Free Sky Wolves by Livi Michael

moment, bemused. One minute he’d been on the coffee table, watching Aunty Lilith polish her bunions, the next he’d fallen asleep in the tea cosy. And now he didn’t know where everyone was.
    He struggled out of the opening for the spout. Aunty Lilith had knitted the tea cosy, which meant that it was a very peculiar shape and seemed to have holes for three spouts. He stood up on the coffee table and shook himself, then looked all around.
    Since Pico was so very small, it was difficult to see over the various things around him, but he felt absolutely sure that the room was empty. This was very odd. He was never alone, since one or other of the aunts would carry him wherever they went, in their sleeves or even under their hats. Worse, the silence around him seemed bigger than the room, as though the whole house was empty. Surely the aunts wouldn’t have gone dog-walking without him?
    ‘WOOF!’ he said experimentally, then louder: ‘WOOF!’
    But there was no reply.
    One thing was certain. He couldn’t stay perched on thecoffee table, all alone. Somehow he would have to get down.
    It wasn’t a big table, but to Pico it seemed very high. This wasn’t as bad as the time Aunty Lilith had absent-mindedly put him on the top shelf of the dresser and he’d had to knock all the ornaments off before anyone realized he was there, but still the coffee table stood sixty centimetres off the floor, which was more than five times Pico’s height. He ran all the way round it before finding the best place to jump from, so that he would land on the thick hearth rug.
    Once safely down, Pico trotted through the door into the hallway, and was further taken aback to realize that the front door was open.
    What was going on?
    A cold wind was howling and it flung the front door back with a crash. Pico summoned his courage, stepped forward into the gap where the door had been and warily looked out. He sniffed the scent of snow. The aunts must have gone out without him, but they wouldn’t have gone very far in this weather, leaving all the doors open.
    As Pico peered out along the garden path, which was flanked to either side by a dense undergrowth that looked like a jungle to him, he was suddenly struck by a new thought. For the first time in his life that he could remember, he was alone, unsupervised. This was his big chance! If he was ever going to realize his dreams of travel and adventure, now was the time.
    But it was very cold and the first snowflakes were gathering. The leaves and roots and twigs all around him looked enormous.
    ‘Come on, Pico,’ he said to himself sternly. ‘How many times have you waited for an opportunity like this?’
    He tried to summon the images of stars and rivers and mountains that beckoned him in his dreams, but he was finding, as many people do, that the moment of realizing his wildest dreams was a rather scary one. He was suddenly very aware of himself as a one-kilo Chihuahua alone in an enormous world and his heart quailed. Why, there were spiders out there in the garden that were nearly as big as him.
    Then, just at that moment, the wind blew again. It brought with it the scent of rain, and traffic and trees, and something else, delicate and sweet, to Pico’s nostrils. It was the scent of Jenny, the new friend to whom he had given his heart. Jenny had passed that way recently, as far as he could tell, and he instantly remembered the way she had looked at him and the things she had said. ‘Your body is small, but your heart is great,’ she had told him. ‘You have within you distant horizons and marvellous deeds.’ And just the memory of this made him swell with pride, so that he was nearly a centimetre taller. If Jenny was out there, he wanted to be with her, and the one place he could think they would be likely to meet was the croft.
    Without further delay, Pico made the enormous leap from the doorstep to the path and landed unhurt. Glancing round quickly for obvious hazards, such as a falling