Dogs in the Dead of Night

An avalanche buries Jack up to his neck within a few pages of Dogs in the Dead of Night, Mary Pope Osborne's Alpine rescue story for 7 year olds.

What happens

It starts before dawn. Annie wakes Jack up because the tree house is back and there is a scroll waiting in it. They need a second thing to break a spell, and the scroll says it is a white and yellow flower. Live its meaning for yourself, if only for an hour.

The book with the bookmark in it shows the Great Saint Bernard Pass, so that is where they go. They arrive in ice and rock and snowy peaks, with no flower anywhere in sight and a monastery far below them.

Then the mountain goes whumph.

Jack is knocked off his feet, rolled downhill and packed into snow that sets around him like concrete. He cannot move his arms. He cannot make a sound. He does not know where Annie is.

What digs him out is three enormous dogs and a line of monks with torches. Osborne makes the dogs completely silly about it, licking his ears and snuffling in his face while he panics underneath. The monks call them the Saints and say they have pulled more than a thousand people out of what they call the White Death.

Then you meet Barry. Barry is a Saint Bernard who weighs two hundred pounds, has a head the size of a basketball and breath like fish and crackers, and who bursts into the bedroom in the morning to sit on Jack. He is young and he has no idea how big he is. Annie thinks he is wonderful. Jack has views.

The reading experience is the two of them together, really. Annie charges at everything and Jack stops to write it down, and here that means Jack getting the facts about avalanches from a book about ten minutes after nearly dying in one.

A quick flag on the opening. Being buried alive in snow is described from inside Jack's head, and it goes on for a page, with him unable to feel his arms or his mouth. It is scary on purpose and the rescue comes quickly. A child who is nervous about being trapped may need you nearby for that chapter. Everyone else will get straight to the dogs.

What to read next

For another dog who is far too much for the person walking him, there is The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog, in which Trevor has one Easter holiday to sort Streaker out.