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spent time alone on the nest. At the same time Grey Brother provoked the anger of the adults more and more. He tried repeatedly to sneak outside after them or to slip away unnoticed while the others were playing. If Romochka set up a maze for him, he deliberately wrecked it, or climbed over. Sometimes he climbed the statue, and barked, inviting Romochka and the others to catch him, and then refused to do anything except be prey. Romochka started games with Grey Brother only for them to fall apart as Grey Brother decided to look at him as the hunter and to tease just out of reach. Romochka couldn’t catch him and was too annoyed to team-hunt him.
    They were denbound. The air was deliciously warmer every day but the atmosphere became close and wet. Everything was damp. Romochka’s clothes chafed horribly on his skin but cooled to freezing if he took them off. Sores on his ribs and thighs got bigger and more painful every day. Puddles formed on the cellar floor and soon the nest was the only part of the lair that was not covered in slabs of ice and sodden snow. At night all Romochka could hear was the split splat of drips and the sliding splosh of falling chunks. Then, one day, spring sunlight broke in and sucked everyone outside.
    Romochka crawled through the hole, wriggling towards the sun. He looked up and saw blue. A car slid past in the slushy lane, engine whining loudly, and his ears prickled at the raw sound. The sky was a patchwork of rain clouds. The puppies followed him out into the ruin. They were such big lanky dogs! The five of them raced through the snowdrifts, all tensions forgotten. Outside the grey snow still covered everything, but it had slumped, sapped from underneath.
    Then it rained, making a white curtain in the sunshine. Romochka stood up on his hind legs and danced, his mouth open. This whispering water, falling on the snow, seemed to him something he remembered from dreams.
     
    Over the next month the mountainous snow crumbled, shrank and vanished, leaving the black ice-sludge and mud of springtime. The heavy grey and deep smoke blue of winter were gone. The earth was black and grizzled with dead weeds. The snow-burnt grass was lifeless, but, above it, the tree branches were dusted to their tips with a haze of green. Even the trees in the courtyard had sticky reddish buds on a few branches. Broad puddles reflected the green, bringing it to ground early. The view up the street towards the allotment was a swathe of these green and blue winking eyes in the cracked asphalt. Romochka stood in the empty lane in front of their lair and held his hands up to the white spring sky, pointing his fingers the way first leaves sprout from the buds. Just as he had danced in the rain on the grey snow, he danced now in the mud. The four young dogs made wide muddy tracks sprinting around him, tongues out, heads up, ears back. Then a car came sliding up the lane, wheels spinning in the mud, and they all dashed for the ruin, playing fear.

    The young dogs had a lot to learn, and Romochka with them. They were allowed to play in the upper floor of their ruined church, and then, little by little, in the grass under the orchard trees. To go outside the courtyard to the allotment up the street they had to have adults with them. They went every day and sometimes at night, avoiding morning and evening when people and cars filled the lane. They learned quickly to track each other back and forth across the wide muddy space of the allotment. But there was no following Mamochka, Black Dog or Golden Bitch past the empty field or down the trail over the waste lands and long grass. If Romochka tried, they growled. If he tried again, they warned him, and if he persisted, Mamochka nipped him so harshly that he yelped. She was now the only one who reprimanded him with teeth.
    Black Dog marked out about half the allotment as a territory for them to play in. Every wake-up, the four tumbled out of the building, pretended to test the air the