The Muttons walked on only two of their limbs, which was quite an advantage, as it meant that they could use the other two for wielding tools and carrying things. They soon found, however, that carrying things was rather like hard work. Even so early in their history, the Muttons had developed a general distaste for work and so they were much heartened by a couple of discoveries made by the proto-intellectuals of the flock.
The first discovery was that, by bribery, threats and a certain lack of imaginative sympathy, the Muttons could persuade other, usually four-legged, species to carry things for them. What was more, some of the more suggestible species were even cajoled into carrying the Muttons themselves, including those who were quite big enough to walk.
The second thing the Muttons found out was that discs and spheres were a lot easier than other shapes to push along the ground. It followed, as one ewe after another, that things balanced on top of circular shapes were also easy to move, and that things balanced on top of circles pulled along by four-legged species were a positive doddle, leaving the Muttons plenty of time to develop the alternative pastimes of warfare, poetry and recreational drugs.
With the benefit of these innovations, along with a few minor serendipities to do with travelling across snow (sledges and very hairy four-legged species) and water (sails, oars and fellow Muttons unfortunate enough to have been born into the wrong tribe), transport, agriculture and trade trogged along quite happily for many millennia. And, for the rare occasions when the Muttons weren’t out moving things around, they had come across a third Useful Thing which was to make their home lives a good deal jollier.
This, as the astute reader will no doubt have guessed, was fire. Fire kept away the less amenable of the planet’s co-inhabitants, warmed the chilly Muttons in winter, helped them to see in the dark and enhanced the variety and taste of their cooking, which had previously consisted of variations on the theme of salad. Fire required fuel, but for the first couple of hundred thousand years there were plenty of trees on the planet, which could be cut down and cheerfully burned. A few Muttons found lumps of black stuff in the earth which burned more slowly and quietly than wood, but among the tribe we know best, the Angry-Sackmen, the grubby black stuff was left to the poor, who couldn’t afford to be finicky about their fingernails.
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