Sky Wolves (7 page)

‘Hooray!’ cried Checkers, belting all the way round the croft again. ‘I’ve always wanted to be in a pack. Can I be the leader?’

‘No,’
said Jenny.

‘But every pack should have a leader,’ said Flo, who had watched a documentary. ‘And an underdog.’

‘That’ll be Pico,’ said Checkers, tearing round again.

‘WOOF!’ said Pico from underneath a twig.

Jenny paused for a moment, wrapped in thought. There was a reason she was here, in this new world, and a reason they had all come together. Only she didn’t know what it was. A ripple of sadness passed through her, and she had a sense of something else dark and flickering in the corners of her mind.

‘This pack has neither leader nor underdog,’
she said eventually.
‘Each of you is needed for the danger that lies ahead.’

Boris looked at Checkers, and Flo looked at Gentleman Jim. Pico stood underneath Jenny and looked up, but couldn’t see a thing. They were all thinking the same thing, though only Gentleman Jim put it into words.

‘Danger?’ he said. ‘What danger?’

‘
I do not know yet
,’ Jenny said.

Flo closed her eyes, but Checkers ran round the croft again, barking madly. ‘Danger!’ he shouted. ‘Hooray!’

Now the colours of the sky were deepening and the first pale stars appeared. Jenny looked up at them and sighed, and wondered briefly if she would ever see her own, very different stars again.

‘When will you know?’ asked Gentleman Jim, but Jenny only said that she would know when the time came.

‘Come along, you lot,’ called Aunty Dot. ‘Checkers, Boris, Flo – time to go home.’

And slowly, reluctantly, the dogs returned. Their mood had changed, and they were all serious and quiet, wondering what their new friend might possibly mean.

Over the next few days, Jenny adjusted to life in her new home. There was a lot to adjust to. Electric lights that went on and off unpredictably, so that the rooms did not go dark when night came, and music blaring out from a small box. There was a bigger box, full of moving pictures, that Sam and Jenny watched, entranced, every evening, until Sam’s mum told him off for not doing his homework, or sent him upstairs to bed, at which point she sat in front of it, entranced. Then there was the washing machine. Jenny got in trouble for attempting to rescue the clothes as Sam’s mum loaded them in, then she guarded them fiercely, her head going round and round, until the machine reached the spin cycle, when she ran off backwards, with her tail between her legs.

‘It’s almost as if she’s not used to electricity,’ Sam’s mum said, as Jenny stared out of the window, fascinated by the street lights. ‘I wonder where she lived before.’

Then, at the end of that week, Sam’s mum got the vacuum cleaner out. Jenny cowered to the ground, appalled, as she plugged it in and switched it on. She watched in horror as Sam’s mum kept pushing it away from her, and it came back, roaring horribly. Jenny was terrified, but her
duty was clear. She flattened herself to the floor, emitting a volley of barks, then advanced on it in a growling rush, gripping the base of it with her teeth and hanging on for grim death while it pulled her back and forth across the carpet. But Sam’s mum did not appear to be grateful for Jenny’s heroic struggle.

‘Sam!’ she thundered. ‘Take the dog away!’

And Sam had to haul Jenny into the kitchen on her lead. Even there she wouldn’t give up the battle. She kept on barking and sounding the alarm until Sam’s mum had finally won the fight and tied the beast up with its own tail.

There was so much that was strange and new that Jenny was often exhausted at the end of the day. She had come to a very noisy world. The bin men arrived with their huge truck that made a grinding noise as they lifted the bins. Police sirens sounded regularly, and once a fire engine thundered past, almost deafening Jenny with its alarm. Many enemies attacked the house in that first week. There was a strange man in uniform who came every morning and a boy with a big bag of papers. Both of them seemed to be trying to get in through a slot in the front door, but each time they tried, Jenny barked furiously until she had seen them off When a man with a ladder came, she nearly had a fit. He attacked all the windows with a soapy solution so that he thought he was hidden, but Jenny wasn’t fooled, and she barked so loudly and for so long that everyone on the street came out to see what was going on.

