Free Selby Snowbound by Duncan Ball

free.
    ‘Phew!’ he sighed. ‘Now to reshape the wax and put some new glurp on it. All I have to do is get rid of some of these eyes, ears and noses. It won’t be brilliant but it should be okay.’
    Selby was about to press his paws into the wax when he heard footsteps in the corridor.
    ‘Crumbs!’ he thought. ‘Mrs Trifle is going tocatch me! I’d better just whack the glurp back on the face and leave it alone!’
    Selby quickly slapped the hardening mould back on the sculpture and then stepped back, smiling innocently as Mrs Trifle came though the door.
    ‘It’s okay to move now,’ Mrs Trifle said to Selby, wondering why there were flecks of white in the fur on his face. ‘Come along, it’s time to go home. You’ve been such a good dog.’
    ‘Are you kidding?’ Selby thought. ‘I’m a failure. Poor Mrs Trifle is going to be shocked to her socks when she sees that silly sculpture. Oh, well, at least I tried.’
    A month later the sculpture came back from the foundry in a big wooden box. People crowded around as Mrs Trifle prised it open.
    ‘This is terrible,’ Selby thought. ‘They’re going to be really upset at Mrs Trifle for spending so much money on a terrible sculpture. I can’t watch.’
    Selby put a paw over his eyes and then thought of sneaking away when suddenly a big cheer went up.

    ‘Well, they seem to like it,’ Selby thought, wondering whether it was okay to look. ‘Maybe Sigfried Slapdash was right after all.’
    ‘It’s lovely!’ cried Mrs Trifle. ‘I knew that sculptor could make a good sculpture of a dog if he put his mind to it. And goodness, the face is exactly like Selby’s face! Why it’s an exact copy.’
    Selby slowly pulled his paw away from his face and saw himself looking back.
    ‘It
is
me!’ he thought. ‘And all because that goo hit me in the face. No wonder it looks just like me. It’ll be strange seeing a sculpture of myself right here in the middle of town. It’s sort of embarrassing. But I have to admit that when I look at it it makes me feel kind of good.’
    Paw note: For a spooky story about the ghost of Brumby Bill read ‘In the Spirit of Things’ in the book
Selby Speaks.
    S

THE SKY EYE SPY
    ‘Stars and planets are so exciting!’ Selby thought as he listened to the Trifles talk to their old astronomer friend, Percy Peach. ‘They’re so mysterious. I just love to think of myself out there in the depths of space. It makes me all goosebumpy. Of course I’ve been to Mars but that’s just a nearby planet. It’s nothing like going to another galaxy.’
    ‘Whatever happened to that telescope that you had poking up through your garage roof?’ Percy asked the Trifles. ‘The one we used when we discovered the Peach-Trifle Comet, remember?’
    ‘We had to put it away. There were three problems with it,’ Dr Trifle explained. ‘First of all, that hole in the roof let the rain in. Secondly, I’m not so good at looking through telescopes. I usually only see my own eyelashes — a few stars but mostly dirty great blinking eyelashes.’
    ‘And what was the third problem?’ Percy asked.
    ‘We could never find the stars and planets we wanted to find,’ Mrs Trifle chimed in. ‘We’d look up and see lots of little white dots but we could never tell which one was which. If you ask me, they all ought to have their names next to them so when you look through a telescope you could just read the names.’
    ‘Well it’s not possible to put names up in the sky, of course, but I have the next best thing,’ Percy said, showing her a copy of his book,
Everyday Stars for You and Me.
    Percy took a map out of a pocket in the back of the book and unfolded it till it covered the dining-room table.
    ‘This is
Percy Peach’s Planet Plan
,’ he added. ‘It’s got all the best-known stars and planets with their names printed right next to them.’
    ‘That’s very clever,’ Mrs Trifle said.
    ‘I’m glad you like it,’ Percy said proudly. ‘Amateur