Our First Dog: The Wolf That Evolved into Man’S Best Friend

Our First Dog

The Wolf That Evolved

into Man's Best Friend

Robert Copps

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Our First Dog

The Wolf That Evolved into Man’s Best Friend

Copyright © 2011 Teresa Ching

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-1052-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1054-7 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1053-0 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 05/18/2011

Contents

FOREWORD

PRE MORTEM

CHAPTER 1: BUTCHER AND

LASHER - TWO FAMILIES

CHAPTER 2: BANISHED!

CHAPTER 3: HOMEWARD

CHAPTER 4: RETURN TO THE FIRE

CHAPTER 5: FAMILY DISPUTES

CHAPTER 6: THE NEXT DAY

CHAPTER 7: THE PUP

CHAPTER 8: MORE ARGUMENTS

CHAPTER 9: CONTACT

CHAPTER 10: MEETING THE FAMILY

CHAPTER 11: THE BIG MAN THEORY

CHAPTER 12: THE NAMING

CHAPTER 13: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 14: AN EARLY FROST

CHAPTER 15: THE VIGIL

CHAPTER 16: WOLF WISDOM

CHAPTER 17: A WINTER EXCURSION

CHAPTER 18: BEAR ATTACK

CHAPTER 19: A ROMANTIC ENCOUNTER

CHAPTER 20: RECONNAISSANCE

CHAPTER 21: NEWS FROM THE CENTER

CHAPTER 22: A DASH TO THE CENTER

CHAPTER 23: WAR STRATEGY

CHAPTER 24:

PONDERING ANIMAL SPIRITS

CHAPTER 25: TRADING

CHAPTER 26: "I FORBID YOU

TO THINK ABOUT THE STARS!"

CHAPTER 27: PUPS

CHAPTER 28: TOO MANY WOLVES

CHAPTER 29: TRAINING THE WOLVES

CHAPTER 30: THE REUNION

CHAPTER 31: A PUZZLE

CHAPTER 32: BUTCHER AND

SWITCHER RESUME DEBATE

CHAPTER 33: A WELCOME VISITOR

CHAPTER 34: WOLVES -

THE SECOND GENERATION

CHAPTER 35: LITTLE ELK’S PLAN

CHAPTER 36: PRELUDE TO WAR

CHAPTER 37: WAR

CHAPTER 38: PEACE AND PROSPERITY

EPILOGUE

FOREWORD

Even at a very young age, Robert Joseph Copps, known to his family and friends as Bob, displayed an intense interest in, and sensitivity to, the world around him. He wanted to learn about everything. To him, every subject was a challenge, every life form a mystery to be solved. His quest for knowledge covered diverse subjects—literature, music, chess, astronomy, philosophy, economics, politics, history, to name but a few. Like Butcher, the protagonist in his book, he was always pondering things and had a theory about everything.

This abiding curiosity stayed with him throughout and in the end, proved to be a great source of strength during the last years of his all-too-short life.

In later years, Bob was particularly captivated by the story of the wolf— from its early origins to its eventual evolution as man’s best friend. Observations of his constant companion Celeste, a wolf hybrid, which he adopted as a pup, gave him an insight into the mindset of the animal. He read voraciously on the subject and came up with his own theory of how our first dog came into being, which became the inspiration of this book.

Bob joked that he didn’t want to write a novel unless he could write about ‘everything’, so woven throughout the narrative is a range of philosophical assumptions; for instance, if the ultimate meaning of the universe can be discovered through introspection, then early man, as represented by Butcher, is pondering the same existential questions that concern us today. His conflict with Switcher can be seen to reflect the fundamental dispute between capitalist and socialist ideals and the consequent conflict of individual rights versus the collective.

In the fall of 2003, Bob was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, a disease which he considered a great inconvenience as it disrupted the routines of his life. The success of the first surgery dispelled any apprehension he might have felt and confirmed his belief that it was but one of the many nuisances in life that he had to put up with. But the cancer came back. Periods of intermittent hospitalization and convalescence, not to mention the debilitating effects of chemotherapy, often left him too tired even for his favorite pastime, reading. He used the opportunity to develop his ideas about the taming of the first wolf, and how this seemingly whimsical experiment sparked enormous changes in early human society. By the middle of 2006, the story started to take shape.