Gradually, Jenny adjusted to the clamour of her new world, though she was still very nervous and didn’t much like being taken out on a lead. No one turned up to claim
her, much to the bemusement of Sam’s mum and Aunty Dot. But Sam kept his word about taking her out every day, before and after school. She wagged her tail furiously at him when he got up in the morning and looked very sad when he left for school, then overjoyed to see him again in the afternoon. He was the first person she had trusted in this strange new world and she followed him whenever she could.

If Aunty Dot came to take Sam and Jenny out, Jenny would meet all her new friends. When Sam took her out on her own, she learned to communicate with them by using the doggie post.

When dogs leave their mark on lampposts or fences or tufts of grass, it usually contains a message for other dogs. In this way Jenny learned when Gentleman Jim’s rheumatism was bad or Boris’s food had disagreed with him again; when Flo was feeling especially nervous or Pico especially cross. Checkers was always very excited about something, often too excited to leave a proper message.

‘Come
on,
Jenny,’ Sam would say, because he was impatient to play with his new friends. ‘What’s so good about that one blade of grass?’

But Jenny would move the blade around carefully, sniffing over and under it and nudging it at the root, before moving on to the next blade. There were the scents she was familiar with, of earthworm and mole and hedgehog, the silvery trails of snails. Then there were the little piles of poo scattered all over the croft. Boris’s poo was especially interesting, and she couldn’t understand what made it glow with a mysterious purple light, until she worked out his message: Mrs Finnegan
had bought a new cookbook and he was suffering from the results. The chemicals in Flo’s poo suggested that she had become sensitive to the new hair dye her human was using on her. She could tell that Checkers had been eating the wallpaper and that Pico was having trouble with his teeth.

‘Hurry up, Jenny!’ Sam complained. ‘It’s getting dark!’

But Jenny had her own messages to leave, of comfort and hope to her friends who were leading such unnaturally stressful lives, and about her daily battles with the postman, the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.

Apart from these misadventures, however, Jenny felt that her humans were shaping up nicely, and that she was getting to grips with the new world and settling in. Aunty Dot thought so too.

‘She’s a little miracle, that dog,’ she said, spoiling Jenny with one of the special treats she always brought. ‘I wonder how she came to be a stray.’

Jenny could have told her, of course, but she preferred to lie in her basket in front of the fire, keeping one eye on them all even when she fell asleep. Then, as the weeks passed, she found that she was forgetting her former life, and she preferred not to think about it. Her life now was full. She had her food, such as it was, she had her family and she had her friends. She was learning to speak to them in a voice that was more like theirs. And, of course, she still had the mistletoe dart. She kept it under her cushion and took it out with her when she went for a walk. Sam was still the only person she allowed to touch it, and it was getting rather mangled now, from the games they played. She refused to give it up, however, since it was her last reminder of her former life. Sometimes, when she tucked
it into her mouth, she had an old, sweet feeling of former times, the image of a golden boy, to whom she was absolutely devoted, and then she would get the pressing sensation that there was something she should be doing, but, try as she might, she could no longer remember what it was. She worried about this at first, but as time went on and she became more and more content, she allowed the fragments of her former life to settle like dust into the hollows of her mind.

Aunty Dot and Aunty Joan and Aunty Lilith sat in their front room, knitting. At least Aunty Dot was actually knitting, Aunty Lilith was holding the ball of wool and sucking her tea from her false teeth, while from time to time Aunty Joan leaned forward with an enormous pair of scissors and cut the wool. This didn’t seem to bother Aunty Dot much; she just carried on knitting with another ball of wool that Aunty Lilith picked up in a different colour. Pico was asleep in his tea cosy in another room. This room was very quiet, except for the ticking of the clock, which was very loud. It was an old-fashioned clock which had a sun and moon travelling round the face on separate dials, and if you looked at it closely enough you would see that instead of numbers, it had the words
PAST, PRESENT
and
FUTURE
inscribed on it where the numbers 9, 6 and 3 would normally be. And at the top, instead of the number 12, there was the word
ETERNITY
in bold letters. It was quite hard to tell the time from this particular clock, especially since there seemed to be an almost infinite number of hands of different sizes, from the microscopically small to the huge. The biggest hand, however, seemed to be pointing at one minute to eternity.

