2. the difference is that a guard dog cannot guess for itself which is the correct sector to bark into, but an Internet columnist is often capable of this.

3. the similarity between an Internet columnist and a were-fox is that both try to create mirages that human beings take for reality.

4. the difference is that a fox is able to do this, but an Internet columnist isn't.

The last point is hardly surprising. Would anyone who was able to create plausible mirages work as an Internet columnist? Unlikely. An Internet columnist can't even convince himself that his inventions are real, I thought, clenching my fists, let alone other people. That's why he ought to sit quietly and only bark when . . .

Then I forgot about Internet columnists and prison-camp guard dogs, as the light of truth suddenly flashed in my head.

'Convince himself that his inventions are real,' I repeated. 'That's it. Why, of course!'

Quite unexpectedly for myself I had solved the riddle that had been tormenting me for ages. My mind had been creeping up on it for many days, first from one side, then from the other - and all in vain. But now something turned and clicked, and everything suddenly fell into place - as if I'd put a jigsaw together by chance.

I realized how we foxes differ from werewolves. As is often the case, this difference was no more than a mutated similarity. Foxes and wolves were closely related - their magic was based on the manipulation of perception. But the means of manipulation were different.

A brief theoretical digression is required here, or else I'm afraid what I say will be incomprehensible.

People often argue about whether this world really exists, or is something like The Matrix movie. It's a very stupid thing to argue about. All problems of this kind derive from the fact that people don't understand the words they use. Before discussing this subject, the first thing people ought to do is get to grips with the meaning of the word 'exist'. Then a lot of interesting things would become clear. But people are rarely capable of correct thinking.

Of course, I don't mean to say that all people are total idiots. There are some among them whose intellect is almost the equal of a fox's. For instance, the Irish philosopher Berkeley. He said that to exist means to be perceived and all objects exist only in perception. You only have to think calmly about the subject for three minutes to realize that any other views on the matter are like the cult of Osiris or belief in the god Mithras. In my view, this is the only true thought that has visited the Western mind in its long and funny history: all the Humes, Kants and Baudrillards are only embroidering the canvas of this great insight in a fussy satin stitch.

But where does an object exist when we turn away and stop seeing it? After all, it doesn't disappear, as children and Amazonian Indians think, does it? Berkeley says that it exists in the perception of God. But Cathars and Gnostics believe that it exists in the perception of the diabolical demiurge, and their arguments are no worse than Berkeley's. From their point of view, matter is an evil that shackles the spirit. By the way, reading Stephen Hawking's horror stories, I often used to think that if the Albigenses had had a radio telescope, they would have declared the Big Bang a cosmic photograph of Satan's rebellion ... There is a middle way through this morass of idiocy - to believe that part of the world exists in the perception of God, and part in the perception of the Devil.

What can I say to this? From the point of view of us foxes, there never was any Big Bang, just as the Tower of Babel that Breughel painted never existed, even if there is a reproduction of the painting hanging in a room that you dream about. And God and the Devil are simply reproductions that are dreamed by some people to hang in a room of the tower on the picture hanging on the wall in a room they dream about. Berkeley assumed that perception has to have a subject, and so the coins that rolled under the cupboard and the socks that fell behind the bed were solemnly interred in the cranium of a Creator specially created for that purpose. But how do we deal with the fact that Berkeley's God, in whose perception we exist, Himself exists mostly in the abstract thinking of certain representatives of the endangered European race? And he doesn't exist at all in the consciousness of a Chinese peasant or a little bird which is unaware that it is God's? How do we deal with this if 'to exist' really does mean 'to be perceived'?

We don't, say the foxes. Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, which is to forget this fundamental question. There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.

But it is better to run into one of these cul de sacs in the first paragraph, rather than after forty years of searching and five thousand pages of writing. After Berkeley finally got the point, the only thing he wrote about was the wonder-working properties of the tincture of bitumen that he'd come across in North America. And as a result, ever since then he has been mocked by various philistines, who aren't aware that in that distant time bitumen was produced in America from a plant called Jimson Weed, or Datura.

Religious hypocrites accuse us were-creatures of addling people's brains and distorting the Image of God. The people who say this have a rather poor idea of the Image of God, since they mould it after their own sanctimonious mugs. In any case, talk of 'distortion' and 'addling' is too judgemental; language like that shifts the question on to the emotional plane and prevents any understanding of the real nature of the matter, which is as follows (please pay close attention to the following paragraph - I have finally reached the most important point).

