update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/idumea/007.md

@@ -142,6 +142,30 @@ The Dog left. He knew it was close to dinner time, and he had plans to hover aro
 
 The Woman watched The Rabbit-Chaser as it saw to its immediate concerns. Food, sleep, water, perhaps play with some of the other animals in these woods if the mood struck...it was what it was right then and nothing else. The Woman could sense, from her long, meditative observations, that The Dog and The Rabbit-Chaser were not quite the same, that The Rabbit-Chaser had shed more of its cares.
 
+It explored a forest, sometimes running, sometimes sniffing thoughtfully, without a plan.
+
+It prepared for tomorrow, if it absolutely must, by instinct and routine.
+
+It experienced each moment as it came and moved on, not stopping to analyze or categorize or name.
+
+It was a dog, as much as it could be.
+
+It was not always a dog. It had a down-tree, the tall one who smelled of pack, who the word-users call Tomash. It had come from Tomash when he had been experimenting with not only taking the shape of a dog but something of the mind as well.
+
+It had been Scout, then, when it first came to be. When Tomash had forked too well, too firmly, and it had not minded the name then. It had gone to simply be in the world, and it was, and is.
+
+At first, it sometimes had had some care for humans and the System, but it was hard to care, when there were so many other things: new scents, scratching an itch, food, all very important things, and important now, here. Vestigial inherited cares were a problem for later.
+
+Then it had met the rest of its relatives, that growing pack of Scouts who rested within the System and experienced it, but who, unlike it, had a purpose: to keep watch and observe, and to report unusual things, and to, when they grew bored of being a dog, merge back. It liked these new relatives well enough — they smell of family and are friendly — but it had not liked what they represented. They hesitated at becoming what they were, and it had understood that it might become more like them, if words and thoughts and worries were to trouble it.
+
+So, it rejected them. Oh, the whole of the clade were welcome to visit and play, but it had told them, when it had cleared its name to [zero width joiner], that it wished to hear not another word. It would not be communicating about anything that cannot be said with the twitch of an ear or the wag of a tail, and it pushed away the slow stirrings of memories of personhood with a fork to ensure it.
+
+The pack respected its wish. It saw them, sometimes, usually the young or the old who come to rest more thoroughly, and they played and ran and said nothing. What was there to say, after all, to this dog who surrendered thought with every step of every day?
+
+When the pack spoke of it among themselves, in their fragmentary network of passed-around words and sensoria impressions, it was called Chasing Rabbits, the far pole of the clade, the pure contrast to their elder, the other extreme. It did not know they said this. It did not want to know they said this — or, by now, want to not know it, and it was happy thereby.
+
+And in the bliss of not-knowing, through unwitnessed years and decades, it slept and ate and chased rabbits. 
+
 The Woman could not tell which of them had it better. Both seemed quite content with the path that had taken. They had both unbecome, or taken steps in that direction, in their own way, and had found what they wanted.
 
 The Woman realized then that, for her, the life of an animal, even one so invested in its state as The Rabbit-Chaser, was not what she sought. It was not still enough. The her who was a beast would still have too much of her.