My mouth watered, as would any wolf’s, as would any king’s.
Moving slow on my two legs, I started to bend over, come down to all fours for this rare feast, but startled back from a sudden, powerful fluttering to my right. My first thought was that this was a trap, that the soldiers were ranged all around, covering their scent and sound somehow—that a crossbow bolt or net was nearly on me, to shorten my reign at last. But then I realized: we weren’t the only hunters, this night.
It was an owl, one of the tall ones that stands up to a man’s waist or a wolf’s shoulders.
It too had been tracking this birth, and likely mourning that it had no access to the burrow.
To it, these wriggling pups were just helpless, especially plump mice that didn’t yet know to run away.
Its talons pierced the back of the pup farthest from the teat, and then the great gray wings pushed down together, lifting the bird back into the darkness on an expanding pad of air. We all listened to it lift away, coast down deep in the trees, and strain this giant mouse down its gullet.
When one of my sons nosed forward, for one of the remaining pups, I lifted my lips, warned him back. He mewled, dropped his tail, slunk off, and I never even had to look over.
I was still listening to this owl, deep in the woods.
* * *
Yes, as a king I had perhaps underestimated Zeus. I admit that freely. Being a wolf, however, had taught me certain things I could never have learned otherwise.
As a man, I could of course walk by any number of rabbits or moles and never feel compelled to snap them up, swallow them down. As a wolf, I snatched those rabbits and moles up even when I wasn’t hungry for their meat. I still thought like a man, but my body reacted to its natural prey like the wolf it was.
I had to imagine it would be the same with Zeus. For all his might and cleverness, he would still be prey himself to whatever form he was using to move among the mortals. And, with these new ears, I knew what form he had been recently taking, and would, I had to presume, continue to take until his current dalliance had run its course.
For years he had sat atop his Mount, playing treacherous petty games with others of his kind, but then a vision of milky skin must have passed before his eyes, as it always did. He had leaned over from his high seat, studied us down here in our filth, finally settled his divine gaze on the one of us who had caught his fancy, one whose beauty was already dooming him or her to unasked-for nightly visits.
His whole existence, see, it’s about satisfying his own fickle desires, be they carnal, as was the case here, or, as when he knocked on my door, playful. Either way, he’s so satisfied with himself that he can’t quite contain his mirth. He’s getting away with it again, and that persistent divine chuckle deep in his chest, at the core of his being, that’s what my wolf ears can’t help but register.
I say this with confidence because I felt that same mirth myself moments ago, padding up behind you: I’m getting away with it again, yes. And who is there now to punish me? But I get ahead of myself.
Though I hadn’t bothered to interest myself with where Zeus was going—which bedroom, what tower—my ears had picked up how he was getting there. I knew what animal raiment he was clothing himself with, and so wagered that I could use that against him.
I padded away from my children that night, and stationed myself along the shore, in what I knew to be his path.
Then it was just the waiting.
Time passes differently on the Mount than it does in the mortal realm. I say this because, if Zeus’s carnal impulses want to be satisfied on any kind of cycle, then that cycle is markedly different than in men, or wolves.
I sat on that rocky shore for five weeks, listening for his return. My sides drew in, my mouth watered for the animals I could hear crawling around me, but I remained motionless, could not give up this effort just because death might be looming. I wasn’t even sure I could starve down to nothing, but by the end of the first week, I knew that this hunger, already all-consuming, was not likely to abate.
Yet I persisted in my vigil.
I once had offered a god a simple meal, and he had turned the table over on me. In my new form, though, I could set that table back up, couldn’t I?
My dry lips cracked with movement when I heard the heavens open to admit a traveler down into our realm.
Zeus was in the world again.
* * *
Though it was daylight, I raced alongshore to the nearest town, took a scent-reading, found the cur I’d mounted two months ago feeding her newborn pups. She bared her teeth at me in the fiercest way she had, and had I still the mouth for it, I would have smiled at her pitiful effort.
She had hidden herself under the porch of a stone house.
I pushed under to dig her out, sucking down the first two of the pups as a reward to myself, but then the stone house’s owner stepped out with a farming tool.
For a moment we locked eyes, his face slack, my muzzle bloody, and then I was on him, had his throat in my teeth. To insure no more interruptions, I went into his stone house then, walking on two feet thanks to the meal he’d interrupted, and easily dispatched the rest of the family—daughter, daughter, wife, moving on to the next while the previous was still falling. On the way out, I took note that the pot bubbling over the fire was stew.
Again, my kind can’t smile, but perhaps my eyes did.
Quickly, with no thought to who might be watching—there was no time—I dropped to all fours, dug the cur and her pups out, and left them curled up there, save the piebald one I had nipped by the back of the neck.
He struggled and kicked in my teeth, but he weighed nothing and was still new enough as to be blind, couldn’t see the legendary run I was making, from far inland all the way to the coast in a matter of hours.
When his skin pricked and his blood washed into my mouth, I didn’t even bite down more, just ran faster, and faster again.
The chuckling satisfaction in the sky was moving along the water’s edge now, was coming back from whatever conquest Zeus felt he’d just made, whatever he’d just gotten away with again.
Instead of meeting him, I surged ahead even faster, into his path, into where he was going.
This time he wasn’t a swan, wasn’t a bull, but a great eagle.
And just as I was carrying a young son in my mouth, he had in his talons the unconscious form of a young boy who had evidently been fetching enough for Zeus to transform, glide all the way down here, and now deliver him back up for a week of pleasure on the Mount, whether the boy agreed or not.
Such is the way of things with a god.
Pushing harder and harder, I ran ahead, dropped the pup from my mouth into the grass, in order to finish what I’d started years before.
Had I left the struggling pup on shore, that would be too obvious, even for one so brazen as Zeus. In the grass, though, his sharp predator eyes would automatically register the blades trembling with life, and his wings would dip him down ever so slightly, to consider this new possibility, his clawed feet already flexing in anticipation.
I was just ahead, hunkered down in a copse of trees, my hackles vibrating with anticipation.
No bird of prey could resist. Not even mighty Zeus.
Without considering the danger, he flipped the unconscious boy up into the sky to retrieve later and angled his head down, tucked his wings back, and fell into a sharp dive, following his eagle instincts.
Slashing down like that, he was a bolt of lightning, yes.