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walking from one horizon to another. They speak of tanks and torpedoes and men swooping through the sky with parachutes blooming above them. They describe grenades falling and submarines rising, and men behind wire dropping down in mud and snow. We can’t see much from these cages, but we see these things.”
    The bear spoke up dismally. “We can’t see anything except each other.”
    “You’re complaining?” squawked the chamois. “At least you don’t have to stare at that idiot chimp and the sourpuss all day!”
    The lioness didn’t react, but the monkey swore brutally, streaking the length of its enclosure and thumping into the bars. The chamois chortled tauntingly and the monkey flung itself about, a jungle scream sheering from its wide-open mouth. The wolf regarded them indifferently, waiting until the monkey collapsed into seething silence before looking back at the children.
    “The birds say our village is different from others,” it said. “They say it’s the sorriest village they can see. But the invaders mustn’t think it’s sorry enough, because sometimes they send more planes, and drop more bombs. Maybe the village will be sorry enough when nothing is left of it, not even a hole in the ground. No earth, no air, no sky, no light —”
    “No zoo,” said the llama.
    “No zoo,” the wolf agreed.
    Tomas asked, “Why does the village need to be sorry? What did it do?”
    “It fought back,” said the chamois lordishly.
    “It fought the invaders?” When Tomas thought of the invading soldiers, he thought of the day in the clearing. He thought of stories his father had told of dark forests coming angrily to life. “That was brave.”
    The wolf lay down on its white belly, stretching out its legs. “Not all the villagers fought, only some of them. But to the ones who did, it wasn’t about bravery. It was something that had to be done. They could not do nothing. This land was their home, their territory. They
had
to fight for it. Never mind that
their
kind have seized so much
wolf
territory, cut down our trees, set traps in our ground, caved in our dens, pursued us to —”
    “Don’t!” moaned the bear, turning aside its great head. “Don’t talk about that.”
    The wolf said carelessly, “They do the same to bears. Anyway, these villagers formed a secret gang, and began to talk of vengeance. They knew they wouldn’t triumph in the end — the invading clan is strong, its weapons are deadly, its numbers are countless, it’s spread through this land like a creeper through a tree, and much farther than that, according to the birds: they say there’s no end to the invaders, that they infest every place from sea to sea and also
on
the sea, floating, slinking — but the gang vowed that if their homeland was going to be taken from them, it wouldn’t be taken easily. They knew that other people in other places were fighting the enemy too — burning crops, souring water, barricading roads, destroying firewood — but such sabotage seemed puny to the gang, the kind of mischief that the invaders would expect, as a fox expects to have fleas. The gang didn’t want to be fleas. They wanted to be a swarm of wasps. They swore that, helpless though they might be to keep their territory, before it was lost they would make their enemy regret setting foot upon it.”
    Andrej and Tomas had sat down in the dusty grass, and Wilma, bundled on the bench, was making no sound. The brief summer night was nearing its darkest time, yet the moon still lit the zoo with a creamy light, turning the circle of cages into a place like a chapel, somewhere solemn and fragile and holy. The lioness’s tail was quietly switching, and specks of ash were still wafting to earth, but nothing else seemed to move.
    “A train track runs between the hills behind this village,” the wolf continued. “We can hear the wheels and whistles from here. The track is important to the invaders because it leads to where they want to go,