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went from out the side of Moe’s mouth right across the yard and into Mr Taylor’s shed. We couldn’t see it at all from back in our yard because it was so thin and clear.
    Dad told me to hold Mister Mosely to quieten him down and keep him still. Then he got Mister Mosely by the head so he could open up his mouth. Old Moe wasn’t too happy about that. He was watching Dad and breathing really fast and whining at him. You could tell he was scared, but he let Dad open his mouth anyway.
    That’s when we saw the big fish hook. It was stuck right in the side of Mister Mosely’s gum. Dad told me to go and see where the other end of the fishing line went. I was pretty happy to do that, because looking at the fish hook in Moe’s gum made me feel a bit sick in the stomach.
    I went into the shed and found that the other end of the line was on a fishing rod which was lying on the floor. It was caught in the doorway. What Dad and me worked out was that the hook probably had some old bait still on it, because Mister Taylor was retired and he went fishing all the time. Moe must have smelt the bait and tried to eat it and got himself hooked just like a fish would. Then when he tried to come back home he must have pulled the fishing rod over and it got stuck in the doorway. And that’s why Mister Mosely always stopped halfway across the yard,because the fishing line was pulling tight on the reel and yanking the hook even deeper into his gum.
    â€˜Poor old fella,’ Dad said.
    Mister Mosely looked up at both of us. His big dark eyes were jumping around everywhere and he was making a really high whiny sound. It was the same sound he made whenever he did something wrong. The spot under his eye really could have been a big black tear that day. All I could think of was how many times I called poor Moe to come home, and how he kept trying to come even though he knew it was going to hurt him every time. I felt really bad when I thought about that.
    Anyway, what happened then was, Dad said that the hook was in too deep for him to get out, so he cut the fishing line with his pocketknife and we drove Mister Mosely to the vet. Like I said, it was one of the weirdest days ever.
    But it wasn’t over yet.

12 Mister Mosely at the Vet’s
    The vet we took Mister Mosely to when he got the fish hook stuck in his gum was a lady vet. She kept saying how beautiful Moe was and she called him ‘Big Boy’ all the time. I liked her a lot.
    When we got there she took us into this special room and asked Dad and me to hold on to Mister Mosely while she tried to get the hook out. She said a dog with a fish hook stuck in his gum was ‘a first’ for her. Moe was really scared. I could tell because he kept whining and licking me and putting his head down low, which is what he always did when he was frightened or worried. I was a bit scared too, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.
    The first thing the vet did was give MisterMosely a needle in his jaw right near the hook so he wouldn’t feel any pain. He jumped a bit when she did that, and Dad and me had to hold on tight so he wouldn’t run away. Then she got out some sort of pliers to pull the hook out. They looked just the same as the ones in Dad’s toolbox.
    At the beginning I wanted to watch everything the vet was doing because it was pretty cool, like seeing a real operation up close, which I’d never done before. But after a while I didn’t feel too good. I think it was because of all the bad smells in the room – the weird medicine smells and the farty smells coming from Mister Mosely, who couldn’t help it because he was just so frightened.
    As soon as the vet started grabbing on to the hook with those plier things, I started to feel really bad. I was trying not to look at the blood in Moe’s mouth or the blood on the rubber gloves the vet was wearing. Then the vet gave up with pliers because they weren’t