A small boy about six years old is walking just inside the forest, weaving through alder, linden, oak and birch. It is a picturesque season: creamy sunlight slides over mottled trunks; fine white branches and pendent leaves wave in the breeze. The air is filled with birdsong and pollen. White blossom hangs in clumps on the rowan trees at the edge of the forest and cemetery. Yellow archangel flowers, lily of the valley and wood sorrel speckle the glades. The sweet scent of linden flowers thickens the air and, up close to any linden tree, the song of honeybees adds to the subtle din of birdsong, electric-cable buzz and distant highway.

This place is one of those odd pockets of Moscow where forest takes over and city fades to sound only. It is a tiny frontier— part of a tattered wilderness interspersed with city, more city, then fields, dachas, villages—the beginning, in dribs and drabs, of the unending wilds that stretch northwards into myth.

On the brink of the vacant lands the buildings are a strange mixture of the older highrise apartment blocks with blue-tiled façades and new projects—excursions reclaiming the grass and swamp, begun in high enthusiasm during perestroika and then abandoned through ever-lengthening temporary delays. The spikes of rusting construction girders and concrete façades stand at the edge of the untended fields, marshes and copses of birch forest. Electricity pylons carry low-slung lines over the fields and into the forest. A few green and brown dachas huddle together in a copse under one of the nearer pylons, looking like a marooned fragment of a village, which is what they are.

He scuffs his feet along, kicking anything solid ahead of him.

The residents of the rubbish mountain and the forest know him and leave him well alone, even go to great lengths to avoid him. What stands out at first sight is his mane of matted black hair. It sweeps back from his brow in a tangled ropey mass that reaches the middle of his back. He is, like everyone here, filthy and dressed in several layers of motley clothes and rags. He is uncommonly healthy for a child of this place, his body straight and wiry. His physique is harder and more agile than that of any normal child. He is more dexterous and twists through his spine more quickly than humans ever do. He swings the rough club in his right hand with easy proficiency. He is almost silent, except for the snarls that can rattle through his nose and teeth.

You cannot guess his parentage exactly, except that he is dark-eyed and faintly Tartar, pale-skinned under the encrusted filth. He has good features: broad cheek bones above a wide mouth and excellent teeth, but it is hard to tell whether he could look pleasing. His black, slightly Asiatic eyes would meet yours, if you came upon him by accident, with a kind of naïve hostility and mercenary appraisal: disconcerting in a six-year-old. He also smells worse than any bomzh. But this isn’t why people avoid him. There are many odd people on the mountain, and as a child he would normally be easy pickings for predators.

People avoid him because he is never alone.

It is whispered that his dogs can appear from nowhere and there are more than twenty of them. They are bigger and stronger than normal dogs. His own long, sharpened finger-nails have the strength of wolves’ claws. He is a demon, some say, who eats the flesh of humans and wanders alone in the form of a child to tempt people near. Others say he is a genetic mutant escaped from top-secret laboratories. Even the sceptics are, nonetheless, aware that he is dangerous. A ripple spreads across the mountain and forest at the sight of him. People wedge their shanty doors shut and watch him through cracks.

Their own dogs bristle and growl uneasily, snuffing the air as he passes. That dogs fear him adds immeasurably to his reputation.

Through the gentler seasons, the dogs and the people who live in the ramshackle huts on the forest edge of the rubbish mountain leave each other alone. They share a territory and share its hardships and provisions. They share its dangers.

Militzia, charged with fighting the twin threats of disease and crime, and trying at the same time to supplement their own meagre pay-packets, patrol the mountain and the rim of the forest. They destroy the shanty huts and round up people, shooting pet dogs in front of their owners. Last autumn the clean-up was in earnest: an unprecedented attempt to remove homeless people from the city centre and get rid of the increasing number of stray and feral dogs. Moscow was to be a showpiece, the government TV stations proclaimed. The streets were swept, the canals cleaned by wide armed barges; dog registration was half-heartedly imposed, a census taken, residency permits audited. Stray dogs and people were hounded and bullied to the outskirts and beyond.

In winter things are different. The militzia season is more or less over, at least out in the open by forest and mountain. The bomzhi survive by working or begging in the city, there to be preyed upon by the militzia waiting outside factories on payday; or supplementing their income through beggar protection rackets. The enmity between feral dogs and bomzhi is seasonal, and winter is its peak. Clan dogs break into any hut that seems unusually cold and fight other packs off the fresh meat they know they will find. If humans notice, they might beat the dogs off with flames and shouting and sticks, but still at times neighbours find a chewed-over frozen corpse when the dawn-dusk seeps like milk into the sky.

Out here, in this land of the dead and the discarded, the bodies exposed when the snow melts in spring are unremarkable. People of the city call them snowdrops. The municipal authorities and the militzia collected more than three hundred this thaw.

In spring, life returns to a precarious normality. For now, men and dogs get along in mutual wariness and muted hostility. The weather is mild; pickings in city and forest are good. And they have a shared enemy.

Romochka kicked through the leaves and junk. White Sister, Grey Brother and Black Dog were with him. He could see Black Dog scavenging by the river up ahead, looking like any dog out there by himself, minding his business. Grey Brother and White Sister were in the forest to his right, out of sight but watching over him. They were waiting for him to go deep into the forest for the hunt. He could feel their separate, reassuring presences, their patience.

He was hovering at the rim of the forest for no good reason, something that had lately become a habit. At first he had enjoyed the stir he caused trailing through with his siblings at his heels. But these days he meandered apparently alone, apparently aimlessly. He listened to fragments of human speech, repeated them in his head in wonder and misery. ‘Yeah, I can get you a teev. Won’t be fuckin easy but I can get you a teev.’…‘I’ll feed you to the dogs if you don’t stop whining’…‘You want wheels? ASK THE ROOF FOR WHEELS!’ If he saw people, particularly if he saw children, he would find a nice birch tree and whack it savagely with his club until its bark was pulped. Then he would saunter off again. He had begun to come close to the huts and the outskirts of the shanty village. Quite a few birch trees had his marks on them.

Today he saw nobody. The muster was over. These days, two men with guns came every morning to the village. They dressed in ordinary, if clean, clothes but their haircuts made them look like militzia. They smelled faintly of houses: cooked oil, sweat and soap. They lined up the men, women and children. Then they chose men with sores, missing limbs or scars. They took the babies off their mothers and gave them to other women. Young children too were swapped around, and then everyone was yelled at, loaded into a minivan and driven to the city. They’d return late tonight, and exhausted mothers would retrieve and feed their starving children.

He smashed some bottles with his club behind a shack but no one came out, even though he could tell there were children hiding inside, hiding first from the muster, and now from him. He knew they were watching him. He howled, eyeing the pretty lace at the window. White Sister and Grey Brother appeared and sat beside him, as he stared at the back door, but nothing happened. He thought of pulling away some of the polythene nailed all over the shack and crushing it into little pieces to provoke them, but changed his mind. The shack itself seemed special to him—it would be wrong for him to touch it. He headed off into the forest feeling restless, even disconsolate. He really wished he had some lace in his collection of special things, or better still, a big piece to hang on the front of his bower.

The singer, his singer, was gone these many months. Her hut too was gone, obliterated as if it had never been. He wished she would turn up again. If he ever saw her again, or her skinny daughter, this time, he told himself, he would talk to them. ‘Hi,’ he said conversationally to a slender tree. His voice was odd and croaky. He tried, louder, ‘How are you?’ Black Dog trotted up, startled, and licked his face, then fell in behind him with White Sister and Grey Brother. They set off at a trot into the forest.

When he was with the dogs he had no reason to fear bomzhi but they worried him, unsettled him. He thought about them a lot, mulling over what he saw them do. Territory and paths clearly mattered to them, but other than obvious zones around fires and houses, he couldn’t see the boundaries, and this made him fear them a little. Sometimes they seemed to him just like sick dogs or lone strays. You couldn’t predict when they would be dangerous. Some of them didn’t know how to behave, either with him or with each other. They fought and yowled, ripped and tore each other over food and scraps of metal. They stole from each other, beat each other senseless, even killed. They mated even when one of them didn’t want to. At other times they touched each other with a tenderness that filled him with confusion and longing.

At first sight and first smell, Romochka knew that to strangers, to house people, he himself was one of the bomzhi, the horde of the homeless, undifferentiated to the city people and the militzia. For a long while he had been charmed that he could pass as a bomzh but these days it troubled him. Today, like many days before, he escaped his vague unhappiness by returning to his usual activities: hunting, or home to the lair.

The forest was best of all in springtime. The dogs scented for him, and he climbed like a young bear to raid nests of eggs and fledglings. Black Dog always dug crazily for moles, although he rarely got one. They chased spotted deer fauns on sight but avoided young elk: they had fierce and powerful mothers. Around the spring-fed ponds the young ducks and other waterfowl were plentiful, if rather smart.

Romochka couldn’t swim and didn’t like getting wet, but all of them tried hard to fish, so enticing was that glitter in the fast running stream that ran from the prudi through the forest and into the city. Black Sister, always the fastest, was the only one to have had any success. She had stood up to her shoulders in the stream, staring intently into the water, again and again plunging her great head under. The one time she came up with that splattering wriggling meal of silver made them all redouble their efforts.

Today, however, Romochka was bad tempered and halfhearted, and they got nothing.

Grey Brother bounded along, joyous, and with the unmistakeable air of transgression. He led Romochka across the allotment with a spring in his step, his limp barely perceptible. Romochka thought Grey Brother was excited that it was, for the first time, just the two of them. He scampered too as he wondered what possibilities a hunt with his surviving brother would bring. Grey Brother was strong and a good hunter, although not as fast as he had been, and Grey Brother still enjoyed the forbidden more than the sanctioned. He liked to start fights with other clan dogs by flouting their boundaries, and he liked to sneak off by himself. He had been known to go out hunting with Black Sister, only for the two to return singly from different parts of the territory. Once he disappeared for more than a day and came home with nothing, the smells of strange dogs all about him.

Grey Brother marked the last meeting post and stood, quivering. He looked towards the mountain and hesitated. Romochka was about to lead off, but Grey Brother suddenly made up his mind and sprang off in the other direction. Romochka ran after him, yipping in delight. He had never gone this way.

Grey Brother was redolent with the smell of mischief and had a lot to show him. They roamed through the grassy verges by the highrises, along roadsides dodging traffic and joggers, past shops and kiosks. Romochka’s spirits soared with the adventure of it. Then they came to the metro entrance. Around the squat glass building with its ever-swinging doors, Romochka saw faces he knew, people sleeping on small squares of lawn with their dogs or begging at the metro doors. He noticed that they recognised him too. And Grey Brother.

His high spirits slowly subsided. Grey Brother knew this place too well. He moved in a practised way from meeting point to meeting point. This was where the paper bags of half-eaten pirozhki came from. This was where they found whole loaves of bread. Cake.