Since the existence of things consists in their perceptibility, any transformation can occur by two routes - either through the perception of transformation or the transformation of perception.

In honour of the great Irishman, I would like to call this rule Berkeley's Law. It is absolutely essential knowledge for all seekers of truth, gangsters and extortionists, marketing specialists and paedophiles who wish to remain at liberty. And so, in their practice, foxes and wolves exploit different aspects of Berkeley's Law.

We, the foxes, use transformation of perception. We influence our clients' perception and make them see what we want them to see. The illusion we induce becomes absolutely real for them - the scars on the unforgettable Pavel Ivanovich's back are the best possible proof of that. But we foxes continue to see the initial reality just as, according to Berkeley, God sees it. That is why we are accused of distorting the Image of God.

This, of course, is a hypocritical accusation, based on a double standard. The transformation of perception is the basis not only of foxes' witchcraft, but also of many marketing techniques. For instance, Ford takes the cheap F-150 pick-up truck, gives it a lovely new front grille, restyles the bodywork and calls the resultant product the 'Lincoln Navigator'. And no one says that Ford is distorting the Image of God. I won't say anything about politics, everything's clear already in that area. But somehow it's only we foxes who provoke indignation.

Unlike us, werewolves use perception of transformation. They create an illusion, not for others, but for themselves. And they believe in it so strongly that the illusion ceases to be an illusion. There's a passage in the Bible on that subject - 'if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, "Move from here to there, and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you."' The werewolves have this mustard seed. Their transformation is a kind of alchemical chain reaction.

First a werewolf makes himself believe that his tail is growing. And the emerging tail, which in wolves is the same kind of hypnotic organ as it is in foxes, exerts a hypnotic influence on the wolf's own consciousness, convincing him that he really is undergoing transformation and so on until he is completely transformed into a beast. Technologists call this positive feedback.

Alexander's transformation always began in the same way: his body curved over, as if some invisible cable joining his tail and his cranium were being drawn taut. Now I'd realized what was happening. While foxes directed energy at other people, wolves trained it on themselves, inducing a transformation, not in others' perception, but in their own, and only afterwards, as a consequence, in that of others.

Can we call such a transformation real? I have never completely understood the meaning of this epithet, especially since every historical age fills it with its own meaning. For instance, in modern Russian the word 'real' is employed in four basic ways:

1. as a battle cry uttered by bandits and FSB agents during the ritual change-over of the roof, or protection provider.

2. a jargon term used by the upper rat and oligarchy in conversations about their offshore accounts.

3. a technical term applied to immovable property.

4. a widely used adjective with the meaning 'having a dollar equivalent'.

The latter meaning makes the term 'real' a synonym for the word 'metaphysical', since nowadays the dollar is an occult, mystical unit based entirely on the belief that tomorrow will be like today. And mysticism is something that should be practised not by were-creatures, but by those who are professionally obliged to do it - the PR consultants, political technologists and economists. That is why I did not wish to call the werewolf's transformation 'real' - if I did, it might give the impression that it involves cheap human black magic. But two things were undoubtedly true:

1. a wolf's transformation was qualitatively different from a fox's illusion, although it was based on the same effect.

2. the lupine metamorphosis consumed an immense amount of energy - far more than we foxes expended on a client.

That was why wolves could not remain in their bestial body for long, and folklore linked their transformation with various forms of temporal limitation - the hours of darkness, the full moon or something of that kind.

I remembered the strange sensation I had experienced while hunting - when for the first time in my life I became aware of the relict radiation from my tail, directed at myself. But exactly what suggestion had I been implanting in my own mind? That I was a fox? But I knew that without any suggestion . . . What was going on? I felt as if I were standing on the threshold of something important, something that could change my entire life and lead me, at long last, out of the spiritual impasse in which I had spent the last five hundred years. But, to my disgrace, the first thing that I thought about was not spiritual practice at all.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but the first thought that came into my mind was about sex. I remembered Alexander's coarse grey tail and realized how to raise our erotic sensations to a totally new level. It was all very simple. The mechanisms for influencing consciousness employed by foxes and wolves were identical in all major respects - the only elements that differed were the intensity of suggestion and its target. I, so to speak, served my client champagne and it made him tipsy. Alexander swallowed an entire bottle of vodka all on his own, which made everyone else around horrified. But the effective substance, alcohol, was the same.

