Sky Wolves by Livi Michael Page B

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 Finneganhad 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 tuckedit 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.

8
In Which Something Very Unusual Happens
    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