His brows drew together. They had all duped him. They had all hunted in the city. All except Romochka.

Grey Brother noticed Romachka’s changed mood and struggled to find something naughty enough to cheer him up. He tried scaring an old man but Romochka only slouched after him, deep in thought. They chased a cat half-heartedly, but soon gave up and trailed back to the allotment. Romochka didn’t mark the post. He felt the treachery of his family keenly. He couldn’t smell the city on them, and so they had hidden it from him. The dogs, who never lied to each other, had lied to him, all of them. Everyone, even the people of the mountain, went there day in, day out.

Grey Brother licked his hand with uncommon tenderness as they walked slowly back across the allotment. He didn’t dart off to do something of his own, and Romochka was touched. Grey Brother didn’t usually hang around being kind hearted.

Back in the lair he sat down away from the others and scowled at them. Mamochka didn’t trust him and didn’t expect him to hunt properly. From this day on, he told himself, I will be hunting in the city. He glowered at them—Mamochka lying on the nest oblivious to his resolve; Golden Bitch staring at him with furrowed brow from the sentry point. You can’t stop me, he thought to himself. I’ll show you all.

Romochka, White Sister and Grey Brother headed home with a jaunty air. He carried their catch in a large doubled plastic bag slung over his shoulder. Now and then they had to stop while he flopped it onto the ground to have a rest. He sighed with exaggerated contentment and pride as White Sister and Grey Brother sniffed it passionately, wagging their tails. They reached the last meeting place by the fence and he swung the bag around in a flourish to leave a message for the others. He peed on the last post, too, for the first time since Grey Brother had taken him to the city. He, Romochka, had brought something home, and it was extra special! He let Grey Brother lick his fingers as they made their way across the meadow grass of the allotment.

Everyone would know that he hunted, and hunted well. Every stranger visiting their meeting place would know that he was part of the family. Each breath filled him with a sweet happiness the closer he got to home and the further he got from the city and people. He began to smile delightedly to himself. It had been chancy, but in the end so skilful. He was bursting with it now, if underneath still a little shocked at what he had done. His ear still burned.

Romochka, White Sister and Grey Brother had sniffed trails in the maze of lanes around the shops, apartment blocks and metro station for a couple of hours, finding nothing much. They missed the one cat they chased; it ran at Romochka to escape, and he misjudged his dive.

He could tell from the way White Sister and Grey Brother lifted their noses that the woman lumbering up the footpath towards them was carrying something good. He felt dizzy for a second with the strength of his inspiration. He didn’t think. He gripped his club, stepped out in front of her and swung it hard at her knees. The dogs held to the shadows, disoriented, not understanding his intention.

He missed. The woman stepped back, dropped her bags and cuffed him across the side of the head, sending him sprawling.

‘Filth! Bomzh! Animal!’ she shrieked, stepping up to kick him, but she got no further. The two dogs were on her. White Sister stood over Romochka, black eyes blazing, snarling and leaping to snap at the woman’s face. Grey Brother circled her and began darting in and out from behind for nips. She swung, yelling in pain, to face him. Romochka grabbed the two shopping bags and ran, wrestling them along the road, around the corner and into an empty cardboard box next to a dumpster in the alley. He shut the box and sat crouched inside, listening. He was shaking all over. The woman screamed and screamed, but he could tell that White Sister and Grey Brother were no longer with her: the screams were very regular. His heart stopped pounding, although his head still throbbed.

He felt and sniffed through the bags. Chickens! Two! No feathers. Cheese! A big half round. Sausages! Celery, carrots, onions. Cucumbers. A liver! What was this big thing? He sniffed it, his nose still stupefied from the liver. A cabbage! There was a commotion of people now around the corner, and he could hear the woman still yelling and screaming. He waited, his hands feeling over the food until there was calm. White Sister and Grey Brother wouldn’t be far. He knew they would find him. He would need them, to stop some big kid or dog thieving his haul.

Then he started to feel bad. It crept up on him. He saw himself again and again swinging his club at the woman. Filth! Bomzh! Animal! His first mother would have been angry.

‘Filth. Bomzh. Animal.’ He said the words over and over to himself, his own rusty little-kid voice scaring him in the darkness of the box. Something dissolved suddenly, some huge barrier between him and people. They had been in the untouchable fringe of his world; dangerous, like dogs with frothy mouths, yet irrelevant like those sick dogs, too. He started to cry softly to himself.

He heard the dogs outside tracking him, then Grey Brother’s nose pushed through the flaps of the box. Romochka giggled in relief and madly licked that big head. He wiped his face and nose on furry shoulders. He backed out and pulled the bags out after him. He let them sniff the liver on his fingers and the chickens in the bag. They bounded around in delight and triumph, which cheered him up immensely. He loaded everything into one bag, put it inside the other, and off they set.

After that, Romochka and the three young dogs preyed on people. They kept as far from their own part of the city as they felt they could safely go, and with this their open path territory expanded considerably. They got a system going and Romochka no longer had to front up first. It was heart-racingly exciting. He would pick a likely victim, someone with shopping bags in a deserted alley, and saunter past them, or behind them, gleeful that there was no way they could recognise that he was a hunting dog. Then, when he judged the moment, he yipped. White Sister, Grey Brother and Black Sister would appear silently out of the darkness and hold the person at bay. Romochka would run hunched into the melée, take the bags and leave the three to keep the furious and frightened victim against the wall until he was safely away. Then the dogs would melt into the darkness again.

Romochka didn’t let them do it too often and never in the same place twice. People would not put up with that, he told himself, if it happened too often. But it was his pride and joy. It was his special hunt with the three. He began to watch people the way he would watch birds to see where their nests were.

He became aware that the dogs each had a different view of people. Grey Brother would beg now and then, from a safe distance. Golden Bitch and Black Dog at times chased kids for the fun of it, and Romochka and the three joined in. When they were all together they could scare even adults, especially the diseased or drunken ones. These reminded Romochka faintly of his uncle, and he whooped as he saw them run from the hunting pack.

Mamochka avoided humans and had trained Romochka and the three to fear them. Yet, in time, he noticed that for all her wariness Mamochka was also the most attached to humans. Unlike the others, she knew the human word ‘dog’. He realised he had never seen her deliberately frighten people, and she would only snarl at them to defend him, Romochka, or (he guessed) one of her puppies. He saw that she had a basic respect and affection that extended to all humans they met, and he was chastened.

Perhaps there were other ways to get food from humans.

People were relatively kindly towards dogs, he discovered. He made White Sister and Grey Brother sit beside him on the street and hummed meanly at them if they snarled or growled, or even lifted a lip at anyone. They both sat, looking crestfallen—ears down, eyes sliding this way and that in discomfort, but quiet enough. He stood outside the Teramok cabin by the metro station with a plastic bag and accosted everyone who entered. He tried his croaky little voice on the long-rehearsed phrase: ‘Please, give. Beautiful dogs, hungry.’

People looked at him and the dogs and laughed. They were beautiful dogs: one white; one gold and grey.

‘What do you want from me, kid?’

‘Food, please, for the starving dogs. When you finish.’

Many did come out and drop their leftovers into his bag. Even the Teramok workers did on occasion. He was all the more successful because he shook his head when they offered him money. Some people gave him coins anyway, and he accumulated a small cache among his treasures in the corner of the lair.

Things only got out of control if anyone tried to pat the dogs. White Sister and Grey Brother immediately lost their grip on the parts they were playing and snapped furiously, then tried to run away. He took to standing well in front of them, so that he could intercept such hands himself, and say, nodding seriously: ‘They are hungry. They bite. Hard.’

When he called the collection to a close, the three of them would scamper off, he with a spring in his step, they with tails waving gaily. Out of sight they would all check the catch, and he would kiss and make a big fuss of the brave dogs.

This kind of hunting was less fun but he felt good about it. He would come home with a heavy bag and everyone would eat well. He was sure Mamochka would approve. He watched other beggars and rehearsed their phrases. For the love of Christ, give! Professional beggars didn’t mind him. Some even nodded to him as he passed by. Word soon spread in their city-wide network that the crazy dogboy was harmless and never took money, and so the beggarmasters left him alone.

As Romochka’s confidence in his urban hunting grew, so did his ability in live hunts. He worked better with his siblings, and they learned quickly to cover his weaknesses and trust his strengths. He was a finer strategist than any of them, and they brought home good food regularly under his guidance. They began to look to him for direction, and to pay attention to his plans.

It was a daytime hunt in the city. Romochka and Grey Brother trapped the large ginger tom in a cul-de-sac, Romochka’s heart hammering with excitement. He crouched, club extended. Grey Brother crouched too, ready to leap up or flatten his body, depending on what the cat chose to do. The dogs and Romochka generally chased cats on sight—exhilarated by the furry burst of speed as they fled, their fury and violence when cornered—but without real hope of catching one.

The cat stood still, back arched, tail bristling as thick as Romochka’s arm. It bared its puny teeth and spat twice. Romochka giggled and yipped. Yes, that’s what he’d do too, spit and think, spit and think. Grey Brother quivered at each sound it made but held back with uncharacteristic humility, letting Romochka lead. Romochka threw pebbles at the cat to make it choose, but it moved only slightly and kept focus. His heart leapt in delight, his belly jumping. They had a cat cornered, and what a cat!

Then the cat bolted, choosing to go for Romochka, as they always did. He was ready, and, as luck would have it, he felt his club connect. The cat roiled back across the open space before the wall and whipped itself upright in the far corner. There it waited, hooped and spiky, tempting them, daring them to close in so as to shorten their reaction time when it made a run for it. Romochka could see it all, and he held Grey Brother back, making the cat choose again.

It chose Grey Brother. It dashed under him, seemingly straight into his great, downward swinging jaws and descending trap of a body. Then, at the last second, it twisted upwards and wrapped itself, snarling, claws outspread, over Grey Brother’s face.

Grey Brother yelped and staggered up, shaking his head from side to side, blind-staring into ginger belly fur while the cat sank its teeth into his brow. Romochka dropped his club and raced up. He grabbed the cat with both hands and wrenched as hard as he could, pulling five parts of Grey Brother’s face up with the cat.

The cat let go just as suddenly as it had attached itself, twisted, and swiped Romochka across the face. He dropped it and kicked viciously, his rage bubbling up with the blood from the stinging gashes. Grey Brother had lost all reason now and was scrabbling for the cat in the corner. Then he had it in his paws, trying to bring his jaws through its flailing weapons as it yowled, raked him and wriggled free. But it was still trapped and by now Romochka was ready. He kept Grey Brother in check with fierce growls. The cat was his.