And so, by combining our resources, we could mix lots of very different cocktails out of champagne and vodka. After all, sex is more than just the simple conjunction of certain parts of the body. It is also a connection between the energies of two beings, a joint trip. If we could learn to combine our hypnotic impulses in order to immerse ourselves in an amorous illusion together, I thought, we could set ourselves up with our own tea for two, in which every drop would be worth its weight in polonium.

There was only one problem. First we had to agree on what we wanted to see. And not just in words - words were an unreliable prop. If we relied only on them, we could imagine the final destination of our journey very differently. Some ready-made image was required, one that would serve as the starting point for our visualization. For instance, a picture . . .

I tried to imagine an appropriate classical canvas. But unfortunately, nothing interesting came to mind - all I could recall was Picasso's early masterpiece An Old Jew and a Boy. Many years earlier I had used a postcard of that picture as a bookmark in Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which I simply couldn't get through, and ever since then I had remembered every detail of those two sad, dark figures.

No, pictures were no good. They didn't give any idea of how an object appeared in the round. Videos would be much better. And Alexander has such a big television, I thought. Surely it ought to be put to good use?

There's a kind of chewing gum that comes with cards showing pairs of loving couples in various humorous situations. These drawings are captioned 'Love is . . .' and I often used to see them stuck to the walls in lifts and cinemas. If I wanted to draw my own version of these cartoons, it would show a wolf and a fox sitting in front of a TV with their tails intertwined.

The technology of a miracle proved to be simpler than I was expecting. It was enough to bring our hypnotic organs together in any pose that allowed us to do it. Only our tails had to touch: we had to follow what was happening on the screen, and any closer proximity was a hindrance.

It developed into a ritual surprisingly quickly. Usually he would lie down on his side, with his legs hanging down on to the carpet, and I would sit down beside him. We set the film going and I caressed him until the transformation began. Then I put my legs up on his shaggy side, we joined our antennas together, and what began then was totally insane, something that no tailless creature could ever understand. Sometimes the feelings were so intense that I had to apply a special technique to calm myself and cool off - I looked away from the screen and recited part of the 'Heart Sutra' to myself, a mantra as cool and deep as a well: I could dissolve any emotional upheaval in those Sanskrit syllables. I liked to look at the way our tails combined - the red and the grey. As if someone had set fire to a rotten billet and it had been engulfed by dancing flames and sparks . . . But I never shared this simile with Alexander.

However, while the technical aspect of the whole thing proved to be elementary, the choice of a route for our outings always involved arguments. Our tastes didn't just differ, they belonged to different universes. In his case it was hard even to speak of taste in the sense of a definite system of aesthetic guidelines. Like a schoolboy, he liked everything to be heroic and sentimental, and he made me sit for hours watching samurai dramas, westerns and something that I simply couldn't stand - Japanese cartoons about robots. And then in our dream we played out the secondary love themes that the directors had had to use to provide at least some respite between the killing and the fighting. Actually, at first it was quite interesting. But only at first.

As an experienced professional, I soon wearied of the standard quickies - I had induced more dreams on that subject than mankind had made porn films about itself. I liked to roam through the terra incognita of modern sexuality, to explore its border regions, the backyard of social morality and mores. But he wasn't ready for that, and although no one in the world could have witnessed our joint hallucinations, he was always stopped dead by his internal sentry.

He would either respond to my appeals to embark on some unusual journey with an embarrassed refusal or he would suggest something that was unthinkable for me. For instance, to turn ourselves into a pair of cartoon transformers who discover their attraction to each other on the roof of a Tokyo skyscraper ... How dreadful! But when I wanted to become the German major in Casablanca and take him from behind while he was the black pianist Sam playing it again, he was as horrified as if I'd been urging him to sell out the motherland.

That would have been another interesting topic for Dr Spengler: most Russian men are homophobic because the cancerous cells of the criminal code of honour are still deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. Any serious man, no matter what he does for a living, subconsciously measures himself against a prison bunk and tries to ensure that his service record doesn't include any conspicuous violations of prison taboos that he might have to pay for with his arse in a very direct manner. This means that a Russian macho man's life is like a permanent spiritualist seance: while the body is wallowing in luxury, the soul is doing time in the prison camps.