Throughout the course of his illness, Bob maintained a positive attitude and kept his sense of humor intact. He never complained, nor wallowed in self pity. He lived as normal a life as circumstances allowed, still going to work, spending his free time reading and writing. By the time he had finished the first chapter of the book in August 2006, sitting was uncomfortable and he had to stand in order to write at the computer. In October, he had to quit his job, as he could no longer drive to work or stand up for long. The high doses of painkillers, chemotherapy, alternative therapies he tried did not produce the desired result, but the one thing that sustained him during this difficult time was the writing of the book, which took his mind off his deteriorating health and kept him focused. When his friends asked how he felt, Bob always said he was 99% fine, except for one thing.

By the beginning of 2007, the last year of his life, Bob could no longer sit or stand for more than a couple of minutes and had to lie on one side in order to write, but he soldiered on. In mid August, when he was rushed to palliative care a second time, he had finished the better part of the book. What was left was the denouement. The evening before he passed away on August 24th, Bob dictated an outline of the battle scene to his sister. Based on these details and the copious notes that he had left, his wife Teresa and his sister Kathy managed, at long last, to finish the book for him.

Bob knew he would not live to see the book published and regretted that his health did not allow him to do all the research he wanted to. For this reason, he wrote an apology to his readers which he titled Pre Mortem.

Our First Dog lays no claims to historical accuracy. It is one man’s theory of how the wolf was domesticated and changed the course of human history. There has been considerable interest in this subject in recent years and Bob thought he had an interesting tale to tell. We hope the readers will enjoy reading the story as much as he enjoyed writing it. To the family and friends of the author, the book also represents a loved one’s determination and struggle to accomplish his final goal, despite the odds. It was this single-mindedness that enabled Bob to remain positive during the last agonizing phase of his life.

The feedback from friends and family who read the unfinished first draft while he was still working on it, especially Terry MacSweeney and Adel Safty, gave him great comfort and support. It spurred him on to continue the task he set out to do. His first wife, Lesley Fell, provided especially constructive suggestions and help in editing the book and the interest and enthusiasm of Nadine Pederson at Black Swan Books was much appreciated.

To those not mentioned above, their contribution did not go unnoticed. We would like to express our heart-felt gratitude for their encouragement of Bob in his journey with Our First Dog.

Teresa Ching

Kathy Copps

October, 2010

PRE MORTEM

I beg your pardon. Due to having got myself into a bit of a pickle in the health department, I was unable to do a lot of the research that Our First Dog deserves. Fortunately, inspired by spending a decade and a half with Celeste, a wolf hybrid, I had for a long time been very interested in wolf behavior, read or watched everything that crossed my path. I think I remembered a lot of it, which was fortunate because when it came time to write the book about the theories I came up with, not only did I not have time for research, but my medical circumstances were such that I could not even drive to the library, sit at a table to work the internet, or even stand up for more than a few minutes at a time to work or surf in that posture. I had to do all my writing on an off-line laptop, lying on my side, and, due to low blood counts as a result of the cancer treatments fight to keep from falling asleep between the words I typed. Or even the letters: how many times did I awaken to find a hundred pages of bs on my screen. Many. I still do it about once a day, though the treatments have stopped.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been as passionate about the plant-and –animal-ologies as I have been about wolves. I could come up with theories of how the first dog emerged from the wolf, but I could never be sure about where lemons grew fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. Here I use the word lemon as a symbol to represent all the shortcomings in my knowledge of the plants, animals, diet, hunting, and cooking; hide-preparation, shelter-construction, medical lore, social and political life, and family ways; of early humans.

But I did have a few ideas about how our ancestors lived. The clues came, above all from my own family, and those of my childhood friends, who also came under my scrutiny about the same time as I became fascinated by early people. I always thought they were much like we were. I still think that, and that narrow fact, if fact it be, gives many a clue about how life was lived by those with extremely reduced circumstances, but the same will to survive, exactly the same determination to leave their children better off than they were.

A disconcerting event recently led me to write this rather pathetic plea for forgiveness for my lack of research. I happened to learn, quite fortuitously, that there is very little record of the lemon until the last millennium or so. And that was thought to be some kind of hybrid of more primitive citron-like plants. There is probably no reason to believe that lemons grew wild in the northern temperate zones where our story suggests the first dog emerged. They might have had a citron-like shrub, probably with extremely small and bitter fruit, which I’m suggesting could have grown on southern slopes where they might be sheltered by some of the local hardwoods such as birch and poplar from the worst of winter. And they would have had a name for it, and for our purposes, we might as well apply our modern cognate, lemon.

