[ WP ] In the canine world , humans are celestial beings who live for more than 500 years at a time . The caretaker of you and the past seven generations of your family will die soon .

I have heard my mother tell me that her mother's mother slept under the stars. The chain-link fence still stands in the back acreage where our Man takes his small smelling-fire, though the old wood box behind the fence is now covered in the tricky, tempting waft of rabbit and vole. My mother tells me that I once wriggled under the fence to dig at the burrows, and when the Man found me he was doubled-over laughing; the kennel had been the last place he'd thought to look for me, she said, but he was proud because this meant I would be strong in our family's craft. 
 
 I became her second soon after that. I sat next to her on the boat. I learned how to be still. I learned how to listen, and how to return the Man's catch. I learned to let it go, although the scent of that final weakness spoke to me strongly to hold on. And then I learned how to set the bird or hare gently at his feet ( not down ten feet away, nor five, nor just out of his reach ). He has not taken me to the old grounds now for many brisk, bright seasons, and I wonder if my joints could bound out to his catch so easily - if my eyes could spot the downed prey, if my nose could scent the path back to his side. 
 
 My mother told me this: the change happened when the den was full of people the Man loved. One of them spoke on my great-grandmother's behalf. And he had resisted on the grounds that, in his wisdom, he knew it might spoil her for our craft. But the love - which must be felt so strongly between creatures bonded for centuries together, like their people are - prevailed, and the Man moved my great-grandmother from under the stars into the mud room. Then my grandmother was suffered to settle under the dining room table ( where she possessed a quilt that still dries me on wet days ), and then my mother and I - when the bed seemed just so large for our Man and he so distant in it - were allowed to curl down with him by his side, from waking to sleep, at his side always. This is how the change occurred, so that I sleep now at the Man's side each night and not under the stars in the kennel where I could smell the shifting leaves and warn the large stalkers to stay away. 
 
 But the Man reaches out for me at night, and touches my head very softly, and when his fingers shake on my ears it feels so very nice. He is so wise; he must be, having seen so much and brought in so much prey. He is the greatest hunter that this den has ever known, probably the greatest hunter in any den of man in the earth. I am fed and full when I push my paws into his side while he sleeps, stretching in contentment as he grumbles his divine language and swats at me to be still. 
 
 I find the path, as in my early days, in the fields. But now I trot only a few bounds out and bring the ball back and I am very good, very good in how I do this thing for him. He rests on the steps outside of the den and we practice this old training in case he ever needs to call on me again to wait beside him in the fields. The day is very low, and normally he would have already set together the wood behind the loud door and put flame in it for the night. But that is not for me to care for; these are the duties of his kind, the things he knows to do, drawing from a well of memory that stretches back the ages of my line. So I do not remind him. As the sun dips low we practice; we remember the old ways. He speaks to me gently, and even teases me with the duck call and mimics the way I open my ears to decipher the dry, groaning caw. A smelling-fire trembles in his hand. He tosses the ball. The stars are overhead. There is a smell of winter in the leaves. I return the ball; I place it at his feet.