It fought with such feistiness, even when exhausted, that Romochka wished it hadn’t died. He would have liked to carry it alive back to the lair, but in the end he killed it almost by accident with a blow to the skull. He was still very proud of himself to be bringing home cat for dinner. It was a brave cat, and good to chew. He decided he liked eating brave and beautiful things best. He kept its ginger tail in his collection of rat skulls, feathers, beaks, claws, iron nails, metal spikes and coins.

Romochka and Grey Brother had brought home the first healthy cat the pack had ever caught, and with that kill Romochka’s place as hunter was finally established.

At the back of the Roma Restaurant, Romochka made friends with the cook. Mamochka apparently knew her. Romochka, watching from the shadows, could see his mother’s fear and pleasure. His heart melted as the wary Mamochka bolted a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. The cook, big arms crossed over big breasts, talked softly all the while, and Mamochka’s ears stayed flattened and her eyes soft and even half trusting as she ate.

The next time they went together with Golden Bitch and Black Dog, who both hung back in the alley while Romochka waited with Mamochka in the pool of light at the Roma’s back door. Mamochka gave one small bark and sat down, expectant, her tail waving. The cook came out and stopped short at the sight of Romochka.

‘Good dog Little Mother bring me here.’ Romochka said quickly. Mamochka looked up in surprise at the sound of his voice, then licked his hand and continued to wag her tail.

‘I thought she was a stray,’ the cook said, frowning.

‘Yes,’ said Romochka. ‘Me too.’ He held up four fingers.

‘Four dogs.’ He called Golden Bitch and Black Dog from the shadows. They stood well back, reluctant, unconvinced. He pointed to Mamochka, to Golden Bitch, to Black Dog, then to himself. ‘Four dogs, please.’

The big cook laughed. She had a gurgly, juicy laugh. Black Dog and Golden Bitch would have fled, but he and Mamochka held them there with their assurance.

‘OK—dinner for four, Laurentia’s best,’ the cook said, still laughing, and turned back inside. She came back out with four bowls of steaming ravioli. This, thought Romochka happily, is the dog’s dinner. She handed him the bowls, and he carried them one by one to the three dogs, then took the last one for himself.

‘Nice manners, young man. Want a fork?’ she asked. He shook his head, blushing with pleasure as he shovelled the wonderful hot food into his maw.

Romochka, Mamochka, Black Dog and Golden Bitch trotted the long and dangerous trail home at peace with the world, their bellies warm and full. They saw a cat hissing and spluttering in a narrow lane and didn’t even chase it. They howled at a military siren. They chased each other around in the vacant lot before their lair.

The Roma was open late. It was a long trail through hostile territories, human and dog, to get there. Skirmishes as they traversed closed paths, judicious retreats, all-out routs, lurking, waiting and slinking through the cold alleys; these were normal. They could get there quickly if they were lucky, but it sometimes took them half the night. Laurentia fed them all the leftovers after midnight in eight bowls. They would get home again sometimes just before dawn, still full-bellied and ready to sleep.

She blinked hard when Romochka first arrived with everyone.

‘How many in the family, young man?’

‘That’s it,’ he said.

She would watch, humming and murmuring, as he handed out the plates to the shy dogs, and then praise his manners when he served himself last. He collected the bowls for her at the end and occasionally felt her warm hand touch his as he handed them back. It was a delicious jolt.

He adored Laurentia. In time he took it as his due that his bowl was special—hot and fresh, not scraps.

‘Where you living, then, wildchild?’ Laurentia asked, pausing in the middle of a song in a strange language. Romochka looked up. He almost answered, then stopped, worried. Mamochka, could she speak, would never tell anybody. Not even the slightly foolish Black Dog would tell. A mental picture flashed of how assiduously Black Dog posted warnings. He wanted to tell Laurentia everything about himself. He stared at her, big-eyed.

‘No place,’ he said slowly.

‘You warm enough in winter in No Place?’

‘Yes, snug as a bug.’ He put his head down, thinking furiously. He had tricked her with a lie. Would she be cross? He couldn’t bear to look. Mamochka was whining softly now, worried. Time to get going. But he had to give Laurentia something special, just to say sorry. He looked up.

‘My name is Romochka,’ he said.

Laurentia beamed at him and held out her huge hand for his. ‘Come!’ she said.

Mamochka growled first, then all the others rumbled low, lifting their heads from their food and moving in as a pack.

‘Shush shush,’ Laurentia said, flapping her other hand at them. ‘Good dogs—I’m not going to hurt your precious prince.’ She kept her outstretched hand waggling in a demanding way at Romochka.

Romochka smiled his rare, sweet smile and put his hand in hers. She swallowed it in her huge palm, and he blushed deep red. She led him inside. They didn’t go into the restaurant, which, from the smell, was down a long dark passage. He followed Laurentia as she ducked through a small padded door. She flicked a switch and a single globe lit up a narrow, jumbled room. On one side there was a low sagging bed that smelled strongly of Laurentia; a bench with an electric hotplate on one side and a three half-empty preserve jars on the other. A loaf of bread lay in the middle, one end sliced off, and a delicate dusting of crumbs spread over the bench. He could smell the dried end of the bread, and its soft freshness underneath. Everything was cosy and lovely. He couldn’t believe Laurentia had invited him in. He guessed her quilt and bed were dry. Everything was so well set up, with little bits of food here and there, handy for any time you needed them.

He stared at a faded picture of a blue sky over a sunny city. Laurentia sighed and murmured, ‘I’ll go back as soon as I pay off those filthy scoundrels.’

She reached for a large jar of biscuits perched on a high crooked shelf, took out three and put them in his hand. Then she led him outside again.

‘Scram, caro,’ she said, ‘before I get caught.’

Romochka drifted off in a haze of happiness. Mamochka sniffed him all over, concerned and impressed. He smelled his own hands. He could smell the sweet oil of the biscuits on one. On the other, he could smell Laurentia. Grease and cooked food, sweat and a woman smell, and, underneath that, a faint burnt smell, as if her old sweat had turned to ash.

Out of respect for Laurentia and Mamochka, Romochka all but gave up robbery with violence. Through the summer he did well with various forms of pilfering and begging, for which he used only White Sister and Grey Brother. He thought of Brown Brother occasionally: so slow to anger and happy to hang out with him for hours on end. Brown Brother would have been perfect. Grey Brother didn’t mind begging from people but was fidgety and liable to vanish when Romochka wasn’t looking. Black Sister was aggressive and bad for business. He could never get the snarl off her face.

Despite his extraordinary appearance and smell, the people of the city barely noticed Romochka. People moved with practised blindness through public spaces, silent and unsmiling, their eyes never seeming to focus, their thoughts turned inwards or dimmed. In the city, children who were pretty, clean and well dressed sometimes caught an eye or a smile, but unkempt children, or children who stank, were erased. There were too many, and the lost children of the city too overwhelming, for any one person to be able to cope with an awareness of them.

Some people did give food or money to children, but without conversation, fiercely incurious. It seemed they built this into their routine, just as they would going to the theatre. Romochka was drawn to the area around the metro entrance, placing himself to intercept these routines, seeking out his regulars with glances, reminding them that he was there. Even White Sister and Grey Brother knew some of their people. They waved their tails lightly when they scented the skinny lady who wore pretty clothes or the dvornik from the war museum who smelled of vodka and toffee. White Sister and Grey Brother were large dogs, similar in form with their twin curled tails and long legs. They both had large dark almond shaped eyes with black rims set wide on their handsome faces. They had very red tongues and very white teeth and pointed, wolf-like ears. To be recognised and deferred to by these beautiful beasts charmed many people.

Romochka both encouraged and restrained the dogs: he didn’t like them getting close to people, but their courtesy was a great asset in the hunt. His role was the boy-owner. He never dropped to all fours, or licked or sniffed the dogs. He didn’t snarl unless he had to. He was known now as the boy asking for dog food, and some people from the apartment blocks sought him out to give him old cakes, bread, meat and bones. He collected so much good food that his family were shining and sleek—better looking than most strays or ferals. He didn’t like seeing them eat rubbish off the mountain any more, and it was a long time now since he had hovered at the back of a garbage truck.

They were fairly safe around the metro. The uniformed men were nearly all crippled veterans with their caps in their outstretched hands. The skinhead gangs and the other street kids frequented slightly less populated places. When Romochka saw forest people in the city begging at the entrances to metro stations, or in the underpasses, in front of churches or hotels, he felt a pull. A feeling that they, alone among all others passing by, were of his kind. They knew him too. Recognition flickered between them, loaded with mistrust, unwilling; unable to flare up without incinerating the tenuous bond they both felt tying them to each other through their shared land. He treasured that thin glimmer. He actively sought mountain people for the sake of it. Yet only in the city was this thread palpable. On the mountain or in the forest he was, as always, their enemy.

The bomzhi watched this domesticated Romochka warily. Those who lived out at the mountain knew he was wild and that he had more dogs than just these two pretty performers.

Romochka had never seen anything like Mamochka and Golden Bitch’s hunt. The dogs, he could tell, had also never smelled anything like it. It was a huge bird with glinting blue feathers, a long blue neck (broken and mauled), a white mask and a strange crown of blue-green. It was lying on its back with brown-feathered wings splayed. Its meaty breast rose high into the air, the very incarnation of plenty. The dogs put bellies to the ground and reached paws for a small claim, waiting for Mamochka and Golden Bitch to start. The two of them hovered proudly over the huge bird as everyone else smelled it over, snuffing deep into the feathers for the flesh beneath.

Romochka stuck his nose to it too, drawing in deep draughts of its feather musk and flesh. The death smell was new as new. It was still just warm. He stroked the fountain of feathers that formed its tail. They were as long as he was tall and thicker than a pile of clothes. He reached under Golden Bitch’s growl, leaned over the bird and pulled at the wing to roll it over. It was so heavy! A real feed. How had they got it home unhindered? Then the tail rolled into view. It was covered in more-than-counting little pictures of eyes or water puddles, each the same as the last, glittering in the dim light. It was like the green eyes of springtime winking in the street. Romochka let out a small yelp of delight. He rolled the bird back and squatted down on that swathe of feathers. He was eager now to get on with eating. These feathers were his for after.

The dogs were wriggling, tails waving, ears up. Then Black Dog, Romochka, Golden Bitch and Mamochka began pulling the feathers off it in huge mouthfuls, clearing their choked mouths with tongue and paw, then pulling more. Romochka yanked handfuls out and threw them behind him. The others gripped and tugged at legs and wings on the periphery, and in no time they all pulled the bird apart. The wonderful rich smell of flesh and viscera rose in their faces. Everyone edged in, low to the ground, ears flattened, sneaking under and around the growls of Mamochka and Black Dog.

