The Dogs of Winter Read Free

tracks. This woman coming toward us was not my mother. She wore a black coat. A brown scarfcovered most of her gray hair. Her arms were folded across her big chest. She did not smile as she looked down at me and said, “So is this the boy?”
    I looked from the unsmiling woman to the man. Perhaps she was my mother’s friend. “Are you taking me to my mother?” I asked.
    The woman frowned. “I thought you said he has no parents,” she snapped. Her eyes were small and hard like the eyes of the witch, Baba Yaga, in my fairy tale book.
    â€œHe’s just a kid,” he said. “He doesn’t know anything.”
    The unsmiling woman sighed. “Most of the children in the orphanage don’t know anything either. At least about their parents.”
    Orphanage. The word dropped like a cold stone in my stomach. Once on the television news I saw a story about orphanages in The City. None of the children in those places smiled or had mothers. Mostly they cried. They were almost as dirty as that beggar boy, but not quite.
    â€œI cannot go to an orphanage,” I explained to them. “My mother won’t find me there.”
    â€œYour mother isn’t looking for you,” he said.
    â€œShe is!” I said.
    The woman in the coat that was black, not red, grabbed my shoulder. “Come on, boy. It’s time to go.”
    â€œNo!” I jerked away from her hand, a hand more like a claw, a witch’s claw.
    I heard my mother’s voice say, Run, Mishka! Run!
    I spun away from them, looking and looking for the red coat. I saw green coats and blue coats and gray coats, and many, many black coats.
    He grabbed me, twisting my arm. “Come on, you brat.”
    And then I saw it: a flash of bright red. I tore away from his grasp, ripping my coat from my body. Run, Mishka! Run!
    I did. I ran as fast as I have ever run toward that flash of red as it descended down the steps to the railway station. I dashed this way and that through the train station, looking in the crowds of hurrying people for the red coat. Finally, I saw it, standing in a line like a beacon, waiting to board the train.
    Gripping the button in my pocket, I pushed through the sea of brown, black, and gray, desperate to keep sight of my mother. The wave of brown and black and gray swept me onto the train.
    I spotted a small figure in a red coat and chestnut hair beneath a blue scarf sitting in the front. I wound through a forest of legs, touched the red sleeve, held out the button, and smiled.
    The train lurched. I staggered back against brown and black and gray. “Watch it,” someone said, pushing me upright.
    I looked at the face of the woman in the blue scarf. Her hair was black, not chestnut. She did not smile. The coat was not even red.
    She was not my mother.

The train lurched. A voice announced, “Leningradsky Station.”
    I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and uncurled myself from the train floor. The wave of brown, black, and gray coats spit me out of the train and carried me along the bright corridor. Was it still day or was it night? I had no idea. In the underground world of metro tunnels, it never changed.
    I followed the stream of people up the long staircase, through the clicking turnstiles, then up the wide steps to the street.
    Cold slapped me in the face. Stars glittered overhead in the night sky. I reached up to pull my hat down over my ears. My hat was not there. My coat was gone too. He had pulled it off as I tried to get away.
    I thrust my hands into my pockets and looked for anything familiar. I saw no bakery; I saw no butcher’s shop where my mother bought bones for the soup. I did not see our apartment building squatting at the top of the low hill.
    I shivered in the night wind. I trudged back down the steps to the underground, where it was always daytime and not as cold. I spotted a heat vent underneath a long bench. Icrawled under the bench and curled up around the warm air. I