Just one week ago I was a stay-at-home dog, spending his days listening for the mailman and searching the kitchen floor for treasure. Within that week I'd been marooned, dognapped, and lost in the desert. I'd stood at the center of an empty world and outwitted invisible hunters. And the adventure had only just begun.
The car-house slipped out of the hunting grounds and followed the sun into the sky. Each time the ground flattened and the sky took its normal place in the front window, there was always another layer of mountain ahead. By the time Mom's appetite for adventure was rumbling again, most of the trees were gone and blotches of white lurked in the shadows.
Mom scrunched down in the driving chair for a better look at the brick-grey dirt on the copilot's side of the highway. "What say we stop for a bit?"
"What does the Witch say?" I asked.
"You will arrive in two hours and fifty minutes," the Witch warned.
"Don't worry about that." Mom hit the shut up button defiantly. "What's the point of traveling if you don't take time to explore?"
"Yippee! A surprise!" I stood up to give my tail more room to wag and let the slowing car-house suck me into the cockpit.
"I was aiming for something farther along the route," Mom said, "but hiking up here on the roof of the world seems so much more exotic, don't you think?"
"That's what I've been saying this whole time!" I I knocked the Witch's power straw out of its charging slot. "Take that, you dingleberry."