Dog Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sister was a different build and the lightest.
    Then he found that he knew much more, things he had known before without noticing. They each tasted and smelled different. The boys had a rank musk. White Sister and Black Sister smelled pungent, in his mind girlish—they shared something with Mamochka and Golden Bitch. They all pounced and scampered in different ways. Brown Brother would slide across the floor as he changed direction in a chase, scrambling and scrabbling, panting hoarsely in his excitement. Romochka found that he could tell whether Brown Brother was being chased or doing the chasing. He caught fear or the absence of fear in their excited breathing. White Sister he knew as soon as he had his hands on her, or her paws on him. He knew her out there in the darkness too: she could hold herself utterly still in a hunt, and he found he could guess when she was near him, stalking him, by sensing a solid patch of stillness among all the currents and crosscurrents in the darkness ahead of him.
    He warmed up and his spirits lifted. He sat up in the nest, craning his neck this way and that to pick up sounds, trying to time his defence from their attacks. He giggled sometimes in an excess of anticipation; and then had to try to control his breathing so that he would hear everything. Then it was on: the rolling fighting tumble as one puppy after another piled on top of him, he laughing and gasping and trying to throw one off, bite another, pin down another and clamp his knees over a fourth. He soon learned not to expose his belly or neck. He poked holes in his woollen hat for his earholes and then pulled it down over his face and neck for some protection. But he was always sore, and Mamochka would lick his wounds every time she settled down to take care of them all.
    He found that he felt larger, more agile, in the dark. A blow from his paw seemed to have the strength of four dogs. In the darkness his sense of himself became fluid. His teeth lengthened and his bite was deadly. All weakness dropped away.
    After a while, he began to leave the nest, feeling out the floor and walls. He found the old rubbish and bones and the rough wooden beams across his path where they had been before shape and warmth drained out of everything. Things were more or less where he had left them, but in the darkness it was all changed and new, icy to touch. He no longer rearranged anything. He became absorbed in memorising every element of the lair. He ran cautiously in the dark, skin prickling for the consequences of misjudgement, running with hands outstretched until the beams rasped against his fingers, then running in the direction of the wall where the path should be clear. Soon he was able to run and jump obstacles in the darkness. He could run around the outer wall with his fingers to the frosted bricks, chasing and being chased. The puppies fell in with the new games, tracking each other and him.
    When they were all tired, they fell in a heap on the nest and slow-licked each other to sleep. He took off his hat and let tongues envelop him. All five of them licked each other’s faces at the same time. Then, when Black Dog came home, he took Romochka, never the other puppies, out across the courtyard to the unlit street. After the silence in the snow-bound lair, this half-forgotten world jarred. The cold bit into his face and hands and made him fumble and hurry. He found his eyes so raw and fresh that the fires burning in the distance flared. The pinpricks of the city burned. Snow lay like a deep orange cloud; the cloud above spread like a deeper orange snowfield. He would go back inside with dancing lights leaping just behind his eyes, on and on.
    He rediscovered Black Dog each time as someone seen: someone with eyes glittering and wet and kind. Black Dog was the only dog he really saw all winter. He stood beside Black Dog as a boy stands to a dog, and he stroked Black Dog, even in the darkness, with his hands not his tongue.
    Every waking