# woof *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 01 Mar 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Alice Turner *01 Mar 1998, 20:03* > We had a long and very enlightening discussion of "Tracking Song" a few > months ago. I had a new thought about it last night, literally as I was > lying in bed falling asleep. > > I think the narrator is a dog, specifically a domestic dog who has > fallen out of (or ejected from) the car his humans are riding in. The > fall gave him amnesia, favored plot device of writers. How can you tell > he's a dog? He has the marks on his neck of a leash or collar; a > "birthmark" that goes "from one side of the hair on the back of my neck > to the other." He only comes up the shoulders of the Wiggikki, who are > wolves (few dogs are as large as a wolf). When he finally meets the > proprietors of the Great Sleigh, they are angels. What dog owner is not > an angel to his dog? > > Of course, I'm not saying the narrator _is_ a dog literally, but in the > same sense that the Wiggikki are wolves, and so forth. The robots obey > him because he is "human," not literally, but of all the human-like > animals they encounter, he is the most human; more human than Mantru, > who is a-human or ex-human, mostly likely a homunculus (in the TBotNS > sense). The narrator does exactly what you would expect a loyal dog to > do: find his masters again; though, being a dog, he's distractable on > the way. He eats the artificial food because it's what a dog raised on > kibble would be used to (the moral dimension aside). > > Again, I'm not claiming this story is the dream of a dog, but that that > the narrator fills the dog's role in the story. > > What do you think? I was a major participant in that discussion---I got quite obsessed with it for a while. And I'm quite taken aback by this new thought---and quite taken with it too. This is one of those interpretations that I think the author may never have thought of, and that may yet have truth. I'm going to think about this for a while. Viz, I had thought about writing about this story, but I could never find a hook that satisfied me. Why don't you think about writing about it instead? I can help--I help with this sort of thing for a living. -alga- ---