I so wanted to give Butch and Bird and their family and guests, some kind of refreshment—so much so that, now that I’ve discovered how unlikely it is, I cannot bear to go back to the text and remove all of the dried lemon rind which was the basis of their favorite hot drink and that did so much to give those cold nights living under a tree the kind of pleasant memory that would continue to warm their hearts for many years after their parents and siblings had died, probably in such miserable circumstances that the mere memory of them is almost impossible to bear. And I beg of the reader to also have a little pity for our poor protagonist, ancestors, whose lives were so brutally short and miserable. Let them have a little lemon-rind tea on a cold night.

After all, if you think about it, even if they did not have that particular beverage, they probably had something that served a similar function, a beverage whose recipe and contents is long lost to the human collective memory, and for which they would almost certainly have had a name, and we might as well call it lemon.

As a result of an early reductionist impulse, I was also fascinated by the experience of early humans, particularly their subjective reality. How much of ourselves could we understand by studying what I assumed to be the simplified lives and problems facing our noble savage ancestors. At an early age, perhaps while shopping through Philosophy Made Simple I had come across the philosophy of Schopenhauer which fascinated me because I was struck almost violently with the insight that all the other philosophies I had been studying seemed to lead to that one. All trains of thought lead to Rome, it seemed to me, though they do not always run on time. I don’t have time to summarize old Art here, but it seemed perfectly obvious to me then, about the age of 14, and I’ve never deviated from that idea, that one could study anything, be it Buddhist mysticism, modern rational(ist) psychology, or the internal life of a blade of grass, and be unable to avoid concluding that the interrelationship of the energies of a bunch of irritating fellow-pupils, or the exchange of fluids between the cells in a fairly simple vegetable had certain common characteristics that did not require an Oxford education to enjoy. It also seemed to me that if anyone could achieve such an insight, if insight it was, then, surely, an early human who could not read, write, or count beyond two, would also be able, under certain circumstances, to reach the same conclusion.

What would such a man be like? What were those circumstances that would bring him to the same conclusions I had reached? These and other questions moldered at the back of my mind for many years, even as the front of it explored a lot of those vast rationalist deviations that tempt young men who are not as smart as they think they are.

FIRST DOG THEORY came early.

Robert Copps

Spring 2007

OUR FIRST DOG

THE WOLF THAT EVOLVED INTO MAN’S BEST FRIEND

THERE HAVE BEEN MANY GREAT GENIUSES IN MANKIND’S

ONGOING QUEST FOR CIVILIZATION. THE MAN WHO

TAMED THE WOLF WAS ONE OF THEM. THIS IS THE STORY

OF THAT MAN – AND HIS BEST FRIEND.

ROBERT COPPS

CHAPTER 1: BUTCHER AND

LASHER - TWO FAMILIES

Tork the Bison Butcher had had a very pleasant morning but now things were really getting on his nerves.

He had spent a few relaxing hours looking down on his favorite glen, an upland meadow, often dotted with hares, his favorite prey. At one end, where the glen narrowed at the base of the low ridge which partially circled it, and on which he was now lying and studying the scene before him, was his favorite tree. The tree was a great oak and Butcher liked to come here of a morning and, between a couple of large exposed roots, lean against the immense bole, pick a few lice and, as he told himself, ponder things. Butcher did most of his pondering with his eyes closed, for he was always badly in need of sleep.

He would usually ponder away until the sun had found a gap in the foliage and started to warm his face when he would awake and often find that a few big hares had ventured out into the glen and begun to nibble the foliage.

But this morning, when he came over the ridge, he was irked to find a small herd of bison browsing just where he had hoped to bring down a few of those hares and, rather than going down to the tree, he had settled himself in some tall grass and watched the bison for a couple of hours. As he had done so many times in the past, Butcher tried to figure out some reliable and comparatively safe way of killing the large animals, in fact, any large animals.

Though Butcher was called the Bison Butcher, al-katta Tork, he had never actually killed a bison. His jovial family had teased him with the name after he had shown great vigor in butchering a large animal wounded by a giant bear and tracked by his uncle until it died. When the family had carried the neatly trimmed meat back to the fire, Uncle had declared it Butcher’s name-day. From then on, all referred to the former boy as Tork, or Butcher, or, simply, Butch.

How he would love to kill a bison! Butcher regarded himself as a merely competent hunter. He almost always brought home some meat, but usually it was small stuff— hares, fish, snakes, birds, and so on. What a thrill it would be, some afternoon, to drag a big haunch of bison back to the fire!

