Last night I dreamt I was a dog.

I lived on a small family farm somewhere on the American frontier, back in the time of plow mules and butter churns. It was one of those long dreams that feels like an entire lifetime. I remember the end of the dream with an awful clarity, but the beginning seems like something that happened many years ago.

The first images are vivid but disjointed. I recall the shape of my master walking against the sunlight overhead. The smell of his leather boots. The shadows at the edge of the forest. A little pig-tailed girl hugging me. Fresh mud in the spring. Warm floorboards in the winter. Everything had a peaceful storybook quality to it, except one thing.

Sometimes late at night, I heard singing. It came from outside, out there in the far distance, from somewhere in the deep forest beyond the boundaries of my world. Some nights it was one voice, but usually it was many, singing a strange, aching song. It sounded like a haunted crying. When I was little, I had whimpered and cried like this to my mother. But who was crying out there in the night? What kind of dark mother was listening?

When I first heard the singing, I was filled with a blood dread. The hair on my back bristled, and I growled and barked at the darkness. Even after the night finally went silent, I trotted around for hours in vigilant anger. Later, as I heard it more often, I learned to accept it with a sullen unease. Of course, this singing was the sound of wolves howling, but I didn't know this in the dream. In the dream, I'd never seen a wolf in my life.

One winter, I began to see them prowling in the woods. To me, they were ghost dogs, shadows sneaking between trees, eyes glinting in the twilight. I growled and barked at them, but didn't pursue. For several months, they never encroached on my world.

They finally came on a late winter's evening. The sun had sunk into an orange glow beyond the edge of the world. The family was in the cabin, and I was out trotting through the snow, anxious to get back to them because I knew food would be coming soon. Then, atop a small hill by the apple tree -- an apparition. My body snapped to attention, and I growled, the hairs on my back standing on end. It was a wolf, just a stone's throw from me, its silvery coat half-lit in the dying light of day.

It came toward me in a sleek, soundless jaunt. I barked and snapped at the air. It slowed and stopped just beyond my lunging distance. Now, crazed with fear and anger, I saw that it was a large female, healthy, well-fed, with a gorgeous coat -- misty gray, the color of snow seen at a winter's distance. Its smell was alien, confusing, but laced with a clear and potent confidence, a supreme assuredness. Indeed, it did not seem to be afraid of me at all, nor did it threaten. Its mouth hung slack, and steam issued from its muzzle in steady, happy puffs. This calmed me for a moment and in the next moment redoubled my anger. I growled from the deepest, most murderous part of my dog self.

It spoke to me. Its mouth didn't move, and there was no sound, but by the logic of the dream, it spoke to me a clear, dignified voice.

"Hello, child."

I snarled at it. It took another step forward, and its eyes caught the last of the sunlight, glowing in a fantastic array of yellows. Those eyes, rimmed in jet black like mascara, projected a powerful allure, an otherworldly glamour.

''You bark and snarl. But look at my face. Am I not of your kind?" it asked.

I could not answer. I could only growl softly.

"Is my face not like your mother's? Do you remember her?"

The sudden scent of distant memory came to me, and I felt a pang of loneliness. I had not seen my mother or any other dog since I was small. Since I had come to the farm, my only family had been the people I lived with (and a few of the more tolerant pigs). I searched now for dim, fragrant memories of my mother. I felt her huge, bristled muzzle licking at my face. I saw her giant, sweeping legs as I followed them through high fields. She had seemed taller than a horse then. I remembered the softness of her teats, feeding from them with my brothers and sisters. What had become of my family? I had spent every day with them, and then one day... all gone.

The wolf paced back and forth now, keeping a small distance from me, its eyes ranging over the farm. Again I saw some strange, haunting glamour in them, something that glittered with secret, distant power.

"The people in that house, they're not your family. We are. We share ancient blood," it said, its voice deep and resounding with the rhythm of wisdom. My master had a voice like this, but it didn't have the total authority of this alpha female's.

I saw with alarm two dark shapes come over the hill by the apple tree. More wolves, moving silent with heads lowered. I barked at them.

"You hate us and love them. But do they love you? What are you to them? Aren't you the lowest of the low? Always getting the last of the food, the smallest scraps? Imagine living differently. Imagine taking your own food. Killing. Drinking lifeblood. Being master over others."

The two other wolves slunk down the hill. The skin on my back tightened again, but the strange hypnotic power of the alpha wolf held me still. "You could leave this house and come with us. We range the forests. We've seen rivers wider than this whole valley. Mountains that go up into the clouds. Lakes with no end but the end of the world. Places with no houses or men at all. You could be with us. We could be your brothers and sisters."

The other two wolves came closer. They were unmistakably females, both young and well muscled. Their confidence was not as absolute as the alpha wolf's, but they showed no fear as they came to me. I smelled on them a strange longing, a deep winter's desire for warmth.

The alpha wolf stepped closer, close enough that her steaming breath tickled my nose. Her eyes danced with cold burning light, and she spoke in a voice that made my blood hum.

"Outside your life waits everything you've never known," she said. "There are worlds, child. There are ecstasies."

I then recognized the allure that lit her eyes, the unspeakable longing that glimmered in their depths. It had seemed this whole time to be some fantastic, alien desire, reaching out to me from a distant world. Perhaps it truly was. But more simply than this, it was hunger.

Plain hunger.

That ancient, unsleeping hunger, older than the first furred thing that ever gave rise to the races of dogs and wolves and men. Hunger had brought this wolf across rivers and mountains and endless frozen plains to meet me in that moment. I can still see her face, the final image of the dream before the other wolves tore into me and I died and I awoke -- her face with eyes that spoke of open loneliness, her face, so noble and gentle and motherly, her face, as beautiful and ancient as the stars.

- Mother Horse Eyes