“Christians believe that God came amongst us as a man, do they not? Yet the Muselmen say he was only a prophet, and that God has no name...We fight and kill each other so readily, yet if I had been born in the East, would I not believe the stories they believe, and if they had been born here, would they not be Christians?”

“They came silently as ghosts themselves, swept along like leaves being scattered about them in the scurrying east wind. Yet their running forms seemed carved out by the wild landscape, in the natural facts of evolution, so they were almost perfectly camouflaged, shielded by the deepening colors of autumn change.”

“That story placed man above the animals, until man's fall at Eve's hand, and linked humans to God himself, fashioned in his image. But now the black wolf was telling the girl a grave secret. That man was an animal too.”

“Fear is an instinct, like hunger or anger. We need it to help us survive, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. It lets us know whether we should fight or flee.”

“Mamma," whispered Rannoch as he nestled by her side, "what is man?" Bracken looked into her calf's eyes. "Man? Man is something you must always fear." "But why must I fear him?" asked Rannoch. "Because, my little one...man is cruel and cold. He eats up everything he touches. He enslaves Lera and breaks the laws of the forest. Because, Rannoch, he is the only creature that hunts without need.”

“The future?' came the voice sadly...'And do we really pass anything on to the future, except mirrors of ourselves? What if the future is as painful as the past?' 'That we can never know,'answered the wolf angrily. 'That's for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe the present. Here and now...What we owe to ourselves, and to those we're bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything.”

“Yes,' growled Fell, 'for animals do not know what they do, but man has knowledge of his cruelty.”