3.31.2010

The Wolves

There was a raging in his heart, like an earthquake, and the waves of his emotions overran him. As a child, he didn't fit in; his father called him wild and his mother, vibrant. If he had an outlet as he grew, he reflected, he may not have ended up on a mountain, in the wilderness, alone.

That isn't true, he told himself. He always had a wolf inside him, and things could be no different.

He sat against a sugar pine, in the middle of the cold winter weather, a fire dug out of the earth, with warming stones in place for the long rest of the evening. He heard the wolves in the darkness, baying. Smiling to himself (for there was no one else to smile to), he whittled at the manzanita branch he found hiking earlier. His hands worked methodically to keep the cold away, scraping here, pruning there. From the raw branch, he began the work and turned it, slowly, into what would be a whistle. It had little shape now, but he saw it, deep down, the whistle in the wood. The potential. The shape within the shapeless.

He kept at it, the working, the whittling. It kept the cold, and the lonelisness, away. The pack he brought into the mountains was now much lighter than when he left the city - he was coming to the point when he would only be able to rely on his own arms and legs and heart for nourishment.

It has come to this, he thought. Soon, I will be a man.

Hours later, he let the fire sink down to embers and covered himself, looking through the pine needles to the expanse of stars above. We never saw these at home, he thought. The Milky Way had begun its sojourn across the night sky and he knew without knowing that it was past midnight. The wolves had gone quiet a while ago and the night animals were all away, tending to their own needs.

Sleeping would be the need most at hand, he reasoned. And yet, he could not sleep. The moon's light was too bright - the woodland was too quiet. His mind wandered too briskly. He called to mind his mother, his sister, his dad. He wondered where they were, what their beds were made of, who they kept for company in the night.

As for me, I have the wolves.

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