Dog Boy by Eva Hornung Read Free Book Online

controlled body of deference. Her ears were back and her eyes soft, and she licked her own nose again and again. Then she dropped very slowly and deliberately out of his arms and onto the ground. She rolled and presented her throat.
    Romochka was horrified and bitterly hurt. She had said something that could not be unsaid and that threw everything awry.
    Golden Bitch soon came to weave with pleasure at the sight of him, and to lick his hands and mouth in greeting. She always watched him with that same yearning interest. Romochka in turn could never forget that he was not a dog to her. He was also not a dog to Black Dog, but everything between Black Dog and him seemed accepted, easy. He was conscious that Golden Bitch was waiting for something from him that he didn’t comprehend.
     
    One day Mamochka, Black Dog, and Golden Bitch led them all together outside the playpen and to the other side of the vacant lot. Sunlight filled the world, and the allotment glittered with yellow dandelions. The young dogs were quivering with excitement. At the far end, they all squeezed through the fence and then clustered to one side. There they stopped, sniffing everything. Romochka could remember this place, but it seemed utterly changed. He savoured the memory, curious. He had been a boy then, with a missing mother and uncle, following a strange dog. He remembered how cold and hungry he was. How unknown the trail ahead. Now the allotment was the threshold of home, redolent with familiar smells, a place of impending safety, even boredom. He was a dog now. His mother was a dog. His brothers and sisters were dogs. He watched keenly as the young dogs smelled everything in long deep breaths, tails stiff and thoughtful. What could they smell? He tried, but it just smelled like pee.
    This was the first meeting place. Only later did he realise that here they could know when and where everyone had headed out hunting, who had returned and what, if anything, they had caught. Here they could smell whether the approach to the lair was safe, and here also strangers left messages, a little way off if they were neutral; in the meeting place itself if aggressive.

    The rubbish mountain rose dark and squat above a forest of birch, larch, spruce, pine oak and alder that stretched from the far side of the mountain to the horizon. The old cemetery hugged the base of the mountain at one side, almost invisible under its tree cover. The concrete block wall that stood between the cemetery and the invasive slide from the mountain could just be seen as a thin white line from the construction sites. Beyond the cemetery was a highway, flanked on the far side by more distant apartment blocks. The cemetery came within a hundred metres of the dogs’ ruined church. All between was long grasses and marsh.
    At the edge of the mountain, the waste land ended in a bank overlooking a shallow basin of rubbish. Whether water actually flowed out and away to some cleaner watercourse was unclear. It was a natural declivity that wound its way along one side of the ancient yet ever-growing mountain. In spring it was a sodden, treacherous pool, hard to cross and quite deep in places. In summer, the river of rubbish seemed to move in this bed in an imperceptible slide. A bucket seen from the eastern slopes of the mountain might two weeks later be seen in the centre of the southern curve. There was no clear trail across this shifting bed of debris.
    In spring, summer and autumn a heady invisible stream, a potent current of chemical rot, flowed from the mountain into every crevice before it dissipated in the air around the apartment blocks, leaving a faint, almost sweet ester that persisted even underground in the metro station beyond. The forest produced its masses of flowers, its nestlings, its fruits, nuts, berries and mushrooms; the land went from muddy, to green, to richly grassed, to gold, filled with hares, moles and innumerable creatures, all as if the mountain had no effect. Dogs