The Dogs of Winter

by Bobbie Pyron

  I offered the potato to Grandmother. She took it gently in her mouth, rolled it about, and then dropped it. She pinned her ears back in apology and wagged the tip of her tail.

  Why had she not eaten the potato? I carefully lifted her lips. I looked and looked for the long white teeth I had seen in Lucky and Smoke’s mouth. The teeth of the dog. The teeth of the wolf. But Grandmother had no teeth, or very few. And the few she had were broken or worn to nothing more than nubs.

  I pulled her to me and hugged her. She rested her head against mine. “Don’t worry, Grandmother,” I said. “I will take care of you.” With my new knife I cut the one sausage into tiny pieces and cut what was left of the black bread up as well. I mixed it all together in an empty flowerpot with a bit of water until it formed a gruel.

  “My Babushka Ina would fix soft food for me too when I was too sick to chew,” I said to her. “She would mix honey with mine to make it sweet. If I had honey, I would do that.”

  I set the pot of gruel down for Grandmother. Rip and Lucky pushed her aside.

  “No!” I said.

  Lucky and Rip looked from me to the pot of food. They inched forward. I stepped between Grandmother and the pot of food and the two hungry dogs. “No,” I said in a low growl.

  I locked eyes with these two dogs who were my friends and who could tear me to pieces.

  “No,” I said again and took one step toward them.

  A look passed between Rip and Lucky. It was brief as a shooting star and full of questions.

  Finally, they lay down and licked their paws as if nothing had happened, nothing at all.

  The days grew short and very cold. When the sun was shining, the Glass House was warm as springtime. The puppies played and wrestled. Grandmother watched over them while Little Mother and Rip went out to hunt rats. But at night, the Glass House turned into a house of ice.

  I begged and bought what I could. Perhaps I would have gotten more money if I had begged with one of the puppies. But I knew it would break Little Mother’s heart if I took one of her children away.

  Lucky proved to be my good luck charm again — Lucky and my shoeless feet. It had become so cold that I wrapped them in burlap I cut with my knife and tied them with string from my ragged sweater. Still, by the end of the day, my feet were wet and frozen.

  As the sun faded in the gray afternoon, I hobbled to the bread shop and the butcher shop and the everything-in-it shop. Some days, I had enough to buy bread and sausages and even a pickled egg or two. Sometimes, I did not. On those days, I would swallow my shame and take the long stairs down into the belly of the train station and dig through the trash bins for discarded food.

  “There are no children or grown-up beggars in that train station,” I said to Lucky and Smoke as I nibbled at what was left of the roasted pork shashlyk. I pulled a piece of black meat from the wooden skewer and tossed it to Smoke.

  “Perhaps they are living underground like Pasha and the rest,” I said, pulling the last piece of meat from the skewer and handing it to Lucky. I licked the grease from my fingers and pulled on the gloves I had found in the wooden shed. I shivered. I was still so very hungry. And tired.

  Back aboveground, Lucky and I lay down in a weak patch of sun on top of a heat grate. Smoke drifted off to where, we never knew.

  Lucky sighed as I rested my head on his sun-warmed belly. I reached up and touched his face. “I’ll get some money in a few minutes, Lucky.” I closed my eyes. “I just need to rest for a minute.”

  When I awoke, my head still resting on Lucky’s side, the day had turned lead gray. Fat snowflakes drifted down. And in my hand that had laid outstretched as I slept, winked coins and rubles growing wet in the snow.

  Lucky and I hurried to the wooden stalls for our bread.

  The woman who sold the bread huddled deep in her coat. As always, a cigarette hung from her lip. And as always, she took my money and handed me the loaf of black bread without speaking. But as Lucky and I turned to leave she said, “Wait.” She dug through a plastic bag, muttering to herself. She pulled something from the bag. “Here,” she said.

  I gasped. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was a hat. I ran my fingers over and over the rows of knitted wool — brown and black and dirty white — thick and rough. I showed it to Lucky. “See, it’s just like you. It is my Lucky hat.”

  Lucky sniffed the hat and sneezed.

