There was a red welly and a red welly, and then, one afternoon, there was only one.

Poppy had been at the bottom of the garden, where the ground goes soft after rain and the grass gives up and turns to mud. She had been jumping. That is what wellies are for. She had jumped in the big puddle by the compost heap, and the mud had made a noise like a kiss, and when she pulled her foot up, her foot came, and her welly did not.

She stood on one leg like a heron, in her sock, and looked at the place where the welly had been. The mud had closed over it. It looked very pleased with itself.

“Bramble,” said Poppy.

Bramble was the dog. He was brown and mostly ears, and he had been lying on the path in the last of the sun, thinking about nothing. He lifted his head.

“The mud has got my welly.”

Bramble came down the garden at a trot. He looked at the puddle. He looked at Poppy’s sock. He put his nose to the ground and went round the puddle once, slowly, the way he went round the kitchen when there had been toast.

Then he sat down and looked at her, as if to say, well, it’s in there.

“I know it’s in there,” said Poppy.

She hopped to the edge and put her hand in. The mud was cold and thick, and it went up to her elbow, and her fingers found a stone, and a root, and something that might once have been a tennis ball, but not a welly.

Bramble watched. Then he got up, and went to the other side of the puddle, and began to dig.

He dug the way dogs dig, front paws going very fast, mud flying out behind him, ears flapping. Some of the mud went past Poppy. Some of it did not.

“It’s not there,” said Poppy. “It’s over here. Where my foot was.”

Bramble took no notice. Bramble had his own ideas about where wellies went.

And then he stopped, quite suddenly, with his nose right down in the hole he had made, and came up with something red in his mouth.

It was not the welly.

It was a ball. A red rubber ball, gone soft, lost in that garden the summer before and forgotten by everybody except, it turned out, Bramble. He carried it to Poppy and dropped it at her sock, and sat down, and looked at her with enormous satisfaction.

“That’s your ball,” said Poppy.

Bramble agreed that it was.

“I lost a welly.”

Bramble’s tail went once, and stopped. Then he looked where Poppy was pointing, and waded in up to his tummy, and put his whole head under the mud, and came up with a red welly held by the top, mud pouring out of it, and a face that was no longer brown but simply mud.

Poppy laughed so much she had to sit down on the grass.

They went back up the garden together. Poppy in one welly and one sock, carrying the other welly. Bramble carrying the ball. Both of them the colour of the bottom of the garden. Poppy’s mum saw them from the kitchen window and said something that could not be heard through the glass, and then opened the door, and it could.

There was a bath. The wellies were rinsed under the outside tap and stood upside down on the step to dry, side by side, two red wellies again.

Later, with the light going, Poppy sat on the back step in her pyjamas and looked down the garden at the puddle, which had gone quiet, and was holding a little bit of sky.

Bramble came and lay against her feet. He had the ball. He was not going to lose it again.

“You’re a good digger,” said Poppy.

Bramble sighed, the way he did when he was happy, and put his chin on her toes.

The garden went blue, then grey. Somewhere a blackbird finished its song and went to bed. And the two wellies stood on the step in the dark, together, waiting for tomorrow, and the mud.