Free Dog Boy by Eva Hornung Page B

the darkness to fight at the tiny entrance hole. The Strangers’ smell was on them, around them, in their fur, in the air.
    Nothing happened. They stood, hackles raised until the smell faded from the air and they could lick its residue off each other and clean their gashes. They tested the outside air and emerged cautiously. The trails, theirs and the Strangers’, were clear. The Strangers had faltered and then veered away at Romochka’s first pee corner. Mamochka sniffed out their certainty, then their doubt and their fear in long breaths.
    They were back the next night, the same three. Then, a few days later, five; then more. The days shortened. The cold clamped huge jaws on the city. The seven dogs slept in a jumbled pile on Mamochka’s nest, with Romochka in the middle. The Strangers hunted him in his dreams.
    Romochka would feel Mamochka lift her head. He could picture her in the darkness, ears pricked. She would murmur low and the dogs would rise from their uneasy twitching to mutter and pace. They were all together now. There was no lone hunting and the lair hummed like a summer beehive with their many voices.
    Once the Strangers were close enough, circling the walls of their sanctuary, even he thought he could smell them, and he stared into the darkness, terrified, longing for Mamochka to stop growling and give the all-clear, to lick him and cuddle him.
    When eventually she settled, and the feeling of relief permeated the dark space, they would leave warily and surround Romochka as he peed, refreshing the human markers that kept the foreigners at bay. Then at the dim daybreak they would go together towards the mountain, hunting.
     
    They seemed safe enough in their lair, even though the starving Strangers knew exactly where they were. They travelled to the mountain only in daylight, and increasingly rarely. The other dogs of the mountain and forest had all but disappeared. Perhaps they moved into the city and were shot; perhaps they were eaten by the Strangers. Romochka saw a few he recognised as young dogs from former clans: they had crept in near to the fires and people around the mountain. Romochka’s family had to learn to hunt near the fires too, moving as a pack through the vacant snowfield to the village, then dispersing in the shadows around the huts, to meet again before attempting to cross back to their den. If they could breathe the Strangers in the wind, they hung back in the village, waiting. They started to use daylight for the return. This left them just a few short hours in which to find all they needed. Returning the long way, weaving through the unheated and now untenanted warehouses and then the allotment.
     
    It was midwinter. Night had altogether lost its summer depth and was an expanse of dirty orange above and below. Day was a brief visitation of many greys. Romochka could see the dogs’ eyes and shapes in the gloom inside the lair only at midday. Otherwise he could see nothing, but could hear them and feel where each of them was. The Strangers were in the empty construction sites all the time. When they were able to get to the mountain Romochka hovered near the trucks, darting in at each fresh tip. He would try to gather enough food for the week in a small sack, but it took the whole family to guard him from other dogs and people once he had some. Then the race home under threat of attack from the Strangers. Grey Brother was the strongest, so Romochka slung the sack over his shoulders and ran next to him, steadying it, slapping and abusing the big dog into submission. He trusted the scouts, Mamochka and Golden Bitch, to warn of approaching Strangers. He concentrated on the sack and on Grey Brother. The rest hung close as his guard. After they had wrestled food home this way twice, Grey Brother understood and they became faster.
    Romochka noticed in the twilight of the days that everyone in his family was smaller than before. Narrower. Ribby, with big heads, especially Mamochka. Their fat