The Other White Meat

"It smells funny," Lupus said. 

Nubilus sniffed. "It does. But it's not an unpleasant smell, is it?" 

Lupus nudged the small bundle with his nose again. "A little like flowers.  Flowers that have soiled themselves." 

Nubilus rolls her eyes at her husband. "It smells better than that.  Why don't you open it and see what's inside?"

Lupus stalked around the wrapped bundle and examined it from every side. It didn’t sound or smell like anything deadly, so he took a corner of the little pink cloth in his teeth and pulled it back.  He jumped backward at what he saw.  "What IS it?" Nubilus asked as she stepped closer.

"Don't touch it!" her husband warned. "We don't know what it is or where it's been!" 

"Oh, please, Lupus!" Nubilus teased. "You worry too much!  Look how pink and lumpy it is! It's not going to hurt us." She took an appraising sniff, which encouraged Lupus to stalk toward it.

"It looks like one of the baby pigs we snatched from the barn last week.  Only uglier."  He licked his lips. "I wonder if it tastes the same." 

Just then, the thing in the bundle started to squirm, and some feeble sounds escaped its mouth.  As its two tiny eyes squinted to the sky, it threw its mouth open and screamed until its face turned red. 

Lupus opened his jaws and lunged for the thing, but Nubilus stepped in front of him. "What do you think you're doing?!"

“How else are we supposed to get it to shut up?!” Lupus argued.  “It’s crying is going to draw the entire rest of the pack, and then we’re going to have to share!”

"You are NOT eating this creature, and we are certainly not sharing it with the pack!" 

Lupus lowered his ears and whined. "But I love pork!" 

"Lupus, this isn't a pig!" Nubilus barked.  “Look, no hooves! It has ... fingers.  Like a human."  Nubilus lay on the ground and wrapped herself around the small thing, placing her nose and tail close to its face. A second later it stopped crying. 

Lupus, on the other hand, had backed away from it again. "What are you doing!?" he cried. "If that thing is a human pup, we need to be gone! Do you know what humans pups come from?  Big humans.  Do you know what big humans have? Guns." 

"I think someone left her here," Nubilus said.  Her eyelids drooped pleasantly as she nuzzled the baby with her nose. 

"How do you know it's a ‘her’?" Lupus asked. Nubilus took the edge of the blanket in her teeth and lifted it, and lupus turned away, disgusted. "Okay, I get it.  But why do you think someone left her here?" 

"She's too small to have run away on her own, and she was wrapped in this blanket," Nubilus rationalized. "Plus, look at this." Gently she dug around inside the blanket with her snout, and emerged with a piece of paper gently clenched in her teeth. On it were several lines of human writing.

"So some human heard I liked pork and wanted to leave me a piglet. I mean, a humanlet. Either way, I don't want it. Let's go." 

"Let's keep her, Lupus." 

Lupus tripped over all four of his legs. "I told you, I don't care how much I like pork, I'm not giving some human more excuses to take shots at us!" 

"Not to eat!" Nubilus said, outraged. "As our pup." 

Lupus' face fell. "Please, Nubilus, we've been through this.  We can't have pups.  We've tried."

"But what if she was meant for us, Lupus?"  Nubilus pushed.  "What if she's the pup we've always wanted?" 

"I've never wanted a human pup!" Lupus cried.

Nubilus' eyes became fierce. "It wasn't a mistake that we found her. It can't be. You are not going to eat her, and I am not going to leave her for something else to eat her."  She nuzzled the baby lovingly with her snout.  "She needs us. All we have to do is get her back to the den.  We can decide what to tell the pack later."

Lupus crept closer to the baby and put his nose inches from her face.  For a moment her tiny hands reached for him, but then she snatched a whisker and plucked it from his snout.  Lupus yelped and skittered backward. 

"See?  Our pup already takes after you!  Ferocious from the start!" Lupus shook his head, and when he opened his eyes he found a look in his wife's eyes that he had always hoped to see, but had never appeared until now from their inability to have their own pups.

 "I can't believe I'm doing this," he grumbled.  Lupus knelt, took the edges of the blanket in his teeth, and gently picked the baby up from the ground. Nubilus grinned at him in a manner than only wolves can distinguish, and the two trotted to their den to plan a way to convince the pack that what they had found was their pup and not a humanlet.    

Nubilus licked her husband’s snout.  “I love you.”

“I luff you, too,” Lupus replied, his mouth full of blanket.