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A fragile animal was chewing on his eyebrows. He turned his head and encountered two gigantic, indignant eyes. Then the fragile animal attacked the lobe of his ear. The little orange kitten was famished, so he got up and cracked an egg into a saucer of milk, making a mental note that the first thing he must do today was buy cat food. He'd found the mad little beast the day before in High Park; it had been sitting alone in the grass and when it saw him it gave a squeak of joy and immediately ran up his socks and clung to his kneecap for dear life. It felt like a starfish against his bare skin, its legs splayed out in all directions. Gently, he had plucked it out from under his jeans.

'Hi there, Small Change,' he said. 'That is your name?, Then he had taken it home.

It had been a beautiful summer morning, and the trees were berserk with green and yellow. He'd been to the zoo in the park and stared at the three buffalo who brooded and chewed and thought their dark brown thoughts and carried around a heavy dark brown cloud of doom when they moved. Far away from their gloom were the duck ponds and the deer pens and the sexy long-legged llamas with their triple set of eyelashes, and the magnificent, insane flamingoes with their splinterthin legs and their shocking pink auras, who gazed into their pond now and then as though to confirm that anything as gorgeous as themselves could actually exist.

And everywhere there were birds sitting in the branches in breathless silence in the glowing world of their freedom, unlike their exotic cousins who were caged in an indoor zoo with nameplates identifying them - Cowbirds (he seemed to remember seeing this somewhere), and Slate-Coloured Juncos, and Toucans (who looked the same whether they were awake or asleep; nobody could tell the difference), and two old pelicans who he had called Willy and Nilly.

He had stood staring at Grenadier Pond, which was large enough to canoe up and down in and which, according to some obscure Kanadian legend, was supposed to be riddled with the corpses of countless grenadiers. (What was a grenadier?) Then he went to where Kali had told him there was a magic triple-bunked tree called the Wishing Tree where as a child she had sat and, so she told him, dreamed up the world.

And today was Thursday. Thursday was always a dark day; it had a dark purple colour. (He had figured out long ago how the different days of the week had their distinctive colours: Sunday was of course white, Monday was red, Tuesday was green, Wednesday was a sort of dull yellow, Friday was orange and Saturday was a lovely sky blue.) Today he was going to see Kali. They were going to drive out to Marine Land at Niagara and watch the whales and dolphins at play.

'Do you know that these huge dolphins jump and re-enter the water with hardly a single splash?' she had told him. 'It's because of their skin, I read somewhere.'

But when he got to Kali's place he found her white-faced and weeping. She offered no explanation, but jabbed her finger into the monstrous news of the morning paper.

On one of the eastern coasts two dolphins had been found with their eyes poked out and cigarette burns all over their bodies. One was dead, and the other was crying and crying into the blue hole of heaven.

'Somebody wrote that in Kanada we weep for animals who are victims because we ourselves feel like victims,' Kali managed to say. 'They're like a symbol for something. That's what somebody wrote.'

'I don't think they're symbols; I think they're dolphins,' he said.

They did not go to Marine Land that day.

The following Thursday disaster struck again. Three flamingoes were killed in High Park. They were found lying dead around their little pool, their long necks wrung into hideous spirals. Bits of wild pink feathers lay scattered around; their six legs, silly as straws, were splayed out in all directions. The black beneath their wings was exposed, and one black-tipped beak dipped slightly into the water as though its owner had been gazing at himself for the last time.

'Who is doing this? What demon is at work here?' Kali cried.

'The demon,' he replied, 'of Thursday. There is no other explanation.'

So that when, two weeks later, some maniac opened the enclosures for the buffalo in the park, and the three great beasts wandered out and away in a huge brown haze, he and Kali were almost prepared. They tried to consider rationally the plight of the ponderous shadowy creatures loose and lost in a forest they'd never before known - for the park was enormous, as big as a forest.

'One of them is pregnant,' Kali said. 'They'll die, all four of them.'

'Three.'

'Four, including the unborn one.'

'No they won't,' he said, with unfelt conviction.

'Yes, they will. They'll die of horrible, unwanted freedom. They were born in captivity; what could be worse than this excruciating freedom?'

'What will they eat? People?' He was trying to be funny.

'Buffalo don't eat people; people eat buffalo.'

It was true, he thought - if you're born in captivity, what is freedom? Freedom is a nightmare, freedom is wandering around alone among the alien trees in an alien forest. There was only one thing more terrible than being caged, and that was being suddenly and unexpectedly released.

Silence fell like rain, and rain fell outside onto all the streets of the city, onto trodden sidewalks, onto unseen rooftops, onto the three anonymous buffalo in High Park. It rained until it seemed to him that this was the beginning of a second Flood, and that it was time for all the animals of the earth to be gathered up and saved from extinction. He dreamed all night of beautiful animals in pairs, entering the Ark.

All of the buffalo died the next morning. One of them was seen trying to cross Bloor Street, on a red light, at five a.m. A motorist returning from an all night party, and later described as being in a state of near collapse, had spotted it and called the Humane Society. By dawn, vets had tracked all the animals down and managed to shoot them with tranquilizing darts so they might be transported back to their pens. But shock and fatigue had taken their toll, and one by one the buffalo succumbed.

He heard the news on the radio which he had switched on as soon as he woke up. He lay there listening, Small Change draped across his ankles.

It's the colour of Thursdays that I don't like, he thought. That dark purple colour. I never liked Thursdays.

The three buffalo died at dawn. The radio didn't say four buffalo, but he knew that the baby buffalo died in the huge red womb of its mother. The others died in an unknown, unreal forest. Right in the center of the city.

So much for freedom, he thought. And then he found himself weeping, just like Kali. He wept for her as a little girl sitting under her Wishing Tree and dreaming up her world - but not this world, no, not this one. He wept for all the animals who had never made it to the Ark. And then he wept because he knew there was no Ark. He wept for two dolphins, three flamingoes and four buffalo who were doomed to share the same world with the insane animal known as man. He wept for all the beautiful breathless creatures of the earth. And they were not symbols.

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