I happen to know why this is the way things are, and I could write a big, thick, clever book about it. Its basic idea would be as follows: Russia is a communal country, and when the Christian peasant commune was destroyed, the criminal commune became the source of the people's morality. The proprieties of the underworld occupied the place where God used to live - or, to put it more correctly, God Himself was incorporated into the notional rules as a top criminal authority. And when the final religious prosthesis, the Soviet 'internal Party committee' was dismantled, a cheap guitar tuned for prison songs set the musical range of the Russian soul.

But no matter how sickening prison morality may be, there is no other morality left at all, only the simulacra produced either by FSB prison guards or sprintii journalists specializing in the propaganda of liberal values . . .

Oh. I deliberately won't cross out that last sentence, let the reader admire it. There you have it, the vulpine mind. After all, we were-foxes are natural liberals, in pretty much the same way as the soul is a natural Christian. And what do I write? What do I write? It's terrifying. At least it's clear where it all came from - I got the stuff about the sprintii journalists from the FSB prison guards. And the stuff about the FSB prison guards from the sprintii journalists. There's nothing to be done: if a fox has heard an opinion, she is bound to express it in the first person. We can't help it. We don't have any opinions of our own on these human-related subjects (that's the last thing we need), but we have to live among people. So we just return the serves. Yes, it's a good thing I don't have to write a book about Russia after all. What sort of Solzhenitsyn would I make? But I am digressing again.

I didn't often discuss the nature of Alexander's homophobia with him (he didn't like to talk about it), but I was sure its roots had to be sought in the criminal catacombs of the Russian mind. His homophobia went so far that he rejected anything that was even remotely gay.

'Why do you dislike gays so much?' I asked him once.

'Because they go against nature.'

'But it was nature that created them. So how do they go against nature?'

'I'll tell you how,' he said. 'Children are hidden in sex, like the seeds in a watermelon. And gays are people fighting for the right to eat a watermelon without seeds.'

'Who are they fighting against?'

'The watermelon. Everybody else stopped caring a damn long since. But a watermelon can't exist without seeds. And that's why I say they go against nature. Will you say they don't?'

'A certain watermelon I used to know,' I replied, 'believed that the propagation of watermelons depends on their ability to implant in man's mind the suggestion that it's healthy to swallow the seeds. But watermelons overestimate their own hypnotic abilities. In actual fact the propagation of watermelons takes place through a process of which the watermelons are completely unaware, because they are unable to observe it. Because this process only begins where the watermelon ends.'

'There you go tying those fancy knots again, Ginger, I can't follow,' he grumbled. 'Save it. Let's do without all this tricky queer stuff.'

Alexander particularly disliked Luchino Visconti. Any suggestion to put on something by this director (whom I consider one of the greatest masters of the twentieth century) was taken by him as a personal insult. I still have fragments of one of our arguments on tape. While the other dialogues in my journal are reproduced from memory, this one is absolutely accurate - the conversation was accidentally recorded on a dictaphone. I include it here because I would like to hear Alexander's voice again - I can listen to it while I type.

AS: Death in Venice. This is getting tiresome, Ginger. What do you think I am, some kind of queer?

AH: Then how about Conversation Piece?

AS: No, let's have Takeshi Kitano. Zatoichi punishes the geisha-assassin . . . And then the geisha-assassin punishes Zatoichi.

AH: I don't want that. Let's try Gone with the Wind again.

AS: Come off it. That staircase is too long.

AH: What staircase?

AS: The one I have to cart you up to the bedroom. And to add to the agony you make it five times longer. I was soaked in sweat last time. Seriously. Even though we never got up off the divan . . .

AH: I have to be spoiled sometimes . . . Okay, this time we'll have a short staircase. All right?

AS: No, let's . . . I fancy something with shooting.

AH: Then let's have Mulholland Drive! There's shooting in that. Oh, please!

AS: Back to the same old thing. I won't do it, how many times do I have to tell you? Find yourself a queer out on the avenue and watch it with him.

AH: What's that got to do with it? It's lesbians in the film.

AS: What's the difference?

(Here there is a pause in the recording, during which you can hear rustling and tapping as I rummage through the video discs scattered on the floor.)