Aunty Joan cut yet another strand of wool and Aunty Dot put her knitting down. Both she and Aunty Lilith looked expectantly at Aunty Joan, who sat up suddenly.

‘Sisters,’ she said. ‘It is Time.’

‘It is Time,’ echoed Aunty Lilith and Aunty Dot, and then all three of them did something very surprising. They unfolded their wings.

Jenny lay asleep on the rug in front of the fire. She was breathing heavily and her paws were twitching.

‘I wonder what she’s dreaming about,’ Sam said.

‘Bones,’ his mother replied. ‘Chasing a ball in a field. Come on, you’ll be late for school.’

But in fact Jenny wasn’t dreaming about bones or balls. She was dreaming that a great tree had spread over the world. Its branches covered the sky and its roots lay in a chasm of darkness. The universe lay suspended beneath the roots of the tree, quivering with life like a great egg that was about to crack, and a serpent coiled from the branches to the roots.

It is Time,
a great voice said, and there, filling the kitchen, was the biggest wolf she had ever seen.

Jenny tore herself out of her dream. Nothing had changed. She was in the lounge, not the kitchen, and the room was quiet and empty, though very cold, because Sam’s mum had turned the fire off. She shook her ears to warm them and to help her wake up properly. She had had these dreams before and she always found them unsettling. She trotted into the kitchen to finish what was left of her food, then paused, looking in astonishment through the glass door.

Snow was falling – a few gentle flakes at first, then thicker and thicker, until the whole yard was covered in a whirling whiteness. But only yesterday the sun had shone and it had been quite warm.

‘
IT HAS BEGUN
’, said a huge voice behind her.

Jenny spun round. There was an enormous wolf in the kitchen.

It is a characteristic of the Jack Russell breed that they don’t know they are small. No enemy, however large, goes unattacked. Jenny crouched, barking for all she was worth, then sprang at the intruder. She didn’t know what he was doing there, or how he’d got in, but she was determined to see him off. She wasn’t even deterred by the fact that if he had opened his great mouth, he would simply have swallowed her. But no matter how often she sprang, the enormous wolf didn’t seem to be quite where she thought he was. And yet he didn’t seem to move.

‘
HAVE YOU FINISHED
?’ he said, as she leapt at him for the fifth time.

‘
Ow!
’ said Jenny as she crashed into a cupboard. ‘Stay still, can’t you?’

‘
I THINK YOU’LL FIND I’M NOT MOVING
,’ said the wolf. ‘
YOU ARE MOVING, AND SO IS THE WORLD. I AM QUITE STILL
.’

None of this made sense to Jenny. All she knew was that there was a strange wolf in her territory. She rushed at him again, barking, but the great wolf simply raised a paw and flattened her.

It was a force like an electric shock. Jenny lay stunned and gasping.

‘
THAT’S BETTER
,’ said the wolf.

Jenny closed her eyes briefly. Something was tugging at her memory. Her mind ran over the facts. There was a strange wolf in her kitchen. He was huge and glowing. His eyes were like two blowlamps and there was a kind of electric drool from his massive jaws that disappeared before it hit the floor.

‘
I HAVE TRAVELLED THE NINE WORLDS TO FIND YOU
,’ said the wolf, and Jenny had a sudden sinking sensation. She knew that she ought to know who he was. She tried to bark again, but all that came out was a kind of rattle.

‘Why are you here?’ she managed to ask.

‘
I THINK YOU KNOW WHY
,’ said the wolf, and added, ‘
IT HAS BEGUN
.’

Slowly, warily, Jenny got up. She couldn’t bear to look at him, so she looked at the floor instead, which was gently smoking. Sam’s mum would be furious, she thought.

‘You already said that,’ she said quietly.

‘
THE FIMBULWINTER IS HERE
,’ said the wolf.

Jenny shook her ears.
Fimbulwinter,
she thought. The word echoed strangely in her mind.

‘Wh-who are you?’ she asked.

The strange wolf lowered his massive head. His eyes seemed to burn right through Jenny.

‘
I THINK YOU KNOW
,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Jenny, though again she had the awful feeling that in fact she did.

‘
I THINK YOU DO
.’