Somewhere, millennia ago, someone knelt in the sallowing daylight, next to a sweet-smelling animal, and felt that they had no words. There were no words back then, when the world was larger and silently cruel, but no one had ever before felt that there was an emptiness in that respect. Except, in the den of fern and hollow trees, a lone human knelt next to a slewn beast (ugly and uninspiring of sympathy) with a spear in their lap. They had never before believed that the blood meant something, but now, it was as if the scarlet was trying to speak to them. Or rather, that it was speaking to them, and they were uncomprehending. They did not know how to speak. They did not know that they could.
Perhaps it had to do with the wolves. Perhaps it was the wolves that had wreaked this change in them. They had heard the wolves night and night again, or rather, their fear had heard the wolves, and in return, they had heard their fear.
(Through their fear, they had learned what the world was. Through their fear, they saw and heard and wanted. Their fear kept them alive, and they nourished it, kept it well-fed and comfortable where it was. They needed it to continue its residency and keep them out of trouble.)
But last night, in the caves where they slept in the dirt, huddled with the others, they felt they had heard the wolves themself, unfiltered, unaltered. They felt a pull in their heart not dissimilar to that of fear, but not fear exactly. It was as if the sound had touched them beyond threat of their own survival. For the first time ever, they thought: why? Why did the wolves make those long agonizing cries? It would give them away to their prey for sure. Their eyes kept shifting to the mouth of the cave, as if the night would have the answer, but the night stood silent, as it always had. Was there a secret feeling that had yet to awaken and ruffle its feathers, that the wolves knew of, but they did not? Were the wolves after it, to gobble it all up for themselves with their large yellow teeth?
The wolves’ teeth. And suddenly, the fear was once again behind their eyes and between their ears, and they refused to think that the pull was anything but what had just returned, even though it had been gone. Of course, that is the way that fear works.
Now, the boar and the boar’s blood seemed to appeal to that same feathered feeling, the feeling that was not fear. The human could not look away from the body, its glassy eyes and protruding incisors. They knew that they should be focused on dragging the boar away, and to the others. There was, of course, a drought. They could not help, though, reaching out and feeling the teeth of the animal with their fingertips, and then, felt their own. They wondered whether anything would study their corpse in the same way. At that moment, they thought of their own death. They had never thought of death before. They had simply ran from it.
Perhaps it was the wolves.
It was then that they noticed how late it had gotten. How long had they spent by the side of the beast? (How had they not realized how hungry they were?) It was almost completely dark. They shivered. It was dangerous to be alone at night. They stood. Their legs ached from being in one position for such a long time. As they stretched, their fear became aware that they were not alone; it sensed a presence on the edge of the glade. Slowly, they turned around.
Past the carcass, hidden in the underbrush, crouched something with flashing eyes in the dark. They gripped their spear tighter, but it did not move. The human was strong and quick on their feet. If there was only one, they could take it.
The wolf still did not move.
They cautiously approached the boar with vines from the tree. When it became clear that the wolf was not coming after them, they began to tie a noose around its middle, preparing to drag it off to the cave.
Abruptly, a howl rang through the air. They looked up to see the wolf with its snout to the moon. The sound startled them, and made them fumble the knot. Fear was pressing them to leave, but they were hungry, and the wolf was likely to tear apart their meal if they were not there. They bit their lip, playing with a bit of dead skin. They decided to compromise.
The human shuffled over to a low-branched tree, and climbed up to a branch high above the clearing. They would watch from above, and if nothing happened, or the wolf started to approach their catch, they would drop back down and scare it off. However, not long after the howl, their fear heard the footsteps of another animal sprinting across the foreboding brown leaves of the forest.  No, there were two, no three… and the wolves kept coming. They were surrounded by reflective eyes and heavy panting. Their fear seized control of them, as it did in the presence of the boar, but they could not fight the pack, nor could they run. The fear was useless. Nevertheless it continued to heighten.
The original wolf had moved so that it was standing above the boar, its tail tucked between its legs, crouching to make itself look smaller as a larger wolf approached. The larger one, the leader, it seemed, held its tail up high and alert, and bared its teeth. The smaller greeted the larger by licking its muzzle and whimpering. The human could not help but notice, however, that it kept glancing back at the meat and licking its chops. It was a miracle that the human could notice anything; the fear had come to a climax, and every movement the pack made was mirrored by a pang in their chest.
