Two dogs and a cat walked into a house in rural Portugal, and a family started writing down what happened.Rudhra came crying and stopped the moment he crossed the threshold. Olímpia came out of the wilderness with no name, no papers and nobody looking for her, and chose her own people. Thrikali stayed a few months and vanished. Nobody set out to make a myth of any of it.But the names kept turning out to mean things nobody had intended. The registered papers said one thing; the village said another; and the oldest stories we have — of she-wolves who fed abandoned twins, of a goddess who arrived out of fury, of a god whose name means both the roar and the red — kept describing what was happening on an ordinary terracotta floor.This is that record. It moves from the myths to the household and back, and asks whether the divide between the observer and the observed is real at all — putting the Vedantin and the physicist in the same room, tracing zero and infinity from Sanskrit to Oxford, and refusing, throughout, to tell the reader what to conclude.Then, in the last chapters, the two animals are given the telling. They describe a day that neither of them understood, and ask the questions their humans cannot answer — ending with the only one they have ever really had:What were you, before we came?Forty-six photographs. Told in three volumes and eighteen chapters. Written for anyone who has ever suspected that the creature asleep on the floor knows something they don't.For readers of The Philosopher and the Wolf and The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.