Romochka’s hands slapped and wriggled around the grinding jaws, feeling for the bits he wanted. The bird was a male. He was a little disappointed but not surprised. Very colourful birds were usually male. He did love female birds: the flesh stocking of shell-less egg yolks arranged in a row from smallest to biggest was his favourite meal of all. He worked his hands deep into the cooling innards, feeling over and under the slippery sweetness for gizzard, heart and liver. His snarl swelled as he lunged slightly towards any whose muzzle came close to his hands. He felt the delicious taut globe of the heart and wrestled with the carcass to rip it out. It slipped through his urgent fingers three times, then the threads and sinews gave and it was his. He popped it into his mouth and couldn’t quite shut his jaws around it. He struggled to bite, chew, growl and at the same time feel for the smooth flaps of the liver. White Sister was pulling the intestines away under him. He found the tight juicy ball of the gizzard and quickly tucked it under his clothes at his neck, feeling still for the liver before anyone else snaffled it. His elbows were out and he growled savagely, then he had the slippery liver in his fingers. Arms buried in the bird, he gently worked it loose with both hands. He didn’t want it ruined with gall.

He sat back, happy. He felt the liver over until he found the gall bladder, bit it off gingerly and spat it to the floor. Then he stuffed the liver, too, down his neck against his chest, freeing his hands to help with the heart in his mouth. He pulled out the gizzard and chewed one side off, making an opening. He squeezed the grit and meal out onto the ground and settled down to chew through the rich flesh and its rubbery inner skin, spitting out small bits of grit and occasional feathers. He was humming now, rather than growling.

He watched the others as he ate. They were lying in the shape of a flower around the splayed carcass, all on their bellies with front paws claiming small parts for themselves. Now and then they inched in under the older dogs’ snarls, reaching with deferent muzzles for more. Mamochka, beside him as always, snapped savagely at anyone who bickered or reached too quickly. Mamochka still watched Romochka’s eating with a fierce dedication. Romochka’s share was secure, stashed away under his clothes. Black Dog’s too was unchallenged. No one would dare to squint at him and pin a piece of his with a hopeful, assertive paw.

Afterwards they each dragged small bits and pieces over to various corners to suck and chew and mull over. Romochka pulled the amazing tail feathers over to his play lair and began to arrange them here and there. Golden Bitch trotted over with the jewelled blue head in her mouth and settled with Romochka to chew through the beak and small bones to the soft centre of the skull, but Romochka drove her out furiously when she bumbled through the arch he was building from the feathers. Then he raced after her, threw his arms around her neck and wriggled his fingers into her mouth as she growled. He wanted the crown. He snarled in her ear as she snapped at him, but in the end he was so persistent that she let him take it. He yanked the bedraggled crown fan from its topknot and handed the head back to Golden Bitch.

Back in his little lair, he felt it over with wondering fingers. Fine black stalks all gathered in the small nub of flesh at the base, each tipped with a tiny iridescent fan at the top. He hid the crown in his special hiding place among his miscellaneous beaks, claws, bottle caps and other treasures, all hidden even though he knew none of the dogs would be interested in them.

He sat on his pile of feathers and watched the dogs lying here and there around the feather-lined lair, each gnawing or crunching at a leg, wing, ribs, spine or neck held between their paws. He began building an elaborate rib cage out of old bones and feathers. He tried to get several of the tallest to stand upright by wedging their stems and then weaving the shorter ones here and there through the flowering ribs. He made the shorter ones all face their puddles inwards. They were the outside of the ribs looking in. He was the inside of the ribs looking out. He was very pleased for a while.

Then he collected as many small bones as he could find around and put them inside the bower, making limbs and a belly for the feather animal. He grabbed Brown Brother’s skull and set it at the front. Then he took the crown from its secret spot and placed it in the belly too. He sat inside what he had made, with its full belly behind him, and the den in front. He was a giant animal, guarding.

He was diverted for days.

Summer passed into golden autumn. There were no puppies. Then, as the cold gripped the city, Romochka stayed active, hunting with the others whenever they were out. The long, denbound nights seemed a distant memory. Something was different this winter, utterly changed. He was colder sooner, struggling to warm up in the nest with the others, shivering as he trotted out to hunt. He desperately needed more clothes. He craved the occasional gifts of hot food. One night, sleeping fitfully in the nest, he reached for Mamochka and felt her smooth belly. He woke up.

It was going to be the first winter with no milk.

With the first big snowfall, the bomzhi by the metro disappeared. Romochka soon realised they and some of their dogs were inside the swinging doors, on the steps, or down in the underpass. He felt the hot exhalation each time the doors swung, and he longed to go down too into those warm tunnels and arcades.

He wasn’t afraid of the metro itself. He had a vague memory of holding his mother’s hand and boarding a loud train. But he was afraid of being cornered and caught by the militzia. So he hovered, feeling the warmth waft his way and vanish before it heated him at all, too wary to enter this other, closed trail of people.

Inside the warehouse fence, Romochka found two dead children with spraycans and glue but no food in their bags; and beside a dumpster, rolled in newspaper, he found a baby frozen solid. He didn’t touch these. Mamochka doesn’t eat them, and neither do I, he told himself. He wrapped the baby up again and left it for other dogs. The next day they all were buried under the snow.

The chill was so harsh that Romochka had to keep moving when he was outside. If he sat anywhere, Mamochka or the others chivvied and jollied him until he got up. They too knew that he had to keep moving. He wound a cloth about his face and wore two woollen hats, but still the cold bit into his nose and ears. He had quite a lot of clothes to put on, but he was only ever warm when he was asleep in the heated pile of dogs, and then only if he had a full belly. His bare hands ached and itched, and he tried to keep them inside his sleeves and in his armpits all the time. One day he was so cold that he thought he could not keep moving. White Sister and Grey Brother trotted, worried, at his stumbling heels. He headed for the metro and with his heart tumbling inside his chest, he pushed through the heavy doors, one after the other, to the warm interior.

He glared around, flanked by the two dogs, but no one paid him any attention. Bomzhi sat along one wall at the head of the stairs to the underpass, and he could see more begging or sleeping at the bottom of the stairs. House people entered and left, flowing up and down the stairs, parting to go round him. They wound their scarves up and put gloves on as they ascended, and unwound their scarves and took gloves off as they descended, but they all paid him no attention whatsoever. A uniformed official in a glass booth studiously avoided noticing him.

Romochka headed down the stairs into the warm dark belly of the underground. He unwound the cloth from his head and let the heat reach in to caress his frozen face. His scalp began to itch. He found a nice dark spot near bomzhi but not too close, and far enough from the glassed-in shops that lined one wall of the underpass.

He sat down with the two dogs, took his hats off, and then he just fell asleep, trusting the dogs to watch out for him. But White Sister and Grey Brother fell asleep too, trusting him to know what he was doing in this strange place and somehow trusting the miraculous warmth as if they were all little babies. The people flowed to and fro in front of them like an impersonal and congenial river. Then one young man stopped and took a picture of them with his mobile phone, and White Sister woke and jolted Romochka and Grey Brother with her growl. Romochka leapt up, looking about bewildered, while Grey Brother snarled and feinted a lunge at whatever it might be that had caught them unguarded. But the people just flowed by, and Romochka settled.

They were all blissfully warm, and all hungry. Romochka pulled out a grimy plastic bag to begin his begging for scraps. People weren’t eating much here, but bit by bit they got something. Local people recognised the tableau—boy, dog, plastic bag—and didn’t need him to say anything. Perhaps some were even comforted to see this familiar creature of their place. Since the scraps were for dogs, no one was shy about what they put in. Half-eaten stardogs, pirozhki, sloika. Shaurma or kartoshka skins. Anything they had been eating, and suddenly no longer wanted. It wasn’t much, but they got some small bites for everyone at home.

Romochka began to get edgy and worried about the others, and about how cold he would become on the way home. He had no idea how long he had slept, and he had no idea what the weather was doing. He felt disconnected and disoriented. He tied up their takings and stowed them under his clothes to stop them from freezing on the way, and he put on all his toasty warm clothes. He shared a stardog with Grey Brother and White Sister to give them the strength for the long trek home.

Romochka hunted deep in the city, partly because he needed the metro station in order to thaw out on the way there and back. He headed for the train stations, the throngs of people, especially people eating, and he filled his bag with scraps, gifts of food, daring thefts. He usually took only White Sister because she was almost invisible in the snow. She stayed nervous and loyal at his side while they trotted swiftly through the streets, but he went inside buildings alone, meeting up with her again at their own peed-on meeting places. He learned the rhythm of people’s stomachs, and hunted at the tail end of meal times. Often he ate all that he collected in the outward-bound metro stop to give himself strength for these hunts and then had to wait until people were feeding again. Once his bag was full, he headed home with enough miscellaneous foods to feed everyone.

And they had Laurentia.

But it was a long trail to any thronging of people with food on them and as fresh snow continued to fall, ranging widely became more and more difficult. The journey to the Roma and back took almost all night. It was a long hungry march in single file through territory after territory, human and dog, into the intensifying bewildering bustle, skirting the new army of snow workers and slow-moving vehicles as best they could; then a sleepy, almost dream-like trail home, with legs aching and the deadly cold encroaching. The snow was too deep and soft until they reached the scraped and salted streets, but these were very dangerous. They tried to keep to the less cared-for parts of the city: the alleys, building sites, railway lines. The snow banked high against the factory walls. On one occasion White Sister had to pull Romochka out of a snowdrift, tugging wildly at any bit of him she could get teeth into as he yelped and squealed.

Laurentia heaped presents on him. One week he staggered home with a stack of old blankets. She gave him a pair of some big kid’s boots lined with sheepswool. He took these things with a serious-faced, awkward thanks. But the coat left him speechless. It was brand new, with tags hanging off the collar. It smelled of shops and Laurentia’s touch, but no one else. He put it on, with Laurentia beaming at him. He wanted to get away. Her smile clung like cobwebs to his blushing face.

Once he was out of sight from the streetlamps of the Roma, and away from Laurentia’s happiness, he wrapped the coat around himself in glee. It was lined with ticked fur that gave off an animal smell. It was thick and soft around his hands and face and neck. The coat itself was a pale colour, quilted, thick and warm. It had pockets. Mamochka, Golden Bitch, Black Dog and the three were itching to have a smell, he could tell, but he trotted on ahead, making them wait.

When they came to the first meeting point they all quickly checked the messages, made their marks and then gathered around Romochka to smell the coat. He squatted as all of them sniffed it over, as they buried their wet noses around his face and hands, breathing in that rabbit-skin smell. Black Dog lost all sense. His eyes rolled, he buried his nose deep into the fur next to Romochka’s ear and began whimpering as he made chewing movements with his jaw. Romochka giggled and slapped him off, but Black Dog couldn’t keep away. All the way home, the big dog had a crazed look in his eyes and found himself nibbling at Romochka’s cuffs. He apologised every time Romochka whacked him but lost control of himself again immediately afterwards.

