savage Sylvan, lately gashed by the tusks of a wild boar;

Glen who was dropped from a wolf at birth, and the bitch who gathers

the flocks in, Shepherdess; Harpy, flanked by her two young puppies;

River, the dog from Sícyon, sides all taut and contracted;

Racer and Gnasher; Spot, with Tigress and muscular Valour;

Sheen with a snow-white coat and murky Soot with a pitch-black;

Spartan, wiry and tough; then Whirlwind, powerful pursuer;

Swift, and Wolfcub racing along with her Cypriot brother;

Grabber, who sported an ivory patch midway on his ebony

forehead; Sable, and Shag with a coat like a tangled thicket;

two mongrel hounds from a Cretan sire and Lacónian dam,

Rumpus and Whitefang; Yelper, whose howls could damage the eardrums –

and others too many to mention. Spoiling all for their quarry,

over crag, over cliff, over rocks which appeared to allow no approach,

where access was hard and where there was none, the whole pack followed.

Actaeon fled where so many times he had been the pursuer.

He fled from the dogs who had served him so faithfully, longing to shout to them,

‘Stop! It is I, Actaeon, your master. Do you not know me?’

But the words would not come. The air was filled with relentless baying.

Blacklock first inserted his teeth to tear at his back;

Beast-killer next; then Mountain-Boy latched on to his shoulder.

These had started out later but stolen a march by taking

a short cut over the ridge. As they pinned their master down,

the rest of the pack rushed round and buried their fangs in his body,

until it was covered with crimson wounds. Actaeon groaned

in a sound that was scarcely human but one no stag could ever

have made, as he filled the familiar hills with his cries of anguish.

Then bending his legs like a cringing beggar, he gazed all round

with his silently pleading eyes, as if they were outstretched arms.

What of his friends? In ignorant zeal they encouraged the wild pack

on with the usual halloos. They scanned the woods for their leader,

shouting, ‘Actaeon! Actaeon!’, as if he were far away,

though he moved his head in response to his name.

‘Why aren’t you here,

you indolent man, to enjoy the sight of this heaven-sent prize?’

If only he’d not been there! But he was. He would dearly have loved

to watch, instead of enduring, his own dogs’ vicious performance.

Crowding around him, they buried their noses inside his flesh

and mangled to pieces the counterfeit stag who embodied their master.

Only after his life was destroyed in a welter of wounds

is Diana, the goddess of hunting, said to have cooled her anger.

PYGMALION

Metamorphoses, Book X

Ovid

Translated by Ted Hughes, 1997