (approximately), and he’d told that estimate to Toby. And I guess I looked totally shocked (which I was), cause Wee Johnny said, ‘Didn’t Toby tell you?’ and I said, ‘Nope.’

And I felt unhappy, y’know? Cause the bones were in my back garden, but I let Toby have control. I didn’t want to be greedy and keep them all to myself. But now it didn’t seem fair, cause Toby had been guzzling down so many of those biscuits, and hadn’t told me how many biscuits the bones were worth – in fact he’d even made out they were worth less, so I wouldn’t think about trying to take control of them, I suppose. Well guess what: we could have saved up a fair few, and I thought I should have got my biscuit fund, since those bones were in my back garden.