I had been in the marshland for about half an hour when I heard the dogs. So far away as to be little more than a whisper in the brain, their baying chilled my happiness in an instant. Dogs were old implacable enemies....
I was running through a fen. Miry bog sucked at my naked feet, stale-smelling sweat covered me, my face was lashed by the thorned branches of a legion of trees that sprang from the rich muck of the morass. Hounds gave tongue in a continuous chorus of hate, seemingly all about me. I ran and ran. Now I could hear the thick shouts of men, in a language that was foreign to me, though it had almost as many gutturals and slurrings as my own speech.
I was of a very ancient race in these parts (wherever they were). My people were classed as vermin, along with the dire wolf and the gray ape and the last surviving remnants of the hyena tribe. Man hunted us with his dogs, great vicious brutes with saber fangs.
I burst through a screen of hanging moss and fell into a spongy patch of swamp. I struggled, miring myself worse than ever. Then the dogs were upon me, screeching their delight. Men followed them and ringed the quagmire. Great satisfaction was on their faces as the boldest of the dogs leaped forward to gash my upthrown arm.
"Haah," exulted their leader, and spat at me. "Pict...."
I shook away the horrible and haunting remembrance. I heard the hounds of the twentieth century, perhaps a little closer than before.
So I had been a Pict! One of the aboriginal British men (or manlike beings) who are supposed eventually to have bred and merged with Aryan invaders and thereafter with the Scots. Was this the most ancient of my racial memories—or were they recollections of former incarnations of myself, my own individual soul? Whichever they were, and I knew they were one or the other, was this the eldest of them? Or would my waxing memory bring forth still earlier pictures?
If the Picts were subhuman, or even utterly nonhuman, and their uncanny blood had come through the incredible cycle of the centuries to rise anew in my veins, wouldn't that explain my war with the genus homo?
Surely it would!