Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) by Randall Farmer Page A

had been hot and sticky.  Now, it was cool and crisp and pleasant.  He didn’t care.  He could move without pain for the first time since he had been a man.  All because of the good loving.
    There was only one problem:  his man memories were still fading. 
    Why worry now?  The world was filled with scents and noises and places to run.  A world filled with cool breezes and wet earth, with foxes, songbirds, squirrels, chipmunks, hawks, and deer.  He knew them all by their scents, which struck him as strange.  He ran, along an abandoned trail, and caught another scent.  Human.
    He hadn’t lost enough of his human memories to forget that humans might be dangerous.
    He went the other way, farther up into these pine forest hills.  Into the mountains whose tops came deliciously close to the clouds themselves.  Hours of padding up switchback trails, following power lines, jumping fences.  He wondered what he was that he could move this way. 
    He stopped under an immense fir and looked himself over.  The air smelled safe here under the towering pines, safe enough to stop moving.  He no longer had hands.  His arms were now legs, his hands elongated, large paws with nasty looking short claws on them.  With a little difficulty, he bent himself around to glance at his rear.  Yes, he had a tail back there.  His waist was narrow, his legs huge and muscular, ending in paws.  His dick had grown huge as well, sheathed like a dog’s.
    He was a dog.
    He sure as hell hoped he was a big dog.
     
    Hours later, the creek he followed plunged over a small waterfall into a pool.  The pool was a little thing, a few feet across, edged with mosses and ferns.  The sun crept lower in the west, the last of the high clouds having cleared.  It would be pleasant tonight, near freezing but not quite.  Clear tomorrow; rain the next day and warmer.  He just knew.
    He studied his reflection in the pool.  Yes, a dog, but not a dog’s head, a man’s head with a snout and floppy dog ears.  His gray fur had red highlights.
    He thought dogs were color-blind.  Well then, he wasn’t quite a dog.
    Below, he heard a car chugging up the mountain.  He ran toward where the noise came from, unable to stop himself.
    Several hundred feet below, a road gently switch backed up the mountain toward a low pass and went on by.  Another road came in from the left, several hundred feet lower down.  That road paralleled the mountain slope, and ended at the first road in a complicated intersection.  He crept down toward the road, anticipating.
    Anticipating fun.
    He hid himself in the overgrown tall grass by the side of the road and waited.
    The next car didn’t come until the sun fell to within its width of the horizon.  A small car, a… Mustang .  A young woman and her daughter rode inside.  After the car passed him, he took off running, barking in pleasure.  The hard running exercised all his muscles. 
    The woman in the car saw him in her side mirror and screamed, but couldn’t speed up.  Not on this twisty road.  In fact, soon she would get to the stop sign where this road met the second.
    He caught up with the Mustang at the stop sign.
    Nope.  He wasn’t a small dog.  He was a large dog, pony sized, taller than the Mustang but not as long.  He expected the woman to peel off, drive away, but he sensed something wrong with her.  She wouldn’t look at him.  He sniffed.  Terror.
    “Mommy!  Doggy!” the little girl said.  She wasn’t terrified.
    He didn’t want to be terrifying.  He missed people.  He had been a man once.  Being around people quieted the ache inside, made him feel like he wasn’t slipping slipping into a world of no words.
    “Hello,” he said.  Poorly.  He didn’t get the ‘h’ sound right, and the ‘l’s weren’t there at all.  In fact, it sounded more like a bark than a ‘hello’. 
    The woman squinched her eyes shut and held the steering wheel with corded muscles, unmoving.  No fun here.