Sky Wolves Read Free Page B

opened the front door.
    ‘Now, you’ll have to be really careful,’ Aunty Dot warned. ‘We don’t want her jumping down and running into the road.’
    In fact, Jenny did seem to be extraordinarily nervous. She flinched at all the brightness and quivered at the noise. Sam held on to her tightly, then he saw Aunty Dot’s bicycle basket.
    ‘I know! She can have a ride in your basket,’ he said, and before Aunty Dot could say, No, don’t! he lifted the lid and lowered Jenny inside.
    ‘WOOOFF!!’ said the bicycle basket, and there followed what sounded like a small tornado. Aunty Dot hastily scooped Jenny out again.
    ‘Pico!’ she said.
    It has already been mentioned that Pico was very small, even for a Chihuahua. He was so small that he could fit in the palm of Aunty Dot’s hand. He was also very loud. In fact the one attribute had evolved out of the other, since Pico lived with Aunty Lilith, who was short-sighted and very deaf. And she weighed a lot. It wasn’t easy to coax her on to scales, or to find any that would take the full brunt of her weight, but Aunty Dot had bought an industrial-sized set especially for the purpose and had bullied Aunty Lilith on to it one day.
    ‘Good heavens, Lilith!’ she had said. ‘You weigh 340 pounds!’
    ‘Too much money for a set of scales,’ Aunty Lilith said.
    ‘No, dear – you’ll have to go on a diet!’
    ‘Dye it? There’s nothing wrong with it!’
    ‘Nothing wrong with what?’ said Aunty Dot, getting confused.
    ‘That’s what I said!’ said Aunty Lilith triumphantly.
    Most conversations with Aunty Lilith went like this, and in the end most people gave up and left her to sit in her specially designed armchair, which could be manoeuvred into different positions at the touch of a button, and to eat her favourite treacle toffee, which exercised her jaw at least. Other than this, Aunty Lilith was quite happy in her chair and rarely saw the need to move out of it, but when she did Pico had to be very careful, because her size-nine feet might descend in any direction. And so this was how he had come to develop his tremendous bark.
    ‘WOOF!’
    Because Pico was too small to go for walks in the usual way, Aunty Dot carried him around in the basket of her bicycle. When anyone approached it, Pico produced a bark like a Great Dane.
    ‘WOOF!!’
    ‘No one’ll ever steal this bike,’ Aunty Dot said, with satisfaction, and Sam, out of politeness, refrained from saying that no one would ever want to. It was a vast, unwieldy thing that clanked and groaned, and looked as if it had been cobbled together from the remains of other bikes. Aunty Dot had ridden it around the city for manyyears. She rode on the pavements, since the roads were so busy, and whenever pedestrians got in the way, she just jiggled the basket so that Pico barked again – ‘WOOF!!’ – and they scattered to left and right, sometimes diving into the road for safety.
    ‘Better than a car horn,’ Aunty Dot always said.
    Now she handed Jenny back to Sam and lifted Pico from the basket.
    ‘Jenny dear, it’s all right – everything’s fine,’ she said, holding the Chihuahua out towards her. Jenny this is Pico.’
    For a moment the two dogs tensed and bristled at one another, then Jenny moved her nose, quivering and whiffly, towards Pico, and after a moment he lifted his tiny nose to her. And, moved by an impulse she didn’t fully understand, she said, ‘Little friend, I see that your body is small, but your heart is great. You have within you distant horizons and marvellous deeds. You will leave the place where you are now and travel to faraway lands. The stars shall be your compass and your journey shall know no boundaries.’
    Now, in the main, Pico was contented with his life. He had known nothing else, having been bought by Aunty Lilith when he was a puppy and hardly bigger than a mouse. But sometimes he did wonder if there was more to the world than Aunty Lilith’s sleeve and Aunty Dot’s