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way the grown-ups did, then tracked their elders out to the allotment. They would trot around Black Dog’s markers, considering them thoughtfully, then abandon themselves to play within the boundary of that invisible fence. Romochka trotted around with them but could not smell what they could. He had to watch their reactions to messages and read the news from this. He found he knew immediately if they were smelling a stranger’s or one from their own family.
    Golden Bitch or Mamochka would be lying down somewhere in the rubbish around them. Romochka would only see them raise themselves up and walk towards the puppies if he or one of the others stepped outside the boundary, or if a strange dog approached the allotment. When Black Dog minded them he played too, more often than not. He taught them all to hunt insects, something he hadn’t grown out of: the happy victory of downing a grasshopper and the respect to be shown to bees.
    They played in daylight, twilight, moonlight, starlight, cloudlight. Rain and mist. Light time and dark time and the time of shadows when dogs looked larger and stronger, and their eyes shone in silhouetted faces.
    Romochka’s raw skin got infected and he had to take all the tormenting clothes off for Mamochka to lick away the pus and scabs near his armpits and on his inner thighs. In time his body grew accustomed to being damp. His chafed patches thickened and he slept near-naked with the dogs to dry himself and to get new sores licked. He began to separate his many garments and hang them up on lengths of wood the way his long-ago mother had hung damp clothes on heating pipes. Then he started dressing White Sister and Grey Brother in his clothes for sleeps, giggling at them and how much like him they looked. His thinner clothes dried out nicely on big warm dogs. Soon he was dressing all his siblings every night. He began to wear as little as possible.
     
    His new daytime world above the lair was not the one he had left behind in the autumn. He noted, first with surprise, that cars, houses, shops, people and cooked food, even when these were seen, smelled, dodged, evaded, were now somehow fixed in place, even unimportant. They were ignored as eyes, ears and noses sought movement; real, interesting little shifts in the grass or waste lands that meant danger or food. There was so much in the new world to be learned that he quickly forgot anything that didn’t touch him. This new world had immutable laws. It was divided into realms of danger and safety; it had clear enemies and its own demons.
    He learned to notice dogs above all and learned that strange dogs were bad, without exception. They were to be treated with care and hostility. Any breach of territory was deliberate and unfriendly, to be met with controlled aggression or retreat. He learned that the most dangerous were lone dogs who had no clan. Onetime people’s dogs, as Mamochka had once been, but these now lawless and unpredictable. He learned that the allotment was his family’s and its pathways were closed to strangers, but beyond it there were the comings and goings of many other clans—open trails. He learned that the lair was secret, and that there was a prescribed pattern on entering and leaving. He learned about the hunt. He noticed that anything a young dog caught was his or her own, but anything a grown dog caught was everyone’s.
    If it hadn’t been for Golden Bitch, Romochka would have felt an easy confidence about his growing knowledge. He wanted, above all, Golden Bitch’s acceptance. He wanted her to stop watching him so eagerly. He waited for her to boss him and teach him to hunt mice. But he never got a puppy’s easy, loving licking from Golden Bitch, or a young dog’s lesson. There was an awful day in midspring when he was so happy that he scampered up to her, leapt and threw his arms about her muscular body as she guarded the territory in which they were playing. He felt her stiffen, then quietly sink into a