As to the task at hand, finding a way to kill the animals, he first concentrated on communicating with the spirit of the bison. As Uncle had taught him, he recited the hunter’s standard prayer: Bison, show me the way to honor you in the hunt!

This was a matter of respect, for he knew that Bison would not answer. She never did. He wanted to find a way of propitiating her, but didn’t know how. Some people liked to kill to get the spirit in the mood for a little excitement and blood-letting, but Uncle always assured him that the spirits of the hunt were not keen on anything being killed unless it was going to be eaten or otherwise used; if you were going to eat it then it wasn’t a sacrifice, so he preferred to look for an incantation that would please the spirit of the animal he was hunting. Uncle had shared a few good ones with young Butcher, who had always boasted to Switcher and the other boys sharing a valley for a few seasons, that Uncle’s incantations usually worked; until one day Uncle, having overheard one of these childhood boasts, drew him aside, and smiling wryly, asked him, Did you ever notice that those magic words I taught you work best when you are very careful to hide your scent, and the game is plentiful?

Does that mean they don’t work? Butcher asked.

I don’t know. It means they only work when you are well-prepared, anyway.

Then there was the matter, assuming the spirit of Bison cooperated in the hunt, of actually killing the large beasts. He had no weapon to make up for the bison’s advantages in size and strength. He could spear a single animal, but the bison traveled in large groups, and they were not afraid to defend themselves. Even if he could spear one, avoid its counter-charge and track it until it succumbed to the wound, by that time, it might have covered such a distance that Butcher would not be able to carry much of the meat back to the fire; certainly not enough to justify the time away from the family. He might as well just kill a few hares with his throwing sticks.

Butcher ground his teeth with frustration. He was sick of hares and wanted some big red meat, rich with fat and blood, meat that a hunter needs to keep fit, to kill even more large beasts.

One night, when he was very young, he came up with a plan to surprise Uncle with a dead bison. In the morning he slipped away from the fire and tried to stampede a small herd that had been browsing in a nearby meadow for a couple of days. His plan was that the males would outrun the calves and the old and weak, and Butcher could slay one and drag it home to great acclaim. But Bison were not afraid of The People. The big bulls turned their huge heads toward the screaming, waving, skinny youth, as if wondering what the weird animal was. They continued to stare until he stopped and stood panting in front of the giant heads arrayed before him. Finally, his weapons hanging from limp arms, he turned and trudged back to the fire.

As the hot sun moved across the sky and still the bison did not leave his glen, Butcher’s lice began to vex him as well. It seemed that they only bothered him when he lay down and tried to relax. Perhaps he just didn’t notice their little tickles when he was striding through the forest, or hauling in a fish. Or maybe they wanted him to be still before they went to work on him, to get the maximum effect, to drive him crazy. Louse is truly a vexatious spirit, Uncle had said, one of the few pests in the bounteous world that seemed to offer no benefit to make up for the irritations she caused.

He rolled onto his back, drew in his feet and felt under his fur leggings for the little critters sticking to the skin of his legs. He peeled off each louse with considerable pleasure, ate the big sweet ones, and crushed the small, bitter ones.

As he found another little bump below his left knee, then slid a thumbnail under it and a finger on top, he thought that there was something very pleasant just in that sensation of trapping the thing. Maybe that was the purpose of Louse, to give man the pleasure of finding him in return for a little blood now and then. No, it wasn’t the trapping that was so pleasant, because Butcher got the same pleasure from gently worrying and picking at old scabs, and bits of dead skin that occasionally sloughed off his body.

Lice had one other major benefit. The first time he had lain with his woman Bird— Song of the Morning Bird—they had begun by picking lice from each other’s hair, and sharing the sweet ones, then moved to more secluded parts of their bodies. Finally, Bird found a rich source between Butcher’s legs. He joked that he had been saving them for her, and she said, with a laugh, Sure, you were saving them for the first girl who found them!, and she wouldn’t share any of these lice with Butcher, but made a big point about how particularly delicious they were.

After a short time, as Bird moved his parts here and there in her search, Butcher grew impatient and suddenly rolled her onto her back and began a search of his own. He was pleased to find that Bird’s crotch was about as rich as his own—nobody had been picking there before him— and after a while she became visibly moist and Butcher climbed upon her and she did not protest.

From that day Butcher and Bird were inseparable; that is, when Butcher was not off learning the ways of the animals from Uncle, and Bird was not studying plants for purposes of consumption and medicine, hide-curing, cooking, and all the other mysterious ways of the old women. By the time their first boy’s spirit decided to join them in this world, the people had long since accepted that the two were one.