  “Don’t just stand there and pet it like a dog,” the bread woman said. “Put it on.”

  Carefully, I pulled the beautiful hat on my head. It came down over my forehead, covered my ears and eyes, and rested finally on the tip of my nose.

  The bread woman grunted. She folded the brim of the hat up to my eyebrows. She nodded. “Better.”

  Oh, the delicious warmth of it! My head was warm and my ears warm for the first time in weeks. I wiggled my toes in my socks and burlap sacks. They were warm too.

  I smiled at the bread woman and wrapped my arms around myself. “Spasibo,” I said. “It is the best hat ever. There could never be a better hat.”

  The bread woman stacked her unsold bread in a box. She folded up the top of the box and then unfolded it. She pulled a loaf of bread from the box. “Here,” she said. “Take it.”

  “But I have only enough money left to buy sausages,” I said.

  “It is too old to sell,” she said, shoving the loaf of bread across the table. “It’s not worth the trouble to carry home.”

  My heart soared like the firebird. Two loaves of bread and enough money left for sausages!

  I raced back to the Glass House with Lucky. We leapt over the brick wall and ran to our home.

  “Tonight we will eat like kings and queens,” I said as we burst in the door. And we did. Two pots of gruel for Grandmother rather than one, extra slices of bread and sausage for me and for the dogs.

  I lit the candles I had found in the shed and placed them in pots. Their light danced and flickered on the glass around us and above us. A fine layer of snow and ice coated the top of the Glass House. The light from the candles shone through it like blankets of delicate lace.

  “The lace of the Snow Queen,” I said to the dogs all piled and sprawled around me. “Do you know the story of the Snow Queen? She was a beautiful but evil queen. She stole children who became lost and kept them in her Winter Lands forever,” I explained. “It was my favorite story for my mother to read to me in the winter.”

  Lucky thumped his tail. Rip rolled on his back, paws waving in the air. Grandmother yawned.

  I burrowed in the nest of dogs and stared up at the glass and ice and lace ceiling. “Let me see if I can remember…. Once upon a time,” I began, “in the land of ice and snow, there lived a queen. She was so beautiful and delicate, yet she was of ice, of dazzling, silver ice. And her eyes were like twin stars and filled with endless winter.”

  The next morning our little forest and our Glass House were blanketed in snow. The dogs chased each other and wrestled in the clean whiteness of it. Even Grandmother left the Glass House and rolled with great delight, her eyes closed and her mouth smiling. Little Mother did too.

  A whimper and a yip came from a mound of snow. One little head popped up, then another.

  “Oh, puppies,” I laughed. “The snow is too deep! We’ll never find you.”

  I put the puppies in the wheelbarrow and pushed them through the snow. Lucky and Rip chased along beside. We ran and laughed until the wheelbarrow turned over and we all went sprawling in the wet snow. Lucky and Rip licked the snow from my face.

  “Thank you for the bath,” I said.

  A bath. Once a week I had taken a bath. My mother would scrub my ears and my neck and my feet so hard I thought surely my skin would come off. “Now you are my clean Mishka. You are no longer a smelly little bear.”

  I took off my hat and placed it in the wheelbarrow. I scrubbed my face and my hair and my neck as hard as I could with snow. The sun was warm and the snow was cold. I took off my sweater and my pa
nts and put them in the wheelbarrow too. I yipped and whooped as I scrubbed my body with the snow. The dogs pranced and rolled. Lucky grabbed my hat from the wheelbarrow and raced to the shed.

  “Come back here,” I cried. Just as I caught up to him, off he’d dash again, waving my hat in the air. Rip grabbed the hat from Lucky and dashed past me. Even Little Mother joined in the keep-away game. I laughed and laughed, chasing the dogs in our little forest. And for just that time, we did not feel the cold and the hunger. We were a boy and his dogs playing with a hat in the snow.

  Snow fell every day now. Sometimes it fell thin and stingy as the woman at the fancy bakery. Other times it fell in generous white curtains. On those days, I stayed in the Glass House with the dogs — all but Smoke — and we slept the day away.