Whenever Romochka took the coat off, Black Dog’s eyes followed it, and, to save trouble, Romochka hung it off a high rafter whenever he wasn’t wearing it. For a while the coat changed the terrible winter for him and made everything easier. For a while it even made him more appealing to people when he went begging in the station; and it made them more appealing to him. Perfumes could not quite mask the skin and fur undertone on winter people: Romochka could smell sheep and fox and other unknown beasts. His coat made him feel a kinship with these fur-clad men and women. He was amazed, the first time he went into the bright lights, to see that the coat was sky blue.

The cold deepened. Even the blue coat could not keep Romochka warm. He risked hypothermia if he went very far at all. He got to the warmth of the metro some days, but no further, and he dreaded having to get home again afterwards. He could not get enough food, and hunger made him raise supplicant eyes, not to the faces of passers-by, but to the food in their hands. Getting to the Roma had become impossible. He dressed in all Laurentia’s gifts and wrapped a blanket over the top of everything.

Dressed like this, and with the dogs around him, he was more or less warm in the lair. Outside, his body was so hampered by his clothes and by holding the blanket in place that he was unable to do more than get to the metro. Then, by the time he got home to the lair, he was invariably freezing. He sought out the driest dog and cuddled close, shivering and shaking, while they gulped whatever food he had managed to bring home. He yipped urgently at them, hurrying them to come to bed. They all knew what to do now, and they flopped down around him, on him, with contented sighs as he patted them delightedly with his mittened hands.

Romochka stayed long hours in the metro, leaving only when he hoped the other dogs might have had time enough to get something or when his bag was full. Bit by bit his regulars re-established their routine. They carried their scraps from home and some helped in other ways too. The skinny lady gave him a stale cake and a pair of thick adult’s mittens one day; on another the dvornik tossed a woollen hat with ear muffs onto the ground in front of him.

Then one day, as he stumbled out through the metro doors to the grey world above, a balmy air swept over his face and a new smell filled his nostrils. The thaw had begun.

Laurentia wept when she saw them and heaped Romochka’s bowl up again and again. She clicked her tongue at how thin he was. She laughed a lot and sang to them. She made an insect-squashing motion with one hand on the back of the other when he asked solicitously about the gangsters and militzia. ‘One day the Roof will fall!’ she said airily, and Romochka grinned too, although he had no idea what she meant. She even, to Romochka’s shock and delight, held her breath, dived in and hugged him.

The city hunting territory was huge now. Its outer boundary towards the rising sun was a wide highway that roared day and night with heavy traffic, an afternoon and evening’s trot there and back. Between the rising sun and the setting sun, the southern boundary was the wide brown river, so far away that they could only get there after thaw. It could take from sunset to sunrise to get there and back. Between the river and the sunrise was the Roma. To the north, towards the winter Strangers, the boundary was the edge of a wilder forest that Mamochka feared. It had elk tracks at the edge.

Within Romochka’s hunting territory there were several metro stations and gradually he became familiar with them all. Spring and summer brought changes, however. Officials and militzia chased him if they saw him; a prohibition on dogs was sometimes enforced, and people veered sharply from him, clutching their noses, staring and frowning far more than they had in wintertime.

He no longer visited the stations only for warmth: he was people-watching. He knew there were trains far below. He could feel and smell them; vaguely, he could remember them. In his home metro he explored further, deeper. He headed past the shops near the entrance to the high atrium before the turnstiles and the abyss of the escalators. He watched people rise and descend; he watched them buy tickets, pass through the turnstiles and then disappear bit by bit: first their legs, then their middles, then their heads. On the other side of that arched maw blank-faced heads appeared, motionless shoulders, hands, legs. Then, when the feet appeared, the whole person suddenly moved and marched off.

He began to carry a few of his coins in his pockets and one day presented himself, frowning fiercely, at the cashier’s high booth. He stood back so the cashier would see that he was there, then leaned in and reached up. To his dismay he couldn’t quite reach the coin dish. He dropped his four coins on the bench near the little glass window. He had watched enough to know that more often than not these were wordless transactions, so he waited, heart pounding. It worked. The bored cashier barely glanced at him as he passed a ticket and two other coins back. He lost that first ticket on the way home.

He became practised very quickly. If the cashier waited, or looked annoyed and barked at him, he would put another coin down. Sometimes the cashier, as on that first occasion, gave him coins back with the ticket. It was mysterious and charming. It was something he couldn’t begin to explain to the dogs.

After a while, adept at buying tickets, he began to think of using them to go through the turnstiles, just like everybody else. He watched closely. He would have to put his ticket in, just so; take the ticket from the machine, so; then march through. Without a ticket, the turnstile would suddenly burst into life and bash his legs and thighs with two metal arms. White Sister would have to go through low on her belly, below the range of the metal arms. He’d tell her. He saw teenagers jump over the arms and saw a dog go under, and he could see that the metal couldn’t hit them.

He sat and watched for hours, daring himself to try it. He had imagined the sequence so many times that when he got up and walked forward it was as if in a dream.

The escalator seemed interminable. White Sister made herself small on the step below him and pressed her shuddering body hard to his knees. The snap of the turnstile arms above her head had scared her badly, and he could feel that the escalator was almost too much for her to bear. His legs too were shaking. He was both afraid and exhilarated, charged with the surge of power and weakness one feels when stepping over a boundary and into another’s territory.

They got to the bottom, and his jaw fell open. He had never been inside something so lovely. It was a soaring vaulted space with great painted scenes in panels along the sides and on the ceiling. He stood, staring. Suddenly there was a shocking noise and disturbance in the air. He grabbed White Sister as she tried to bolt, growling in her ear, struggling to hold her there by will, for he could not hold her by strength alone. The noise rose to a shrieking, deafening metallic grinding, and a train settled stunningly at the platform. It quieted to a steady roar. Romochka and White Sister were blocking the end of the escalators with people flowing around them both in a mad hurry. Then he was growling in her ear as the train’s roar rose to a sudden scream again, until it lurched and shot like a forest snake into its dark hole at the other end of the station. He still had her, shaking hard against him, mainly because she could see no escape back up the dark escalator through the moving forest of legs.

He wrestled her off to the side and sat down with her between a rubbish bin and an ornate bench. The people on the bench stiffened, sniffed about, looked at him with tiny glances of angry comprehension and got up to move elsewhere. He murmured in White Sister’s ear as another train screamed into the hall next to the opposite platform, stilled to a roar, emptied, filled, and screamed off, filling the whole huge space with deafening compound noise.

He kept at White Sister until her heartbeat settled. The monstrous trains came and went so often that she soon lost her flight reaction and settled into simple misery, clinging to him. Romochka smiled happily and began to look around at the fair, clean faces of the men and women, all depicted in rich colours, framed in carved stone. His heart burned at the sight of men and women hoisting a red tractor, men and women harvesting wheat, or building a brick factory in the sun. Men and women stern with resolve, pointing their guns at unseen intruders. Always sun-drenched, even though the real sky outside was the colour of river water.

He gaped, open mouthed and blank eyed. He ran his callused paws over the walls, staring up, not noticing or hearing the curses of the people who first tried to repel him with insults then scrambled to get away from him.

Crowds of people stood near the edge of the platform, each person almost touching the next, yet just distant enough to be alone. They were clearly not a pack. It was as if all these strangers had somehow agreed that their personal territory could be shrunk for the purpose of waiting for trains. People stared blankly up the tracks or straight ahead, none meeting another’s eyes. Bomzhi, with slightly larger personal territories, waited for trains, lay along the walls or stood next to loaded, tarp covered trolleys. There were gang children and homeless children too. Some were weaving in and out among the people, asking quietly for coins.

Memories unfurled; his neck hairs stirred. He almost felt the ticket clutched in his hand, his other sweaty and warm in his mother’s palm. Chatting, not noticing anybody. Not having to notice everything. He was suddenly filled with yearning for his lost smallness, for his mother’s hand holding his. Then White Sister shifted against his foot and he realised his eyes were tired from watching the people flowing on and off the trains. The grand and beautiful pictures on the walls began to make his head ache and his empty belly grumbled. He felt increasingly as if danger were all around and he couldn’t see or smell it. White Sister had been sleeping off her shaking terror on his feet, trusting his ease, but she woke up now at the smell of fear-sweat. He got up suddenly and they rode the awful escalator up to the daylight.

He had been home for half a day when he wanted to go back.

They all sat up, wakened suddenly from an afternoon snooze. Mamochka, Golden Bitch and Black Dog growled low, making a swelling, threatening chorus. Everyone’s hackles rose and Romochka’s neck and spine prickled. Someone was stumbling around in the ruin above them; rummaging, clumping, then dragging a beam from one end across the earth and weeds to another. They heard voices: there were two men in the ruin above.

Romochka scuttled to the wood pile and climbed up. The dogs paced, alert and scared. He could see legs wearing boots made of a yellow pelt of some kind. Romochka hummed a low, silencing warning, and the dogs dropped their voices and hovered in a group below him. They watched his face with such open trust that his chest swelled. He hummed his lowest, quietest note then stopped, listening. The second man’s voice rang out over the other end of the cellar and Mamochka, staring at Romochka’s rigid form, kept the others silent. The man in the fur boots grumbled just above them: ‘It’s a good place. What’s that idiot on about?’

The other man murmured something indistinct.

‘I don’t fucking care—look around. We can build a house with all this stuff, and if everyone’s scared of the place, all the better. Leave us alone, no problem.’

Romochka clambered down. The dogs paced miserably and Romochka listened with rising anger as the two men pulled things back and forth above them. The dogs looked at him, repeatedly, asking something of him. Mamochka licked him every time she passed, a deferential kiss that made him ache inside. Mamochka had never licked him like that; yet now, again and again, he felt her tongue on the corner of his mouth, and he felt her waiting. Waiting for him to tell them what to do.

Evening fell, but it was not a comforting darkness. The men lit a crackling fire up above in the ruin, murmuring and exclaiming all the while about some beef they had obtained. The flickering light through the cracked floor made the den seem permeable, flimsy. The smell of cooking meat and onions filled their space.

Romochka climbed back up onto the wood pile and stared down at the family as they waited in a semicircle before him. They all knew now that the men were moving in, taking over their closed paths.

Mamochka gazed calmly up at him. Golden Bitch, sitting motionless at her post by the entrance suddenly got up and walked over to Mamochka. She raised her head and looked at him intently with ears pricked. There was nothing bewildered in her glance. She wagged her tail slightly. She looked like Black Dog—impulsive and eager. Ready.

He was dizzy with sudden resolve: he would drive the men out.