Butcher yawned. He had to figure out a way to get more sleep. On summer days, or mild fall days, such as this, it was not so bad: he could steal an hour or two from the hunt, but in the winter it was much harder to get comfortable away from the fire. And at the fire, there were just too many things to do, too many kids’ questions to answer, to get any sleep during the day.

In any season, it was almost impossible for him to sleep through the night. After dark, while his little family slept peacefully, Butcher leaned back against the fir tree and kept watch. Wrapped in his black cape so that only his eyes were exposed in the shadows beneath the lowest limbs and only allowing himself brief doses of sleep, he looked, listened, and sniffed for anything that might emerge from the darkness.

Today he quietly cursed the bison for robbing him of his brief nap by the oak tree. Little did he know that what sleep he got that day would have to last him a long time, for his life was about to get very complex.

The night before, Bird had stayed up with him for a long time. After the kids were sleeping snugly in the black capes that he had taught them to wrap themselves in, so that they looked like nothing more than shadowy lumps on the ground, she had continued to stay awake, weaving clothing for them from cedar fibers.

The capes were something he insisted be used and be used wisely. They were extra large for the user, dragging on the ground if not cinched tightly, and were worn fur side in, even if worn with other clothing, and the outside was dyed black with the finest soot. With proper ground selection the family could sleep in the middle of a dark field and be confident of being unseen by anyone unless stumbled upon in the night.

Butcher had already settled in, cudgels and thrusting spears handy in the lowest branches of the tree, wrapped his cape about him as he made his children do, and wearing the woven-bark slippers that Bird insisted the whole family wear on the fir-bough and hide sleeping platform. They were a very good idea, for the leather day-boots could be left by the fire to dry, while the feet remained snug in the soft slippers.

Your eyes, Bird, he said. It was very dark under the fir, even when the moon illuminated the ground around the fire smoldering in its pit under a pile of wet leaves.

I know, but this is not fine work. I can do it with my eyes closed. It’s true. I’ll show you tomorrow. I have to get it done before the freeze makes it hard to break down the cedar bark and I run out of supplies.

He knew that in the morning all the details would be perfect, as if she had been weaving in the noon-day light, and not in total darkness.

Let me light a lamp for you.

I’d rather use the pork fat for cooking. Besides, we might have some emergency and need more fat than we can scavenge.

We should find one more boar this season.

Bird only sniffed at this and changed the subject. Butch, are you staying awake again?

I find it hard to sleep this time of year.

Any time of year. You shouldn’t be called ‘Butcher’, you should be called ‘Watcher’.

And you should be ‘She Who Weaves by Night’.

After a while she put aside her work and, pulling the baby’s basket close to her, wrapped herself in her own black cape and snuggled up to Butcher.

He leaned over and with one long arm lifted the baby, basket and all, over Bird, and set the infant between them, staring down into the tiny, laughing face.

Bird peered out under the lower limbs and into the night. It’s Switcher’s moon, isn’t it?

Butcher laughed at this new appellation. Yes, it’s the moon of the first frost. He’ll probably wander in any day, low on supplies, sniffing around to see if we’ve had a productive summer and stored up a lot of meat that we would just love to share with an unlucky relative. ‘The People have to stick together, and all, and all…’ and, if nothing is offered, he’ll break down and offer to trade a few pieces of ochre or beads that he had switched with someone, or taken from them, more likely, even though he looks just as well-fed as me, better in fact, with all those extra slabs around his gut. It’s a wonder one of his trading pals doesn’t just hit him over the head and cook him up. They must be sorely tempted by all that crisp fat they could feed their kids.

Bird was laughing, Well, you could, too. If you think it’s such a good idea.

Butcher chuckled, That will be the frosty winter day when I crisp his ass. I know where it’s been.

Oh, I shouldn’t talk about my dear sister’s loving man like this, Bird laughed. We’ll have to give them something, Butch, anyway. Even if he’s lying.

I think Switcher has a lot stored at his winter fire in that cave he talks about that no one ever sees.

You could go there and see.

Nah.

Switcher’s cave was half way up a mountain several suns from Butcher’s fire, or so Switcher said, for no one had ever seen it. No hunters went there because the high country was barren except for a few skinny goats that Switcher could never catch.