  But still, there were days of brief sun. I followed Lucky past the shed and over the crumbling brick wall and up and down alleys to the great plaza and the shops and the wooden stalls huddled together by the train station. Now that Grandmother and Little Mother were stronger, Rip tagged along too. And always, always, just out of sight was Smoke — a whiff here, a smudge of silver and black there.

  We wandered farther from the great plaza with its gold-roofed buildings and marching soldiers with their white gloves and tall black boots. The restaurant doormen with their white gloves had chased me away from the long black cars and the beautiful ladies.

  I found a bookshop with an old woman and a cat. The old woman gave me kopeks and the dogs milk. The cat had eyes like Rudy: gray and cold. My eyes longed to find the words they knew in the books; my hands itched to feel the weight of the book and the smooth cover. But the woman would not allow me to touch the books. Instead, she helped me sound out words from old newspapers. “Food,” “men,” “dogs,” “guns,” “cold.”

  I found a shop where a man with a huge mustache painted the faces of saints on wood.

  “Can you make a firebird?” I asked him. “Can you make the face of the Snow Queen or the Little Match Girl?” I asked as I ran my hand over the rough face of Saint Bernadette.

  The man blew out a long sigh. His mustache fluttered above his lip. “No, boy. People will not pay for such things. They want the saints, always the saints.” He hammered two pieces of wood together. “They think they will bring them good health and fortune.” He hammered harder. “Where were the saints when I lost my son in the war?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they were sleeping.”

  He sighed again and handed me a coin. “Maybe you’re right. Even God and the saints must sleep, I suppose. But who,” he asked, stroking Rip’s head, “looks after us when God and the saints sleep?”

  “Dogs,” I said.

  I also found a school near the bookshop and the shop with the wooden saints. In the late morning when the sun shone just so, Rip and Lucky and sometimes Smoke followed me to the schoolyard.

  “Watch,” I’d say. The bell rang and the children burst from the mud-colored building and swarmed like bees over the playground. Through the wire fence we watched the boys throw snowballs.

  “I don’t like that tall boy in the blue scarf,” I said to the dogs. “He put a rock in the middle of his snowball.” The boy in the blue scarf hurled his snowball at a small boy off by himself holding a book. The snowball smacked the little boy in the side of his head. He cried in pain, dropping his book in the snow.

  “See, I told you he was mean,” I said. Lucky and Rip barked in agreement. “He is a bad, bad boy.”

  The small boy ran toward the school building, holding the side of his head.

  “Hey! Hey!” I called through the chain-link fence. “You forgot your book!”

  “Who are you?”

  I turned. A girl studied me through the fence.

  Before I could answer, she pointed and asked, “Are these your dogs?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Lucky pushed his big black nose through the wire and wagged his tail. The girl reached through with her small hands and scratched under his chin. Rip stood up on his back legs and yipped and twirled.

  “That one too?” she asked, pointing to the patch of sun on the sidewalk where Smoke slept. I hesitated. Smoke did not belong to anyone. I nodded. “Sort of.”

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “My mother and father won’t let me have a dog. They say they take too much care and I am too lazy to look after one.”

  “The dogs look after me,” I said. “We look after one another.”

  She looked at my soggy, bag-covered feet. “Why don’t you have shoes?”

  I shrugged. “I had shoes once. Famous Basketball Player shoes. I could run faster than anybody in those shoes.”

  “Where are they?”

  “One was lost. One was stolen,” I said.

  The snow swirled around us. Birds fluffed their feathers against the cold. Snow fell on the white fur hat of the girl. She stared at my feet.

  The bell rang. The girl turned to go. “Good-bye,” she said. “I hope your mother gets you some new shoes.”

  “My mother is gone too,” I said. “Like my shoes.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother and your shoes,” the girl said.

  “Anya! Come in now!” a big woman called in an angry voice.

  “I have to go,” the girl said, and she dashed across the schoolyard.

  Anya. Wasn’t that my mother’s name?

  “Wait!” I called.

