bunn

I was thinking about Placidus meeting Esca on the wolf hunt in Eagle of the Ninth, and then I started thinking about Cub again, in the context of my thoughts about wolves.  And I started thinking about animals living illicitly in country that is heavily populated by people, like these beavers and for that matter, the wild boar that are out there that I never see. And somewhere, I forget where now, I read an article about how wolves now are at the far end of a scale of wildness, because we have driven them away from people.  They were for so long symbols of ferocity whose presence could not be tolerated, that we have now created wolves which are very far from being dogs, and dogs which are very far from being wolves.

That brought me back to the idea that British wolves, eighteen hundred years ago, living half-hidden among towns and villages and farms, might not be quite the same as wild wolves as they appear to us today, in the remote places where there still are wolves.  And then I remembered that in Eagle of the Ninth, Esca said that three hunters went into the den where the cubs were hidden.  A normal wolf den is a low burrow of a thing, it would be hard to get three men into it, particularly when one of them was the elegant Placidus.

And before I knew it I had written this very short, rather sad story.

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I started this thinking that Rosemary Sutcliff's picture of Cub, the wolfcub raised by Marcus and Esca, was really too rosy and doglike. I finished it thinking that it's more accurate than I'd originally thought, though there are some holes.

Cub is brought to Marcus as a very young pup: his eyes are open and he has teeth but he's not very mobile and he's not weaned. This adds up quite neatly to suggest he is about 15 days old when Esca takes him from his den in, say March of the year after Marcus is wounded.
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