The thing is this: Switcher spends all the hunting seasons off trading, so at the end of the season, he can righteously claim to have no meat. But what he doesn’t have in meat he has in useless trade goods like ochre and gold, or tight bundles of high-quality moss, or some nice flint weapons from the south. When he gets desperate enough he emerges from the mountain with a bag of stuff that he wants to trade for dried food. It is so stupid of him, because the only meat available is very low quality and yet costs so much. If he wants to trade for food, he should be honest about it and trade earlier, like now, when The People have more meat than they know what to do with and would love to get some flashy gifts to show off.

Switcher, as a young man, knew everyone but never had any close friends, had got into the habit of wandering in a broad circuit among the small groups of The People, exchanging a few hides for beads, or beads for hides, depending on how much was offered, trading some recent gossip for a nice dinner, joining an occasional raid or hunting party, and everywhere hinting that he would not turn down an invitation to share the resources with one of the families of the lower valleys.

Although he always arrived with tragic tales of terrible luck during the hunting moons, and fierce battles and tough negotiations with the Near People, for the benefit of us all, which invariably had required the sacrifice of some of his stores—to buy them their lives—every year he arrived looking well fed, even sleek, and unscarred.

Wasn’t he a real pest last year? Butcher continued after pondering a little. ‘I fought the bastards to keep them from coming into this lovely valley of yours. You are very lucky not to have been molested for many summers; lucky to have this valley to yourself, lucky to have friends to keep the Near People out.’

Under his arm, Butcher felt Bird chuckling.

How he went on, he continued. ‘Your place among The People is high. You have a large family and much to share. I tell the tales of your successes to all I meet, and they tell me stories about you that have been passed on by others. Though it has been many summers since they have seen you, I will never tell them where you are. Still, your place is high.’

Bird took the baby from the basket and tucked her under their overlapping capes. The baby was well swaddled in the finest hare-fur, and Butcher knew that he also gave off an enormous amount of heat, so that if she managed to free herself from the swaddling, which she seemed to hate, Butcher would still keep her warm until either he or Bird noticed the little limbs flailing between them. I know you will share something with them, Bird said, setting the fur-lined basket behind her. It might be true that they are holding out, but I can’t take a chance that my sister or her children might not make it through the winter.

We will not have enough, I promise you, Butcher said. And to himself he added, Unless we get lucky, we will be short by one large deer.

Butcher was glum at the thought of sharing the leather bags and baskets of dried fruit, meat, birds, fish, roots, and berries that the family had put into their storage pits for the winter. The amount of work had been tremendous for everyone in the family except the baby, who had already freed one arm and was reaching out for Bird’s swollen breast. After adjusting the baby’s furs, and securing them more tightly, Bird shifted to let the baby nurse.

For Butcher and his first son, Little Aurochs, who had been killed early in the season, this work, which he was now expected to share with that bum Switcher, had meant many suns hunting and carrying game, almost all very small, back to the fire, preparing weapons, and digging storage pits. Bird and the girls worked endlessly gathering the fruits of the forests and the glens, then cutting, drying, scraping, making baskets… And it meant that they would themselves run out of food before the small animals had emerged and begun to fatten themselves on the new berries.

Don’t grind your teeth, Bird reminded him. I know you’re thinking of him. We must begin to think of new things.

Doesn’t it make you want to leave this place, sometimes, Bird?

Bird was silent. This was a tough subject for them and Butcher immediately regretted bringing it up. Usually he would not. But the thought of Little Aurochs had made him lose his self-control.

He had given Little Aurochs his name early. (It was properly Butcher of Aurochs, but no one, save Butcher himself, could bring himself to call him by his father’s name while his father lived, and they quickly became used to the diminutive, to which he, thrilled to have any name at all, raised no objection). The boy’s coup in killing a small female aurochs by setting a complex trap and delivering some skillful blows, and the fine song he created to celebrate the event, had inspired Butcher to give him a name a couple of seasons before boys usually had their name-day.

That had been a huge mistake, Butcher now realized, a mistake that Uncle, who hated to deviate from traditions—You cannot know why they became our traditions, he always said—never would have made. Truly, the boy was not a man—he was still impetuous, too eager to prove himself, which Butcher, wincing to himself, thought indicated a lack of self-confidence. As soon as he had a name Little Aurochs began to hanker after killing a larger animal to justify his new appellation.

Aurochs continually raised the subject of big game. Butcher admitted that to make it through the winter they needed to smoke more deer meat: the meat of a single doe would give them a worry-free season no matter how badly they might accidentally provoke the spirits of the snow and wind.

If they