woof
The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 01 Mar 1998
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/387

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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-

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