He leapt down, his body tingling. He hummed them all in close and bounded on all fours up the rubble pile and into the moonlight and firelight above. He felt their huge courage rise like a wind behind him. Golden Bitch was at one hand, White Sister at the other, and the rest following close. Romochka didn’t stop to think. He bounded up the familiar blocks of stone and leapt to the nearest parapet. The dogs spread out in the shadows beneath him as he raised his shaggy head to the midsummer moon. He felt his fingers curl to the stones, and a howl bigger than his whole body welled and roared through his throat. The dogs howled in response below, hidden in the shadows. Then there was silence.

Both men leapt to their feet and turned away from the fire, peering this way and that.

‘Alyosha, what was that?’

‘Dogs? Calm down, Yuri—they won’t come near the fire.’

Romochka stared down from his parapet. He felt, then, immensely powerful. He was not afraid of their fire! He cackled out loud and both men started. Mamochka was leading the dogs around the outside of the ruin and he waited, humming quietly, weaving them into a dance—a singing hum now, not a growl.

‘Alyosha, what is that?’ Yuri was pointing straight at Romochka.

Alyosha peered at the silhouetted form.

‘A statue, a little lion?’

Yuri laughed nervously. ‘It moved, I swear it did!’

‘Hah! You’re off your face, you moron. Stone don’t move.’

Yuri shuddered.

Then Romochka stood up on the parapet, and both Alyosha and Yuri screamed. He howled again and all the dogs answered from around the outside of the ruin. He stood for a second, then leapt down, singing the dogs in closer. Alyosha and Yuri were both panting now. Wherever they looked they saw the glinting eyes of the six dogs. Romochka bounded on all fours just outside the clear light of the fire, then raised his voice, pulling the hum of the dogs with him into a crescendo. The two men screamed again and ran for the street door, the terrible slavering noise of the pack filling the air around them.

Romochka spent his first night as leader basking with the pack by the embers of the fire and eating hot, half-cooked beef stew.

Each metro station had its own character. Romochka had roamed in a daze through gracious stone forests, palisades, mosaics, statue arcades and painted scenes, his mind strung taut with a strange, pleasurable pain. He had found children in the pictures, all pretty and fair-haired, pet dogs, and bigger creatures. He’d searched these crowds of many-coloured heroes, the crowds that never went home or hunted, and felt his heart pound in sickening delight. In these pictures, somewhere, he would find his singer, Pievitza—in all her sternness and glory, and she would be flat too, and identical every day, yet new; silent yet singing.

But today was different. He didn’t gawp at the ceiling, or stare at his favourite painted panels. He walked down to near the end of the crowd and stood, sweating, at the edge of the platform, not looking at anybody, setting his face with the same studied and strategic indifference he had observed many times. This he understood well, and it pleased him. Mature dogs too, he told himself, would act as though the other were not there, not a threat, and so make themselves unthreatening too.

People looking round for the awful stench didn’t have time to identify Romochka as the source. The train pulled in with a diminishing scream over the roar of its engine. The doors hissed open, and he was suddenly pressed from all sides by the crush of people pushing against each other at the edges to get on and the flood of people pouring off. He found himself swept onto the train, but once on he couldn’t feel White Sister beside him. People pressed against his body, and he started to panic. He would have begun fighting to get away if the crush hadn’t suddenly separated again into discrete bodies, some seated, some holding on above their heads, all avoiding each other’s faces or staring with unseeing expressions. The space around him began to grow as people scented him and tried desperately to get away.

In that widening space, Romochka dithered, craning his head frantically. He lost his balance and fell flat as the train lurched and took off, accelerating to its impossible speed, shuddering, clunking under him, grinding against the tracks. He was on all fours, clinging to the bucking floor with open palms, crying through clenched teeth. A wave of horror rolled over him and then, through all that grinding, gnashing, screaming, roaring, rattling and clanking, his ears twitched. He had picked up a quiet, terrified whimper. Somewhere up the carriage and down low. White Sister was flat to the floor up ahead somewhere.

He began to wriggle forward on all fours through the legs but then the train decelerated sharply and he had to stop moving to keep his balance. People were shouting at him but as a thicket of legs stampeded off the train and another forest marched on, all the words were broken up and lost. White Sister was still whimpering quietly somewhere ahead of him. She hadn’t moved. The train took off, the people began to part around him, and he moved through that open space towards her. Another stop, another exodus, and an even more crushing surge onto the train. He was pressed against the legs of those seated along the benches, people jiggling and bouncing in unison as the train bounded, swayed and rocked over bumps in the tracks.

The carriage was so full now that people couldn’t get away from him. He wriggled doggedly between knees and was cursed and kicked, and then the train decelerated, stopped, and seemed to fill even more. He was crying with the effort, and thinking about starting to bite when he felt White Sister’s tongue on his face. She was pressed tight under the seat behind the row of legs near his hands. He reached under to her happy face and cradled it. Someone high above him laughed kindly, and he felt a little better. He decided not to bite anyone.

He closed his eyes, squeezing the tears out, and rocked and swayed and bounced with White Sister until the people who smelled him began to desert that carriage and he could ease the dog out and cuddle her in his arms.

He wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve and pulled himself together. He adjusted to the flying speed of the train and stood. He nearly fell again when the train suddenly decelerated and slid into the lights of yet another station, but he was too low and hemmed in to see more than a glimpse of the roof. He clung to a silver pole with one arm and to White Sister’s body with the other, so that they would not be swept out of the door again with the sudden dissolving of people into that strange human river that had swept him on. People settled into their places, and then he clenched his teeth, eyes shut as the train launched into speed again.

When he opened his eyes, he saw immediately that the carriage was half-filled with kids, big and little. He could tell that these were not house kids. These were bomzh kids, street kids and gang kids, and he was suddenly very alert. He edged himself into the first free space that had a metal pole to hold onto, and he made quick hostile eye contact. The first kid to approach he snarled at savagely and made White Sister do the same. The kids laughed and talked about him, but they left him alone.

Then a terrible thought burst in on him. How many stops and starts? How many stations? He was probably further from home than he had ever been. This train had not really changed direction all that much apart from what felt like a long turn away from the sunrise. It was hard to know in the darkness.

He started to wonder whether it was really the same train that appeared in his metro station, or whether it was a completely different train each time. He tried to remember what had happened when he was a very little boy, and he vaguely recalled getting off trains. The phrase catch the metro home.

A horrible fear flooded his body then and he nearly blacked out. This train was carrying him further and further and he had better get off before it was so far that he would never find his way back. How far he must have travelled already! As the train pulled into the next station, he stood up and, with White Sister, stumbled out onto a strange platform.

This station was filled with trains and platforms and people flowing between them in steadily tramping hordes. His heart twisted in despair and he wished he could curl up somewhere and go to sleep. White Sister whined miserably at his side, her ears flat to her skull. He scrambled to the wall and then found an escalator.

Romochka and White Sister emerged into the daylight in a completely unfamiliar part of the city. It was so different from his city that it might have been somewhere altogether unrelated. Unbroken buildings rose all around them, some exceedingly beautiful. The blue sky was filled at all edges of its vast basin with the intricate forms of grand and ordinary buildings, none of them concrete apartment blocks or factories. Grime-laden trees stood around here and there as ornaments, but there was nothing in sight that resembled a wild copse or a forest. There wasn’t even any garbage.

Romochka was too devastated to hunt. He scrambled past people and cars and into a small park across from the metro station. After his shock he needed sleep more than anything. He found a broad, low bush and crept under its bower. Trams squealed and rollicked along their tracks around one side of the park, and a busy lane curved along the other. As he closed his eyes he could smell exhaust, car brakes, the kartoshka and pirozhki from the stalls and, closer, vodka. A lady sitting on a park bench nearby was sipping it, raising her whole handbag to her face for each gulp. The leaves had been raked out from under this bush, and the dusty bare earth filled his nostrils, smelling naked and wrong. He fell asleep, leaving it to White Sister to snarl at anyone who tried to push in.

It was evening, and he was cold. He cuddled White Sister close and stared out through the leaves at the weak glimmer of coloured lights.

They were lost. He couldn’t think of any way to find out from people how to catch the metro home. What was the human word for his home? He couldn’t think of one that anybody would know.

He trotted cautiously to the streetside with White Sister. Other than a cleanish drunk on the tramstop being shaken by two very bulky militzioner, and a street kid cleaning windscreens at the traffic lights, he could see no one homely. He could see no bomzhi and no dogs. It was terrible to be in a city with only one dog and to have no idea where the bomzhi would be. When he found them, he had a fair idea they would be strange bomzhi, not the mountain and forest clan. Bomzhi knew he was not one of them, as did street kids and skinhead gangs. Dogs knew he was not one of them as well, so here all he could hope to do would be to hover near bomzhi in the hope of becoming a little less visible, and more like a bomzh or a street kid to all the other clans: the militzia, the various clans of house boys, the beggarmasters and that indiscriminate mass of people, men and women and children, who lived in houses, carried zipped bags of various sizes and colours, and cleaned their clothes.

He would have given way again to despair, but White Sister’s tail was up and plumy and her step jaunty. She looked at him repeatedly, waiting for him to lead the way, urging him to hunt. She was hungry. The burden of responsibility pushed him on. He crossed the road at the lights and, alert for any sign of militzia, began to look for a place where people gathered, eddied and ate. He needed a bag desperately if they were to beg for scraps, but this place was so poor in rubbish that he couldn’t find one.

Finally he found a familiar blue dumpster in a lane. He climbed on top of it and managed to wrestle its heavy metal lid open. To his delight, it had plastic bags and mixed rubbish, including old bread, cabbage leaves and chicken bones. He threw as much out to White Sister as he could and stuffed two plastic bags into his pockets, along with the bread, some bones and cabbage leaves for himself. It was a while since he had had cabbage and he started to cheer up.

He nearly dropped the lid on himself when White Sister growled. He scrambled out, losing half a loaf of bread and pinning his hands between the lid and the rim. The two militzioner from the tramstop were at the head of the lane watching him. They were both equally heavy but one was shorter than the other. They were too substantial for him to consider running at them and dodging around or jumping. White Sister’s teeth were bared, her hackles up, but her eyes were sliding to him. She was so far out of her paths that she didn’t know what to do. For a second Romochka stared at the two men. They stood still too, but he sensed from their alert poses that when they moved it would be towards him, and for more than a casual hassle.

‘Eh, you! Papers!’

Romochka didn’t know the lane or where it led, but he turned and ran, his coat swinging. For some reason the militzioner shouted after him but didn’t bother to give chase. He and White Sister pressed themselves into the evening shadows along the walls and made their way to the end of the lane, out into a maze of old shops and ornamented five-storey buildings.