But then, when the leader began to growl, the fear left them, as if it could not handle the strain of its current vessel any longer. They watched (with fascination? interest?) as it invaded the space of what they had come to view, in this short period of time, as their wolf. Their wolf fell onto its back, exposing its vulnerable belly to the opposition.
The leader started on the boar first, even though it was their wolf that had found it (and they who had killed it, the human thought, annoyed). Then it was the biggest and the strongest. The human could only sit there, helpless (even though they did not seem so helpless anymore), as they watched the pack tear apart their would-be dinner. It was only toward the end where their wolf began to nibble at one of the femurs, which had already been stripped of meat.
It wasn’t a large boar, however. There was not a whole lot of meat. The large wolf was not satisfied, and turned back on the original, who kept gnawing on the bone fruitlessly. As the hair on the back of the leader rose, the human understood what was about to happen and felt a thick syrup of a different sort of feeling in their stomach. It was warmer and heavier than fear, but less desperate than the pull they had felt to the howls the other night. Their wolf was going to die.
They just sat and watched.
They wouldn’t call it a fight. The smaller wolf had tried to protect its meager meal, and the leader would not tolerate dissent. The leader was two times larger, so it tore their wolf apart. That was the way of these things. The human had witnessed similar occurrences among their own group. It was the response of the living wolves that caught them off guard.
Don’t be mistaken: the human knew tears. Humans in particular were close to each other. Their fears were more highly sophisticated than those of other animals, and knew the truth of safety in numbers and the importance of repopulation. When a human died, there was crying, because the fears knew that they were one step closer to being on their own. The response of the wolves did not feel like a response made up of fear.
It was howling like they had heard in the cave, except they came to the realization the the wolves were not howling at the moon. They were howling with it. Of course, the moon couldn’t feel things. The human wasn’t actually completely sure that the moon existed, but they felt that the moon was an extension of themself. The wolves, in turn, were an extension of the moon. The moon did not have a voice, so maybe the wolves spoke for it. Did the wolves speak for them? It was the same, heavy dark feeling as before when they had had their premonition.
They all at once had a distinct urge to join the cry caused by the feeling that was not fear, to call out to the sky and summon, for once, all of its wrath, instead of running. The tree they were holding onto was no longer there, nor the bones of the boar, nor the clearing. It was only the human, the wolves, and the sky. They wanted to say something. They needed the words they did not have, so they let the wolves translate. That night, the human told the sky to paint them with the blood of the wolf, so that no one would ever forget that it was here, that it was alive and had sharp, ferocious teeth.
….

That night on the dirt, beneath stone, the human sat against the wall of the cave, but their mind was really back at the clearing. They did not know how they found their way home, but found nearly everyone asleep when they returned. The human could not sleep, and so they sat and thought about the resonance of the howls against the shape of the land. They thought about how the fear hadn’t returned even now, and how the night was silent once again.
And then it wasn’t.
The whine of a child arose. It was a fast learner, and already knew the ways of fear, and the vulnerability of its soft skin and unsteady gait. It knew that its only defense was the strength of its parents. They expected its parents to attend to it presently, so they did not make a move towards it. However, the longer they waited for the crying to stop, the louder the child became, and gradually, they began to recognize it as the orphan. It too, was in a corner of its own.
And something had changed in them, because they went over to the pup and sat next to it, stroking its hair. It initially bristled, but then leaned into their hand. It quieted, but tears kept streaming down the curve of its face. Before they knew what they were doing, they let a quiet tone rise in the back of their throat, and felt the vibration behind their mouth. The child stilled as the sound grew louder.
The human felt like a tool in the hands of the sound, because it was the will of the sound, not their own, that was driving the soft slow intonations. They wondered whether the wolves had a gentler version of their howls, because that was what this seemed to be. You are here, the human was saying to the child, in the language without words. You are here, and that is okay. I am here too.

Perhaps, though, the wolves had a different version of gentleness.
The child fell asleep, head on their shoulder, and exhaling little sighs. As for the human, they continued to hum into the darkness, and thus, the darkness was not empty.