AH: Listen, there's a film from one of Steven King's books. Dreamcatcher. Have you seen it?

AS: No.

AH: Let's try it. We won't be people, we'll be aliens.

AS: What kind of aliens are they?

AH: They have a vertical mouth full of teeth running the entire length of their bodies and eyes on their sides. Imagine how bloody a kiss could be? And cunnilingus at the same time. I think that's the way they reproduce.

AS: Darling, I get to see enough stuff like that at work. Let's have something more romantic.

AH: Romantic . . . Romantic . . . Here's The Matrix-2. How would you like to screw Keanu Reaves?

AS: Not a lot.

AH: Then I can screw him.

AS: Rejected. Is the third Matrix there?

AH: Yes.

AS: There could be an interesting possibility there with those machines.

AH: Which ones?

AS: You know, those humanoid robots with people sitting in them. They use them to fight off those black octopuses. Just imagine it, one of those robots has caught a black octopus, and . . . AH: Listen, how old are you, twelve?

AS: Okay, let's forget The Matrix. (Some kind of rustling again. I think I move on to another heap of DVDs.)

AH: How about Lord of the Rings?

AS: You'll only come up with something weird again.

AH: Well I'm not going to spread my legs for a hobbit, that's for sure. How come you're so afraid of everything? Do you think they'll find out at work? Your moral character?

AS: Why do think I'm afraid? I don't want to, that's all.

AH: Listen, there are some films in English here. An interesting selection.

AS: What have you got?

AH: Midnight Dancers . . . Sex Life in LA . . .

AS: No.

AH: Versace Murder?

AS: No.

AH: Why?

AS: Because.

AH: Do you know what the gays in Miami say instead of 'vice versa'? 'Vice Versace'. Just think of all those dark, convoluted meanings . . .

AS: First one of them shafts another up the backside, and then they swap places. That's all your convoluted meanings.

AH: I'll put it on then?

AS: I already told you. Go to the that cafe at Tverskaya, Gifts of the Sea or whatever they call it, find yourself a queer and have your fun.

AH: Listen, stop being such a reactionary. There are homosexual animals in wild nature, I've read about them. Sheep. Monkeys.

AS: As far as monkeys are concerned, I hardly think that's an argument in favour of gays.

AH: Oh you've been well trained. No reforming you. What's that disc you've got there?

AS: Romeo and Juliet.

(You can hear me snort contemptuously.)

AH: Bin it.

AS: Can't we watch it just once more?

AH: How many times?

AS: Just one last little time. Come on! You're a dead ringer for Juliet in that T-shirt.

AH: What can I do with you, Romeo? Go on. Only on one condition.

AS: What's that?

AH: Afterwards it's Mulholland Drive.

AS: Gr-r-r!

AH: Darling, really? So soon?

AS: Gr-r-r!

AH: Hang on, hang on. I'm putting it on. I'll know this off by heart soon . . . 'From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean . . .'

AS: Whoo-oo-oo!

AH: I'm not criticizing your organization, you beast. Relax. That's Shakespeare.

Love and tragedy go hand in hand. Homer and Euripides wrote about that, so did Stendhal and Oscar Wilde. And now it's my turn.

Until I learned from my own experience what love is, I thought of it as a specific kind of pleasure that tailless monkeys can derive from being together, in addition to sex.

I formed this impression from the numerous descriptions I had come across in poems and books. How was I to know that the writers were not describing love as it actually is at all, but constructing the verbal imitations that would look best on paper. I thought of myself as a professional of love, since I had been inducing the experience in others for so many centuries. But it's one thing to pilot the B-29 flying towards Hiroshima, and quite another to watch it from the central square of the city.

Love turned out to be nothing like what they write about it. It was ludicrous, rather than serious - but that didn't mean it could be dismissed out of hand. It was not like being drunk (the most popular comparison in literature) - but it was even less like being sober. My perception of the world didn't change: I didn't think Alexander was anything like a fairy-tale prince in his Maibach. I could see all the sinister sides of his character but, strangely enough, those things only added to his charm in my eyes. My reason even came to terms with his barbarous political views and began to discover a certain harsh northern originality in them.

