The Dogs of Winter by Bobbie Pyron

Author:Bobbie Pyron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2012-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

I was no longer content to ride the trains, and neither were the dogs. Smoke disappeared for longer and longer periods of time, as he had before. Grandmother spent long hours on the sun-warmed sidewalks, sleeping. Little Mother did her best to keep track of the puppies, whose long legs carried them farther than she liked. Lucky and Rip made new friends of all the dogs on the streets after the long winter.

And like the dogs who lived on the streets, with each passing day, more and more homeless children emerged from wherever they had been during that winter. They emerged pale and thin and hungry for whatever they had not had.

As the days grew longer, packs of older children roamed the streets looking for those made weak by the long winter. I watched a pack of younger children steal the shoes and coat and hat from another child sleeping in a doorway. I watched a snarling pack of older boys torment a drunken man cowering in a bus shelter. It was not enough for them to steal what little money he had and to steal his bottle of vodka; they also taunted him.

“You crazy pig!” they cried. One boy knocked the drunkard in the head with a stick. “You stupid fool,” another boy sneered. He kicked the drunken man in the seat of his pants as the man tried to stumble away from the pack of boys. The man fell to his knees. The boys descended on him like vultures.

Grandmother and Rip pressed against my knees and whimpered. We turned and walked away from the cruel, cruel laughter of the boys. I rubbed my thumb over and over the edges of the tooth in my pocket.

“I don’t know why humans act the way they do,” I said that night to the dogs. We were all curled together in the warmth of the basement beneath an abandoned, crumbling church. Little Mother had found this place and brought us here.

“Sometimes they are cold and heartless like the Snow Queen. Sometimes they are full of ugliness and hunger like Baba Yaga.”

Little Mother scrubbed my hand with her tongue, one paw pinning the hand to the ground. I pulled a small bug from my hair, no bigger than a grain of rice. I crushed it between my fingers. “Too many are like the Little Match Girl — lonely and starving.”

Lucky rolled onto his back, waiting for a scratch. “Ah, Lucky, my thief,” I said with a smile. “Why should I scratch your belly when you steal?”

He had a new trick to steal food. He picked one particular person from the crowd leaving the food stalls with their lunch packet. He followed them a short distance across the stone square. Then he would let out a loud woof. The lunch packet would fall to the ground from the startled person and, before the person even knew what had happened, Lucky snatched up the food and ran. Sometimes he shared with us, and sometimes he did not.

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