Scarboy

'He heard and felt something behind him that chilled and stopped him. It was a growl-the last sound he would have expected in the tight, dark space. His foot had touched something, solid but not hard. His mind flashed with images of wild animals cornered in dark spaces-rabid raccoons, possums, badgers? But these were animals from his mother's stories of Virginia, not of the city, not of Boston. Sam wanted to turn and look but held still. He decided to move his foot back again. He felt the resistance, and again, there was the growl. It was gravelly, rising from some animal depth. It was not a small animal. What could it possibly be? Sam couldn't stop himself from turning...

It was a dog, and it was hurt... Sam could see scraped skin on its legs and patches on its coat where the fur had been scorched. Burns, that was it! The animal had been caught in the fire!

'Sam was transfixed. There was something all magnificent, menacing and terribly wrong in the sight. This animal had crawled in here to die. Sam suddenly realized that his fear was gone. The absence of fear thrilled him. But he was also sobered by an equally new and demanding feeling of responsibility'.

Scarboy... the story of an extraordinary German shepherd's journey through the lives of four souls in culturally-torn late 1960s America - a hippie poet, a black boy, a racist cop, and an ailing musical prodigy - and how he changes their lives forever.

Rip Pauley is a former Hollywood screenwriter now living in South Carolina. "Scarboy" is his second novel.