The elders tell us this story:

In the beginning, when the Earth was warm, we lived on the land as Man, in those cities now sunken on the ocean floor. We were fat and lazy and proud, and we built machines to do our living for us. And while, for a time, we were blissful in our ignorance, we soon grew tired of our sedentary lives, of the softness of our bellies, of looking at each other with dull and dreamless eyes.

So we abandoned our cities and machines, shed our clothes and shoes and left them to rot on our roads, and we came to dwell in the hills and trees. We grew fur to protect our skins. We hunted and became hunted, and on eating the flesh we knew Good from Evil, and our eyes opened wide and our eyes became wild; our hearts grew strong and we felt moonlight on our faces.

We became wise. There was knowledge in the earth, and under it, and we crawled on four legs to become closer to her breath. Survival was a struggle in those hard places, and the struggle became life, and we grew tails to defend ourselves, our fur giving way to scales, hard and shiny like the stones in our stomachs. We raked at each other with our claws and tore at our enemies with our teeth, and on those short stretches of rest we laid on rocks warmed by the sun.

And when the struggle became too much to bear and the blood came to taste bitter in our throats, we left those hard places behind us and moved to the edge of the world, where the land met the sea. It was quiet there, vast and infinite; we tasted salt in the air, and when the sun finally ended her slow dance across the sky and sank into the blue, we crawled in after her. The land receded behind us, growing smaller and smaller until it was a pale green line wavering in the horizon. Then that, too, was gone, and we were alone, and we took our last breaths and slipped beneath the waves, and all around us were safe waters, and all around us was home.