  The girl stopped. I rubbed my eyes. She was not my mother. She was a schoolgirl named Anya with a white fur hat.

  “The book,” I said. “The boy dropped his book.”

  She picked the book up out of the snow and wiped it off. She waved and ran to the woman waiting on the edge of the playground.

  Winter closed down like an iron fist. The City was encased in a cold so sharp, so bitter it hurt to breathe. Worse, my shoes made of socks and bags froze. They stood up all by themselves in the morning like little brown trolls.

  Finally, on the fifth day, the cold broke. The dogs and I awoke that morning to the sound of birds and the steady drip drip of ice melting off the roof of the Glass House.

  The dogs shook the cold from their coats and stretched. The puppies unwound themselves from the warmth of Grandmother’s fur. They stumbled over to Little Mother’s belly and rooted about for milk. There was no milk to be had. All of us were starving. We’d only had what food Lucky and Smoke brought to the Glass House.

  I wrapped my feet in the wet boots of old sock and burlap. I scrubbed my face with snow. “I’ll get us food,” I said to Little Mother and Grandmother, and set off with Lucky and Rip and Smoke.

  Later in the morning, after visiting the bookshop woman and the man with the giant mustache, I stopped to watch the children playing at the school. I had barely arrived when the girl with the white fur hat stomped over to the fence.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, her fists planted on her hips. “I’ve waited for you every day,” she said with a scowl.

  I rubbed my raw feet. “It’s been too cold,” I said. “We were trying to stay warm in our house.”

  She squinted her blue eyes. “Where do you live? I thought you said you have no mother.”

  I pointed back toward the onion-shaped gold domes. “We live in the Glass House over that way.”

  She shook her head, her brown curls bouncing underneath her hat. “You talk like a crazy person. No one lives in a glass house.”

  “We do,” I said. “The dogs and I.”

  “What is your name, anyway?” she demanded.

  What was I to say? I had always been my mother’s Mishka. But there was no Mishka because there was no mother.

  She waved away the words rising from my throat. “It doesn’t matter. I call you Sobachonok, Dog Boy. To me, you are Dog Boy.”

  I nodded. “Dog Boy,” I repeated.

  The teacher in the big coat on the other side of the playground blew a whistle.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” Anya pulled a bag from beneath her co
at. She squinted up into the sunlight and swung her arm, her hand clutching the bag, around and around in a big circle.

  “One! Two! Three!” and the bag sailed high and higher over the fence. Rip barked and danced on his back legs. Lucky crouched in fear. And Smoke, my beautiful Smoke, tipped his head back and caught it with ease. He dropped the bag at my feet and lay back down in the sun.

  “Open it,” Anya said. “It’s for you.”

  I opened the bag and pulled out boots. Glorious gray boots with rubber on the outside and cloth on the inside.

  I clutched the boots to my chest. “How could these be for me?” I asked. “Did you steal them?”

  Anya laughed a small, tinkling laugh. “No, silly. They belonged to my little brother. He’s outgrown them. Mummy threw them in the dustbin, but I thought they’d be better off with you.”

  I turned my face away and pretended to carefully inspect the boots.

  She planted her fists on her hips again. “Are you crying?” she demanded. “Because if you are, you have to give them back.”

  I shook my head and scrubbed my face. “It’s just the cold,” I sniffed.

  The bell rang. The children scattered like birds.

  “I have to go, Sobachonok,” she said. “I got in trouble with teacher last time.” And with that, she ran across the schoolyard. When she was almost to the big woman in the gray coat, she turned and called, “See you later, Dog Boy!”

  I pressed my hands to the wire fence. “See you later, Anya,” I whispered.

  The last time I saw Anya on the other side of the fence, the sky was heavy with snow and she was filled with light.

  “Three weeks!” she crowed. “We have three weeks off from school!”

  “You won’t be here?” I asked. I did not understand this. Seeing Anya every day had become as much a part of my life as begging and searching garbage cans for food.

  “No, silly,” she said. “It’s Christmas! We always get three weeks off at Christmas and the New Year. Don’t you know that?”