Set in the outskirts of Rome in the first century A.D., the story tells of the Roman poet Ovid, and how his sudden exile to a land of barbarians helped to evolve his view of nature, civilized life, and the inextricable relationship between place and perspective. They close their human mind like a fist and when they open it again it is a wof's paw.An Imaginary Life is the 1978 historical-fiction novella written by Australian author David Malouf. Later I heard, again from the goatherds perhaps, that there is indeed some part of our nature that we share with wolves, and something of their nature that is in us, since there are men, at certain phases of the moon, who can transform themselves into wolves. I thought of the child, and how wolves must have something in their nature which is kindly, and which connects with our kind, or how else could the child live amongst them? What was frightening was the way the head had been hacked off, with ropes of dark blood hanging from it and the fur at its throat matted with blood.

It was gray, and not very fierce looking, despite the curling back of the flesh over its fanged jaw. And I have seen a wolf's head that one of the hunters brought back to hang up as a warning in his fold. I have heard stories of how they raid the outlying pastures, and once I think I heard one howling in the snow. The wild boy they speak of lives among wolves, in the ravines to the east, beyond the cultivated farms and villas of our well-watered valley. I have heard the goatherds speak of a wild boy, whether this one or another I do not know and of course I do not admit to them, or to anyone, that I know him. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. A black he-goat is up on his hind legs reaching for vineshoots. There are windblown poppies in the grass. The goatherd is dozing against an olive bole, his head rolled back to show the dark line of his jaw and the sinews of his scraggy nexk, the black mouth gaping. I see myself – I might be three or four years old – playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance. A NOVEL BY David Malouf WHEN I first saw the child I cannot say.

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf