[IMAGE: https://images.hive.blog/DQmaTEvh3M3zK1YXXob3mohKDf6jpqXLumU1iQfbKScjDBU/IMG_1475.jpeg]

He appeared in my house even before the war. A year before the familiar world began to crumble into pieces. Thin, hungry, confused and unhappy. He stood and looked as if he had almost stopped waiting for something good.

His mistress died, and he simply had nowhere to go.

I wasn't going to take another dog. I wasn't going to. Because each new dog is money, time, responsibility, sleepless nights, worries and a constant feeling that you are still not doing enough.

But orphaned animals are my special pain.

They don't know how to live homeless. They can't. They are not used to sleeping in the rain, looking for food in the garbage, fighting for a place where they can go to bed. They don't understand why they had a house yesterday and not today. And very often they just wait. In one place. At the gate. At the entrance. At the closed door.

They just can't survive.

That's why he stayed.

It was difficult at first. He didn't understand the rules. I didn't understand whether it was possible to enter the house. Can I come up? Can you trust me? Sometimes he shuddered from sudden movements. Sometimes I looked wary. Sometimes I ate so fast, as if I was afraid that the food would be taken away now.

It took him a long time to get used to it.

But I got used to it.

At first, I started to meet at the gate. Then I learned to sleep peacefully, not listening to every rustle. Then my favorite places in the yard appeared. Favorite bowl. Favorite walking routes. And then somehow it turned out that he had always been here.

He became part of the morning exits to the yard, part of the evenings, part of everyday life.

And then the war started.

And now sometimes I think about strange coincidences of life. About the fact that a dog that lost its home came to the house of a man who did not yet know how soon he would begin to live in a new reality of constant anxiety, sirens, news and uncertainty.

We both didn't know anything then.

But somehow we managed to find each other.

And, probably, that's why now, when it's especially disturbing at night, there's always someone warm, snorting and absolutely sure that as long as we're together, everything will somehow be experienced.

Oh! I've forgotten to say - his name is Bucks