Rome

At least one of my forefathers must have been a domestic dog.  From when I was a cub, I felt the pull of the human city, but my mother always told us never to go there.

'They might once have been our friends,' she said, 'but now we disapprove of them because they're civilised, which means that they have too much and they fight and kill each other to have more.'

'Wolves fight,' I said.

'We don't kill each other if we can help it, and only then for something we need.  The humans already have more than they need.  You haven't seen the walls of their city.'

I didn't tell her that I had seen them.

'Their city now reaches far beyond those walls,' my mother went on, 'and really, they are the most vulgar creatures imaginable.  They eat and eat and have a special place to go and be sick in.  And to think they disapprove of the way that we decent animals smell each other's behinds.'

'Why might they once have been our friends?' I asked, and so my mother began to tell us the story of the humans who lived with wolves.

'Among some wolf cubs were two human whelps, whom the mother wolf loved as her own.  They played well with their brothers and sisters, learning to fight their enemies and to hunt in a pack with their friends.  They ate meat, of course, and walked on their four legs until the litter was grown.  The two humans, though, were unsteady on their two feet and would not be independent.'

I had seen human dogs and bitches walking on two legs, their pups with them year after year.  I would have to leave my mother before they were half grown.

'The humans took to eating plants as well as meat, which we wolves can do if we must, but I do not recommend it, my dears.  Unnatural and terrible things happened.  It rained fire.  “What is this fiery downpour?” the mother wolf cried.  “It is the gods,” the human whelps said.  These gods, they claimed, sent them messages when they ate the mushrooms that grew wild in the forest.'

One of my brothers scoffed, and said, 'That can't be true!'

It was true, about the mushrooms anyway.  I had seen humans pick mushrooms in our forest, eat them and go mad.  I doubted the fire rain, though.

'As more litters were born and reared, the boys began to fight only each other, and they fought in earnest.  One day, they tearfully left their mother wolf, telling her that the gods meant humans to be greater than other animals.  After they left, the human city came, and they say that one killed the other over its creation.  The human race spread.  Their children never learned to speak.'

'Then they aren't great,' my brother said, and I had to agree.

All the same, the first meat I caught for myself flew from the hand of a butcher.