They wandered on. His deepening impression of the city was its bareness; how hard life was going to be until they made it home. There was nothing to be found here. No rubbish gathered in these lanes, no piles of miscellaneous junk filled odd corners. There were no fields with old mattresses and other havens. The grass was all clipped short and no small creatures could find a space to live. Even the fringe of grass between pavements and buildings, that little mouse-run at the edge of everything, was not there. The ravens mewling and complaining in the parks looked well fed, but he couldn’t work out how they got by—or how to catch them. It was a city of many different types of dumpsters but to his dismay most were locked. Here, too, it was as if bomzhi didn’t exist and so far he had seen no single dog that wasn’t clearly a pet.

The shadows darkened and the city’s glimmer intensified to brilliant lights. Scared, fast-moving bomzhi began to appear here and there. Romochka saw a round hole open in the pavement, and a man in a properly filthy overcoat with bottles clinking in his pockets scrambled quickly and surreptitiously out. He swung his big head this way and that in the twilight, then pushed the metal lid to his hole back into place and walked quickly away. This frightened Romochka as much as it informed him. He didn’t dare go down there; he might be trapped with them. He noted, too, the speed at which bomzhi moved on the street. They knew that they were not safe here.

It was a frighteningly barren and uncomfortable place. There was nowhere to stop and think. He was overwrought. He decided that he had to find a safe lair and worry about food and water tomorrow.

They broke into a fenced-off demolition site to get away from the unending tramp of feet and the proximity of fast-moving cars. The site was calm, the engines of the huge earthmovers silent for the night. They clambered over a pile of rubble nearly as high as a building. The summer air was heavy with dust and, as they settled against a lone corner wall in the rubble, Romochka realised how thirsty he was. White Sister panted.

The sounds and smells of the city were muted, but they slept only fitfully, waking at the early dawn. A clear sky arched above the city. It was going to be hot.

Romochka rubbed his gritty face and looked around. The site was piled high with a rubble of multicoloured bricks—some with pale blue paint and plaster on one side; some yellow; some wallpapered. The corner that had sheltered them rose like a broken tooth to one side, its chipped plaster shattered and torn at the top, but somehow both homely and strange up close.

The chains at the mesh gate clanked. Time to go. They climbed over the rubble to the far side, wriggled under the fence into an unfamiliar lane and away. They trotted aimlessly looking for anything that might feed them or give them water. They tried every dumpster and were chased away from the few that Romochka could open. It was a long time now since the cabbage, bread and chicken bones. White Sister’s belly looked pinched high up against her spine. As they made their way down a small lane, following the smell of water, a faint music filled the air. Romochka was too thirsty and hungry, and too scared to think about music, but he did lift his head, jangled by the sweet sounds.

He stopped and reeled: he recognised these buildings: they were the flat cupolas and domes he had seen depicted on station walls, now made real and as round as peaches. Worst of all, in the middle distance, peeping through gaps between buildings, a vast brown water glittered in the afternoon sun. He began to pant, clutching dizzily onto White Sister. There could be no doubt. He shut his eyes to try to lessen the horror.

They were on the other side of the great river.

He could sense that they were a long way downriver from home. They had turned the Roma way between the rising and setting sun but had gone much, much further than the Roma. They would somehow have to find a way across the river, then head upstream until he found the little bit of river he knew from the outer boundary of his city hunting territory, then head between the setting sun and the rising sun until he picked up the Roma trail, then home. And before that, they had to get food.

He sat down under a tree and rocked back and forth, whimpering. That escalator was so long, so deep underground! Could the train really have gone under the river? He’d never thought of the river as having a bottom. He tipped himself over at that and curled up tight around his empty stomach, but White Sister wouldn’t let him be. She licked his face and hands, burrowed under him, nudging and cajoling. She stared at him intently, optimistically. He was the leader. She also knew they had to hunt and couldn’t hunt separately in this place of unknown trails and boundaries.

By midmorning they found themselves above a wide, still canal that ran the same direction as the river. They dodged a sudden noisy horde on the footpath and stared down at the water. A steep paved escarpment dropped without a lip into the dark waters, and there was no way he could see to climb down and get a drink without falling in. White Sister whined as he hunted around for something to carry water in and something to lower it down, but this city, maddeningly filled now with the smell of water, hot bread, cooking meat and hot oil, was empty of anything one needed. They made their way along the promenade at the edge of the canal, looking through the wrought iron balustrade for any chance to get at the water. White Sister, ahead of him under the shadow of a high footbridge, suddenly ducked and scrambled. There was a shriek and a sharp crack: she had caught a water rat. Romochka’s spirits lifted.

After the rat he felt a little better. He let White Sister lick the blood from his face and fingers while passers-by exclaimed and walked wide around him in flurry and disturbance. He ignored them. He was in no danger from these clip-clopping women and their pungent, soapy men. House people like this would hate to touch him, would never think to jump him, hold him down or beat him. He could see that this place was not a haunt for gangs, skinheads or bomzh children, so that left only militzia as the principal predator.

He was still terribly thirsty. White Sister panted and gulped, panted and gulped. The river was out of sight but very near, drawing this canal in. He could feel its presence like a huge animal hiding, ever moving. Its current wove sinuously through the air here and tugged at the sunrise end of the canal waters.

Sure enough, the canal opened up ahead, joining the great river. The balustrade ended suddenly, and here there were steps down to a wide concrete platform at the water’s edge. He drank deep and splashed his face and arms in the water. The ripples settled and the dark water stilled. The reflected evening colours formed again into straight lines and the orange windows of the shaken buildings were almost perfectly aligned again.

More food, shelter, and a way across this river. He shook the water with his hands again, breaking the city into tiny scattered fragments of pink, orange, grey nothingness. He hated this city.

The river, at least, was smelly and reassuring.

It was evening again, and again he could smell food everywhere and hear music. The eyes of each passer-by gleamed momentarily on him, then studiously lifted, and he knew that in such a place there could be no invisibility. Sad music, men’s and women’s voices, floated from one building; another pumped a heartbeat and electric sizzle. He kept moving from street to street, White Sister trotting miserably at his heels. The city lights were every colour, and the high domes shone in the night sky, and everything was dreamily beautiful.

Romochka watched White Sister as they trotted. Her behaviour was bothering him. At first he couldn’t work out who she was speaking to, who she was eyeing with that friendship glance and tail, that pleading, that little dip of her ears. Then he realised it was people. Any people. White Sister was so hungry now that she was begging, turning from him, breaking all the rules and behaving like a stray.

He was overcome with rage and disappointment. When she gazed at the next passer-by, inviting, he growled and kicked her savagely. She cringed, guilty, then slunk for a while at his heels, head and tail low, glancing at his knees now and then. But she couldn’t help herself. She was starving and people had always been good to her.

The next time Romochka growled but did nothing. He felt very cool towards her; and wretched with an inner dismay. It was his job to find good hunting grounds and a safe lair and he couldn’t do it.

Tears ran down his face. He had never felt more unhappy in his life. There was nothing to do but trot on. He dared not stop but had nowhere to go.

They were halfway across the bridge. The summer river moistened the air. He breathed deeply, and White Sister snuffed between the poles of the balustrade. The traffic roared too close, but still he felt better than he had since boarding the train. He stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked at the water far below where it swirled and settled. Could they trust this rich smell of water and putrefaction to pull them back in the direction of home? Then he noticed that White Sister was head up, snuffing another way, the way home, straight home. He felt suddenly peaceful. All would be well.

It all happened so fast that Romochka thought he must be in some terrible dream. They entered a courtyard that Romochka thought would be a shortcut, found no exit and, as they turned to leave, the world whirled into movement. The tramp and scuff of boots and yelling and shouting. It was so sudden and terrible that Romochka didn’t know where to look. For a moment he stood, whipping his head back and forth, unable to comprehend that he was surrounded by a wall of uniformed muscle.

He made a dash for it, and the ground thumped him hard in the back of the head. He was brutally rolled over, his face pressed into the asphalt, his wrists wrenched and cuffed. Someone put a boot to his head while someone else tied his feet together. White Sister was snarling over the back of his head, and someone yelled, ‘Shoot the dog!’ as she was booted hard, and lifted off his body completely. He could see with one eye half obscured by his hair as she regained her footing and turned to lunge, then someone very big stepped over him towards her, impossibly fast, and cracked her hard over the head with a truncheon. White Sister crumpled and Romochka screamed. She was moving feebly on the asphalt, struggling to raise her head, as he was lifted into the air. The men were shouting over him and he was thrown into the militzia van.

‘Why didn’t you shoot the dog? I ordered you to shoot the dog, Zolotukhin!’

The militzioner shrugged. ‘I like dogs.’

A revitalised bustle and noise rose in the main station, and the door to the cells opened. Noise of moving bodies and excited voices swelled around a man who entered the cell corridor. The pack leader, Romochka guessed. His companions fawned: eager, informative. Romochka heard his own incredible hairiness, vicious nature, strange gait, amazing reflexes and stench—and their triumph in capturing him—all made into words and passed to the leader. He felt afraid. The leader came up to the bars and stared at him, unsmiling. Romochka stared back, equally formally, his spine stiff.

The leader turned and said in a cold, gravelly voice, ‘What the hell do you think you are doing? It’s just a kid. Get those cuffs and the gag off him.’

‘It bites, Major Cherniak.’

‘Get them off!’

The pack held back, and they all burst out laughing. The leader growled in exasperation. He unlocked the cell and marched up to Romochka, who crouched more tightly into his corner. The major leant down, holding his nose with one hand, and untied the gag. Romochka waited a second, and then bit as hard as he could, holding and grinding his teeth into a soapy wrist. The leader straightened, yelling, shaking him by the hair and wrestling his hand free as Romochka tried to get more wrist in gobbling snaps.

‘Give us a hand,’ the major grunted, and the laughing men yanked Romochka’s head back while Cherniak extracted himself. Romochka gave a choking growl.

‘Just a kid, just a teeny kid,’ one sang and pouted his lips.

The leader sighed, nursing his hand as they relocked the cell. ‘That is just a kid, and a really little one too. What is the world coming to?’

The mean one snorted. ‘Feral kids are worse than rabid dogs. Worse than adults too, and they reckon there’s millions. Never solve anything unless we get rid of them. Put it down, I say.’ He made a flicking hand gesture, pointing at Romochka’s head. Romochka understood: he had seen guns. He snarled.

‘God, Belov, you got kids. How can you say that?’

‘That’s no kid. That’ll kill my kids given half a chance.’

The leader turned away and snapped at the others, ‘Get him out of restraints by dinnertime. And don’t cut his hair— you’ll need it.’ He stalked off.

As evening fell five militzi entered Romochka’s cell. They took off the handcuffs and shackled his wrist to a ring in the wall. While two held him down by the hair, another untied his feet and ungagged him. He kept them at bay with his best performance, but was bewildered when they put a huge bowl of hot soup and half a loaf of bread down on the floor beside him, and left.

