The Dalmation

by Eleanor Frankling

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

I'm confident Eleanor Frankling provides oodles of valuable information on the beautiful dogs with their black spots on their white coat we've all come to know and love as Dalmatians.

However, since fiction always trumps fact, at least by my reckoning, no exposition on the Dalmatian would be complete without this memorable ditty by the one and only Barry Yourgrau - the drama of man and man's best black spotted friend in full throttle action mode. Enjoy!

SOUP BONE
A man jumps out of an airplane. Sobbing, he empties a shoe box of love letters into the whooshing air. The letters shoot up and stick against the puffy bottoms of some clouds. The man looks, and groans unhappily, but then gets caught back up in the tumult of falling. He gulps and clutches at his head but his hat is long since gone. A cloud rushes up under his feet and the man cringes and crashes into it. The cloud flings him up in the air, as if it were foam rubber. He sprawls back down onto it in a heap. It's a tiny cloud and the man clings to it, desperately, like a shipwreck survivor hanging on to the side of a barrel.

He looks around. Out of nowhere, something hits right next to him and bounces away into the sky: it's a big soup bone, the kind dogs love. The man looks up and sees the looming, onrushing image of a dalmatian hurtling towards him. The dog barks and flails as if skidding on vertical ice. Its tongue trails up over its nose, its ears stream straight up. The man gives a shout and frantically flaps his feet to try to maneuver out of the way. The dog crashes right on top of him. The cloud heaves violently. The man almost loses his grip. The dog scrambles and slides down the man's leg and hangs on to an ankle. "Let go, let go," the man shouts at it. He kicks furiously with the leg but the dog hangs on for dear life, whining, eyes shut tight. "You dumb mutt, let go!" the man screams. He feels his aching fingers slipping. He gives a terrific leg shake and then frantically lets go with one hand to deliver a wild, desperate punch. He misses. The cloud capsizes and pops loose. Screaming and whining and barking, the man and the dog tumble headlong into the wide blue sky.