Love was absolutely devoid of any meaning. But it gave meaning to everything else. It made my heart as light and empty as a balloon. I didn't understand what was happening to me. But not because I had become more stupid - there simply was nothing to understand in what was happening. They may say that love like that doesn't run deep. But I think that anything that is deep isn't love, it's deliberate calculation or schizophrenia.

I myself wouldn't even attempt to say what love is - probably both love and God can only be defined by apophasis, through those things that they are not. But apophasis would be wrong, too, because they are everything. Writers who write about love are swindlers, and the worst of them is Leo Tolstoy, clutching his programmatic bludgeon 'The Kreutzer Sonata'. Although I have a lot of respect for Tolstoy.

How could I have known that our romantic adventure would prove disastrous for Alexander? Oscar Wilde said: 'Yet each man kills the thing he loves . . .' He was a writer who lived in an era of primitive anthropocentrism, hence the word 'man' (sexism was also easy to get away with then, especially for gays). But in everything else, he was spot on. I killed the beast, the Thing. Beauty killed the beast. And the murder weapon was love.

I remember how that day began. After I woke up, I lay on my back for a long time while I surfaced from the depths of a very good dream that I couldn't remember no matter how I tried. I knew that in cases like that the thing to do was to lie without moving or opening your eyes, in the same position you woke up in, and then the dream might surface in your memory. And that was what happened - after about a minute, I remembered.

I had been dreaming of a fantastic garden, flooded with sunlight and filled with the chatter of birds. In the distance I could see a strip of white sand and the sea. Immediately in front of me there was a sheer cliff, and in the cliff there was a cave, sealed off with a slab of stone. I was supposed to move the slab, but it was too heavy, and there was no way I could possibly do it. Summoning up all my strength, I braced my feet against the ground and strained every muscle in my body as I pushed on the slab. It fell away to one side and the black hole of the entrance was revealed, belching out damp air and an old, stale stench. And then, rising up out of the darkness towards the sunny day, chickens appeared - one, two, three . . . I lost count, there were so many of them. They just kept on walking towards the light and happiness, and now nothing could stop them - they'd realized where the way out was. I saw my chicken among them - the brown one with the white patch, and I waved my paw to her (in the dream I had paws instead of hands, like during the supraphysical transformation). She didn't even look at me, just ran straight past. But I wasn't offended at all.

What an amazing dream, I thought, and opened my eyes.

There was a little patch of sunlight trembling on the wall. It was my own virtual place in the sun, acquired without any struggle at all - it was produced by a little mirror that cast the ray of light falling from above against the wall. I thought about Alexander and remembered our love. It was as certain as that yellow patch of sunlight quivering on the wall. Something incredible had to happen between us today, something truly miraculous. Without even thinking what I was going to say to him, I reached for the phone.

'Hello,' he said.

'Hello. I want to see you.'

'Come on over,' he said. 'But there's not much time. I'm flying north this evening. That only leaves us three hours.'

'That's enough for me,' I said.

The taxi drove me slowly, the traffic lights took an eternity to change, and at every crossroads I felt my heart would leap out of my chest if I had to wait just a few more seconds.

When I got out of the lift he removed the gauze mask from his face and took a deep sniff.

'I'll probably never get used to the way you smell. It seems like I remember it, and yet every time it turns out the memory in my head is nothing like it. I'll have to pull a few hairs out of your tail.'

'What for?' I asked.

'Well . . . I'll wear them in a locket on my chest,' he said. 'Take them out sometimes and smell them. Like a medieval knight.'

I smiled - his ideas about medieval knights were clearly derived from jokes. Perhaps that was the reason they were fairly close to the truth. Of course, the hairs that medieval knights carried in their medallions didn't come from tails - who would have given them those? - but by and large the picture was accurate enough.

I noticed an unfamiliar object beside the divan - a floor-lamp in the shape of an immense Martini glass. It was a cone studded with light bulbs, set on a tall, thin leg.

'That's a really lovely thing. Where did it come from?'

'It's a gift from the reindeer-herders,' he said.

'The reindeer-herders?' I said, amazed.

'Or rather, the reindeer-herders' leadership. Some funny guys from London. Good, isn't it? Like a dragonfly's eye.'

I wanted so badly to throw myself on him and hug him really tight that I could hardly keep still. I was afraid - if I took another step towards him there would be a shower of sparks between us. He clearly felt something too.

'You're kind of strange today. Haven't been dropping anything, have you? Or sniffing anything?'