Next morning he was held down and stripped. Then, as he yowled in pain and scrambled back and forth as far as his handcuff would let him, he was pressure hosed with cold water and left naked for a few hours until he and his cell were fairly dry. The station wasn’t cold; he warmed up bit by bit and later they threw him a blanket.

Over the following days Belov’s Dog became an attraction at the station. Officers from other precincts came, paid money and laughed loudly while Romochka was held down, pushed and goaded, poked and mimicked—his savage bite, raking claws and incredible speed shown off to a never-ending stream of amused militzi. They gathered to watch him eat, laughing, and they watched when he used the toilet, exclaiming over the fact that Belov had managed to train him. Belov said there was nothing like a high pressure water hose—it should be in the dog training manual.

Romochka kept within the boundaries of his dog self and never let on that he heard them. He was in disguise in the hope of some unknown future advantage it might give him. He lurked malevolently within himself, watching them, hating them and, bit by bit, despising them for what they didn’t know. Days passed.

Hiding inside his dog self insulated him to a degree from his own thoughts and feelings. He was a dog: words meant nothing. He was a dog: numb grief and wild joy were the boundaries within which all feeling was stretched. His self was a dog’s self, a set of known trails, ways and places to be, between these boundaries. The present was not good. He thought about it little. He ate glumly, fought when there was opportunity and snarled to comfort himself. Despite this retreat, however, another feeling crept over him, like the season tipping from summer to autumn. It seeped into him, quelling all other feelings. It was sadness and with it came, first in moments, then more often, the snowfall of despair.

Belov’s business died when the dog became too quiescent to retaliate with any conviction. Officers no longer found the sight of a disconsolate naked boy with an adult’s hairy body and a huge black mane all that funny. Some asked for their money back. Belov’s loudly vaunted idea of bringing in another dog to stage fights never eventuated.

Romochka wished bitterly for this dog, and for true doghood. Were he really a dog, he would understand only their bodies, not their words. Were he really a dog, he wouldn’t know all their names, and their kids’ names. He wouldn’t know and remember every word and phrase, and be paralysed by these lives that stretched before and after the station: he would know only their smell, only their aggression and torments; and what they ate.

The fight went out of him altogether. He stared dumbly, balefully without growling or snapping, unresistant even when he was pushed around. He was no longer sure that hiding his human side would get him released, but he remained a dog, unable to climb back to his boy self at will. Boy worries crept into him only gradually, flittering in pictures across his mind. Mamochka carrying a white hare, head held high. Black Dog looking guilty with Romochka’s blue coat between his paws. White Sister lapping from cupped hands under a silver drainpipe. His hands. White Sister all friendly, begging from strange people. White Sister crumpling on the road.

Had he seen her stand up again?

Major Cherniak reappeared a week later. Romochka was crouching in the corner of his cell, crying softly to himself, hugging his naked knees.

‘Why’s this kid still here? He’s crying. Have you idiots been feeding him?’ There were murmurs of assent. ‘Has anyone got in touch with child protection?’ Every man looked at the next, and eventually there was a collective shaking of heads.

‘He shouldn’t be here. Get him dressed, tell them they can come and get bitten too. We’ve done our bit picking him up, more than our bit cleaning him up. He’s their problem, not ours. And when he’s gone, get this cell steam cleaned. That smell is horrible.’

Next morning Romochka was held down and forcibly dressed in some soapy clothes that smelled of Belov’s tobacco and were too big for him.

Belov laughed. ‘Give him to that idiot at the Anton Makarenko Centre.’ He made a rude gesture. ‘Rehabilitate this, dickhead!’

Cherniak laughed with the rest. ‘Just call the usual number. If they want the Makarenko people involved, that’s their business.’

Romochka considered he had been amazingly well fed in the cell and felt physically strong. He understood from their talk that he was to be moved, and his spirit rose like the sap in spring. He took pains to be particularly docile all morning, retrieving his boy self as consciously as he could. He stood on his feet, eyes cast down, never growling or baring his teeth.

It worked. He was marched quietly out to a white van without manhandling, flanked by three militzi and two paramedics who spoke gently to him. At the moment when the paramedics went to take over and load him in, he ducked, slipped his hands from their grasp and bolted, sprinting as hard as he could while holding his overlong trousers up. There was uproar behind him as they gave chase, but he was faster.

After a little while their shouts and exclamations, their heavy steps, receded behind him. He heard a siren and shot off the road into a winding lane, then darted into an alley. He found himself, still running top speed, on another road with a wide footpath and many people. He left that too, as soon as a likely alley joined it, then zig-zagged through a sequence of laneways and passages until he was sure he had lost them.

He quietened down to a trot, his heart still hammering. He scented his way to the river. He was on the home side, upriver from the bridge, and, to his great joy, he could see it. He made his way steadily back and began to trot along the cold trail he and White Sister had taken more than a week before.

He sweated with the horrors of that place. He looked around. There was no mark to show what had happened, and his ridiculous boy-nose would never be able to find White Sister. Despair flooded back. He was alone, his family lost, his sister hurt: all his doing. And he didn’t know how to get home. His ears buzzed and his sight blackened, shutting the world out.

Then, as suddenly as he had been caught, he was knocked down by the squealing, wriggling, yabbering force of White Sister. Chewing and slobbering his face and arms, shoving her head into his belly, throwing herself bodily at his chest for the embrace. He sobbed in happiness into her neck and held her so tight she snapped this way and that, struggling to be free. Then she capered around him in wild joy, her eyes shining. At last she sprang up with buoyant purpose, looking back at him repeatedly: Let’s get out of this horrible city, now!

At dusk it began to rain, and, to his delight, a trickle ran onto the footpath from the wide silver drainpipes that ran down the outside of the older buildings. He scampered over, bent down and put his open mouth under one of them, then cupped his hands for White Sister. They trotted on through the evening and the first part of the night, winding in and out of lanes and roads, backtracking from each cul-de-sac, waiting fearful in the rain for traffic to clear on roads they had to cross, but angling always back to White Sister’s point of certainty, then heading off again at a run. White Sister was thinner even than before but, to Romochka’s relief, her interest in people had been snuffed out. She turned to him, insistently, repeatedly, and to him alone. They stopped only to check dumpsters for food.

They slept in a large railway station that sheltered more bomzhi than Romochka had ever seen. Then, just before dawn, Romochka gave White Sister a chunk of bread from his pocket and they were off again, running into a wind-driven rain, but warming up. He ate as he ran.

At midmorning, they found themselves around the corner from the Roma. Romochka yipped and White Sister jumped for joy. They ran round the back. They had never been there in daylight; the lane was deserted and the restaurant shut. White Sister coursed about, whimpering with happiness as she smelled a cold trail of the family. Romochka scratched and whined quietly at the locked door but there was no sound inside. Laurentia wasn’t there.

Hungry as they were, they felt they were as good as home, and they set off on the familiar path as though it in itself were food and could give them the energy to keep going.

By late afternoon, they were in the allotment, trotting wearily with glazed but expectant eyes. No one was home in the lair, so they threw their aching bodies down on the bed and slow-licked each other’s faces while they waited. Bliss and weakness filled Romochka. White Sister was so much bonier than when they were here last. He ran his fingers over her. It seemed a long time ago. It seemed just this morning.

They heard the joyous crescendo of the clan as their trail was found, swelling to a scrambling, yelping climax in the courtyard, and then dog after dog piled upon him and White Sister, whining and wriggling and squealing. Even Black Sister, her reserved body swaying in delight, approached both of them with teeth low and, when Romochka threw his arms about her and licked her face, she shuddered. Held in his arms, she licked his ear, and then reached out to lick White Sister’s face too, once. Black Dog and Grey Brother capered madly around the cellar, ears back and haunches low, then chased each other just to have something to do with their happiness. Pregnant Mamochka wriggled her surprising big belly into Romochka’s arms and kept biting his face through her yabbering, as if she had to do more than lick to believe she had him back.

They had food. They had dropped it outside out in the allotment as their excitement took them over. They raced out once everyone settled and returned with a soft summer hare and three stiff ravens.

Romochka could not stay away from the metro for long. He was wary since it had kidnapped him but unbearably curious. He hunted with the dogs around the mountain for a few days, but his ears were tuned to people more than ever before. He scavenged for clues about the wider world and was astonished: that world had been here all the time, inaudible to him. People here knew Belov. ‘Major Belov,’ he heard the one-legged man say, ‘pimps, beggarmasters, baby trade, you know…the Roof. He’s the one you got to talk to.’

He changed most of his coins for a precious collection of tickets. At rest in the lair, he played with them, shuffling them into patterns and getting the family to smell them.

Soon he was drawn back to the station, tickets in pocket. He opened his ears, realising quickly that stations had names and learning the name of his. He found metro stations throughout his territory and bit by bit worked out how to catch the trains for one stop, then trot back home. Then two stops, and three. White Sister remained his sole companion, seasoned as she was in the underground trails and their dangers. The others accompanied him to the metro entrance but no further, and not even Black Sister showed any resentment. He quickly ran out of money, and life became more dangerous when the beggarmasters realised he had started collecting cash as well as scraps.

His exploration of the underground territory opened his ears and eyes to people, and with this came an awareness of the uses of money. He couldn’t enter shops, he knew that without trying. But street and metro kiosks were for everybody. So easy! He was amazed that he hadn’t considered it. You simply held out some coins and pointed. If they waited, or gestured, or said something, you pulled out one more coin.

He began buying hot food—stardogs, pirozhki, cheese-filled bread, boubliki and shaurma from the kiosks, which he and the dogs gulped down in ecstasy. Sometimes, if he pointed to the dogs, he would get some scraps too, especially if he bought food at the same time. He ran out of money as quickly as he got it.

Mamochka loved the new grease on his hands but hated him going down the escalator to the metro. She tried to steer him to hunt on the mountain or in the forest, but he went rarely these days. The metro pulled him into its arcades of glory, its bazaar of hot, greasy, pastry-covered foods and its enticing human world.

Mamochka watched him as he went, watched every move he made, troubled but passive. Sometimes she even sat on her haunches, immobile, and he mistook her silhouette for the old image of Golden Bitch at sentry. Her watching annoyed him. He would push her, pull her, cajole her to the nest. She licked him thoughtfully for a while, then stopped, preoccupied. Even after her two puppies were born, Mamochka worried. This autumn he made no move to suckle. He showed no interest in the puppies. He was out, always, at the metro. Long hours, returning late, sometimes even with no fruit of a hunt.

In the dark before a late autumn dawn, Mamochka entered the lair carrying a strange smell. Everyone looked up, noses and ears questioning the dark air. Her steps were awkward, slow, and it was clear from the broken rhythm that her legs were braced and splayed in the effort to carry something heavy and alive.

She stumbled and then dragged her burden over to the nest. Romochka sat up. She was carrying more than a strange smell. She was carrying—dragging—a whimpering human baby by the clothes at its scruff.