Hello.

I’m a hwlsskohh, or what in your language is called a wlko, or giraffe ocelot, and my name is Perry. That’s not my real name. You don’t want to know my wlko name. Perry is what a morphographer called me when I was a kitten, and the other wlkos thought it was cute or something and it stuck. Even my mothers and fathers hardly ever used my wlko name.

I live with my co-mate, Lop, by a small bay on Bluff Lake in the Meggada Plain. We don’t have any wlkwy co-wives. I did, once, but my co-mates–my twin brother, who the morphographer named Drushka, and our wives, Kanyaa and Ranee, were murdered by hunters about eighty years ago. Our girls were about to become green-eyed. I guess they took them away. And also the two ripened boys. Pets, maybe. Or in a zoo.

We’d been co-mates for forty-nine years. I suppose their skins are on somebody’s floor. Sometimes it makes me cry when I think about it–fifty years is a long time, even for a wlko. Lop thinks crying isn’t manly. I’ve never seen Lop cry, but he’s actually a nice guy and you couldn’t ask for a better co-mate. In the–what did I say? eighty–? years since we’ve been co-mates, he’s never let me go cold. Even once.

Of course, you say: What would you expect? He’s a rupellid.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should explain what wlkos are, and where we live, and how, and what we look like.

Now, I’ve seen mirrors, but I don’t have one, and anyway writing isn’t easy even without looking in a mirror at the same time. Also, I don’t know a whole lot about "life" beyond my immediate family and Clan 36 (and our wives’ clan, Clan 18) and the wlkatar–the big gatherings–and you can sum them up in a sentence or two.

Besides, everything I do seems natural and normal to me. Too obvious to need explanation. But I guess that almost everything wlkon do seems unnatural and unnormal to everyone else.

Since I’m at a loss to figure out what to write down, what I’ll do is stick in here an account written by the last morphographer who visited us, just before Bruno and Robby were born. He lived with my family about eighty-five years ago. One of the last of the visiting morphographers, I guess. Not like the old days–our dads told us that when they were little, some summers the morphologists crawling around the Meggada well-nigh outnumbered the wlkon. But, I don’t know, maybe once they’d figured everything out they lost interest.

Anyway, this guy, named Roper, he left this thing, and a bunch of other stuff at our site when he went off on some kind of trip. Only he never came back. I never heard what happened to him, but it seems strange. He was very smart. I learned stuff from this thing about my own self that I wouldn’t have guessed. Even so, it’s kind of dry reading. Some of the words are real hard, too.

So here goes. I’m not too happy about being called a "beast" and an "animal" all the time. Still less Drushka and Kanyaa and Ranee, such sweet, sweet creatures. All of them. Dr Roper seems to like them, too. That makes me happy. And he was nice about it, and explained that it was just hard for him to think of us as different from the beings he knew on his own earth who had fur all over their bodies.

Oh, yes, and so far as I ever knew, the earth was the earth and the suns were the suns. But Roper told me we actually live on the third planet of ten, and the suns are actually "Gamma Draconis". It’s flattering to think that someone is keeping track of these things.