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You have never seemed to have the same deeply ingrained desire to please that people favored in other dogs. The words 'good' and 'dog' together don't evoke any rush of endorphins, don't make you seek to repeat the behavior that gained them for you, and 'bad' is only an annoyance and a limitation that you seek to avoid, so it is not to gain pleasure that you obey. There is no soothing when a human hand lays atop your head with a broad, warm palm that should make you feel protected and approved of the way it should have when your mother did it while she nurtured you and your sisters in a time you remember more instinctively than descriptively.
Even they sensed, early, that you were different. When the claps and squeals of youngsters - humans, you knew on some level, had to be pleased, but you did not desire it the way other dogs did - failed to delight you into play. When coaxing words and praise could not even then entice you into enjoying doing what they wanted.
With the first family, it was bearable. When you marked outside they were happy. When you laid still on the rug and waited they would leave you be as if you were any other piece of furniture. They left you in the back while they were gone though the fence drove you slowly mad, circling and circling because it would never expand far enough to let you reach the fat, complacent birds that settled in heavy flocks where the neighbor fed them. So you ran and ran until you grew strong and silent at it, and on the first day you made it over the fence you killed ten and left them shattered and featherless in the grass.
They burst in your mouth, broke apart leaving dust on your tongue and blood ran hot down your throat. The dry, dead dirt the humans gave you to eat never filled you again. Even when they ate meat, it was dead and old because they were scavengers, not strong leaders. When you stole it because they were weak, it tasted like ash and burnt wood. They were too weak to protect it from you so they could eat first which means it should be your right, but oh the sounds they made in their impotent anger.
You went over the fence again. And again until the birds would not come and wind storms found bloody feathers from all corners of the yard to fling up onto decks and into doorways. Once, a woman flies out of the house to swing at you with her claws on a long stick.
When the stick breaks over your back, you let the bird in your mouth go - broken but still flailing one wing, and drove your teeth into her instead because she was not strong enough to take it from you, and new blood mixed with the bird blood taste.
After that they made very angry human noises but could not make you feel ashamed while you ate your bird. You do not need to please carrion-eaters. Why? They could not even please themselves with fresh food.
The next place is solitary and the smells are new and clean, not the asphalt and gasoline of where you had been before, and here it is primal. The man here kills his meat - and it is everywhere. Fat flightless birds that scratch the dirt and eat hopping bugs, and big heavy cattle that you would need a pack to hunt, and muddy pink fleshy pigs that roll and grunt and raise young that would fit just so between your jaws and crunch.
Sometimes the man smells like blood and brings a carcass back to the house, but he feeds you dry hard dirt, and even if he is a hunter too, you think, he is a poor leader. He turns his meat to ash before he eats it, too.
When you kill your first piglet, wriggling and shrieking deafening against your ears and bleeding in hot spurts down your throat in a way the birds never had, the man hurts you. This is a new pain, a bright deep bone-marrow pain that comes with noise and tearing, and your back legs buckle first before the pain comes, like one of the cattle had kicked you right over.
And then you smell your own blood and the echos slowly become audible to your deafened ears as two dozen pinpricks gape wide suddenly and bleed.
You don't surrender the piglet when you run - limping and compensating, trying to keep steady on the three legs that support you while pain wakes like the slow spread of fire in the hind that dangles uselessly, tucked up almost against your belly and leaving your hot blood behind you in the grass.
Twice more sound drowns the world free of the perception of all else, but it does not cut you again and the man does not chase you. You are free and gone and you never have to go back. Your blood seems a right price - a small price, when you crush the still hot piglet in your mouth and then place it on the ground and tear it.You do not have to leave any of it behind like the birds, there are no dusty inedible feathers, and you eat it all and find its belly full of mother's milk and the brittle, small bones full in the middle with sweet marrow, and you will never eat the hard dirt pebbles again.
But your leg is fire and pain, and it makes you slow. Sleep takes you unwilling when you wander a clear dirt track that smells faintly of old gas, and when you wake its in a cold white place with hard metal all around you that wont yield to your teeth. There is nothing but the miserable sounds of other dogs to keep you company and unliving stones to eat in a cold metal bowl. You have been far more patient than this.
Your leg heals, and you wait.
There is a rhythm here. In, the cold cage, and out where you are expected to mark on command, and then in again before you can run. Light, dark, repeat. These men do not expect you to please them. They seem to want nothing at all but to poke and prod and pinch you for your blood. Your mind reduces them to hands and arms, because they have reduced you to your wound and the functions of your body.
It almost shuts you down, makes you go quiet and tired all the time, makes your mind grow numb and your blood seem to cool in your veins and you have no idea what the definition of yourself is aside from the four hard metal walls around you. Except once, when you are outside, there is a flash in your mind and you become aware of a throat while you are pissing over a lake of piss where a thousand scents try to claim but fail, and when you finish you turn on your leash and jump. Your leg is healed enough to carry you up as high as you need to be.
You do not eat this kill. You leave it and run, but there is hot bright blood in your mouth again and no respect for hands and arms lingers like old, bad instinct in your mind.
You move and you take. It is a freedom, and a definition that does not include the close press of metal walls around you and again and the confusion of what you are leaves your mind at last.
You eat birds and their dusty feathers, and cats when they are trusting and indolent, and scurrying squirrels and biting, fierce raccoons and whatever else you catch. And you run, because the live meat has rendered you alive too, the pumping blood keeps your and nothing is forcing you to die by eating dead, hard dirt to slow you and tie you down to the earth.
Then, he comes into your hunting ground and it changes. He is not hands and arms or dead dirt, or a hunter like the man who had thrown sound and cut your leg.
He looks you in the eyes.
He is still and quiet and he sits down low where you could reach his throat in an instant.
But he brings meat, and it is old but not turned ash like the other humans did, and he waits and will not look away. You, in spite of yourself, go.
He asks nothing to share with you, and you eat first in front of him, while he watches. While he waits, like you know how to wait, and for a moment it feels good. Right. Here is the proper order, a weaker thing letting you eat first, leaving the stronger animal to be strong because it's your teeth that will - what?
Protect?
You've never met another dog like this before.
He comes again, and you do not move territory. And again, and you take your dues as tributes and leave him enough to live on, though he does not eat it. You forgive him, after a time. You don't much like the dead, cold meat either, but humans ate dead ash and old things because they were weak and that's their place, and this is all he cannot offer you because his teeth aren't meant for throats. He probably does not know how to eat vital meat, he cannot catch it.
You bring a rabbit. You lay it at his feet and stare until he reaches down slowly and takes it, looking you in the eyes and you can see your own tongue lolling and pink and slick with fresh blood reflected in them. Your teeth show in sudden warning and only after you see them reflected do you realize you've made it, what you are threatening.
He looks and you look. It is still and quiet between you for a time but you have hypnotized each other and he lifts the prey to his mouth at last and you will not have to kill him to maintain authority and balance. It's wistful, that feeling - you can see his pulse working in his neck as he chews, but he is more dog than even your sisters, and it is dog, too, to have a pack.