A Wolf’s Wish

By Balto123

To a wolf, time is a nebulous thing. There are no calendars, no watches, and no alarms to mark its passage. When there is no weekend, no church, no Sunday football games, what meaning can the "week" therefore have? Without bills or paychecks, what good then is a "month"? What good is an "hour" when there is no one to charge for it? The days pass, and the seasons change; and nothing else is important.

So it was hard to say how much time had passed before the wolf cub began to realize that there was something different about him.

By that time, he was already leaving the den, making short trips to the stream or the rocks with his five littermates. (There had been eight when he first opened his eyes, but three were gone now.) He loved to stick his front paws in the water, to feel the current pressing by his toes, to see the lights dance across the water when the sun was high in the sky. He wouldn't always go back to the den when the rest of the cubs did; he would stay until he got hungry, or until his mother got nervous and called him back.

That day, as he stood at the water's edge, he heard a strange sound... a buzzing in the sky. He thought he had heard it before, but never when he was outside. Nervously, he started back towards the rocks, where there were better hiding places; but as he did, he looked up and behind him, towards the noise... and what he saw stopped him in his tracks. It flew through the sky, like a bird, but not like any bird he had ever seen; its path was perfectly straight, with no turns, no flapping of wings. And it was shiny, like the water...

He had seen something like that before. He could remember it. But he couldn't remember where, or how.

And, even stranger, he could remember something else... he could remember looking down, and seeing the ground, the trees as small and far away as that shiny thing in the sky...

He ran back to the den, faster than he ever had before, yelping all the way. The adults looked around in confusion when they heard him, for surely nothing was wrong. He didn't stop; he went straight to the back of the den, and wouldn't come out until hunger finally pushed the fear from his mind.

From then on, the wolf cub often had memories that he couldn't place, often couldn't even understand. They seemed wrong somehow. There were no smells, for one thing; just sounds, and sights. And the sights had bizarreness to them, as if there was a different quality to what he was seeing, something more than the difference between light and darkness... but how could that be? And so many of those memories were filled with things he had never seen--huge shiny boxes rising to the sky, and strange two-legged things...

Sometimes, they were more than sights and sounds; sometimes there were feelings as well. These confused him even more, for they nearly always seemed to be wrong. Sometimes, when he licked his father's muzzle and his father brought up food for him, there was a strange feeling of revulsion... and when he grew strong enough to travel with the pack, and he watched them bring down a kill, he sometimes felt a pang of sorrow, of pity. But why was that? What other way was there?

So he tried to put those things out of his mind; he didn't understand them, and they weren't helpful. But still, they continued; and despite himself, he remembered...

The wolf grew, and learned.

Two more of his littermates died, but he flourished. He started hunting small game of his own, and eventually took his place in the hunting pack, harassing the prey and driving it into the jaws of the older wolves. When the kill was brought down, he waited for the older wolves to eat their fill first, as was his place; but game was plentiful, and there was enough to go around. He learned quickly, and forgot nothing.

And one day, he watched the deer carefully as the pack chased it, knew which way it would turn next, and was there when it did... and as he leaped for its neck, there were no odd memories, no second thoughts. His jaws clamped down like a vice, and the blood squirted down his throat, and the deer took a few more strides and went down, and his pack mates were on it before it could try to rise again, and soon it was over.

The pack gathered around the kill, jockeying for position. He stood his ground. Another male--a year older, a bit larger, and slightly higher than him in the social order of the pack--growled at him, nudged him in the side. Almost without thinking, he whirled, snarling, bloody teeth bared, fur standing on end, tail held straight back behind him...

He locked eyes with the other wolf, and they stared each other down for several long seconds, both growling. His muscles tensed, knowing that the older wolf could lunge at him at any moment. But he knew, with every fibre in his being, that if it came to a fight, he would win... and when the elder wolf blinked and looked away, he knew that the elder knew it too.

Then the elder wolf turned and walked slowly away, its tail curled down uncertainly.

He pressed his advantage, following the older wolf, jaws still bared, tail held high now...

...and it rolled over in the grass, exposing its belly, tail curled between its legs, whining piteously.

He got in the older wolf's face, snarling once more, satisfying himself that the matter had been settled. Then he turned, and resumed his place at the kill. The alpha male looked at him questioningly, and he realized that in his excitement he had kept his tail raised, as if in challenge; he lowered his head and tail respectfully to the alpha, and that was that. No one else challenged his place at the kill; the elders left him room, and the younger wolves--and the elder he had just displaced--waited their turns.

Another strange feeling came over him. But this time it was pride, satisfaction. For once, a proper feeling. It was a good sign.

He turned his attention back to the kill, and he ate well.

In many ways, that first kill was the beginning.

From then on, the odd thoughts and feelings came more frequently. He would lie awake at night, curled up nose to tail, looking up at the stars but not seeing them; the strange memories ran through his mind, over and over, and he tried to make sense of them. They all seemed to focus on these pink two-legged creatures, and their tall boxes. Some of those boxes, he knew now, were the two-leggers' dens. Sometimes, in those memories, he would be in one of those boxes, and look into a thing--a thing that was hard and flat, but that the light bounced off, like the water--and he would see a two-legged looking back at him. So these thoughts belonged to the two-legged, not to him.

He wondered what a two-legger's thoughts were doing in his head. Sometimes he wondered if the two-leggers existed at all, or if he was just dreaming things. Yes, the shiny birds had to come from somewhere, but they could be anything...

But then, not long after that first kill, the pack had come across a strange trail--all black and hard, like rock, but all flat, and bad-smelling, and running off both ways as far as he could see. The older wolves seemed unconcerned, but he stared at it, walked up to its edge to smell it more closely, because it was something else he had seen before in his mind, like the shiny birds. And then a loud shiny thing came down the trail, very fast--he ran back to the edge of the trees to watch, with the rest of the pack--and the loud thing had stopped, and he knew that he had seen this thing in his mind too, and he knew what it did. He looked around at the pack, at his littermates especially, to see if they knew it too, to see if they had these thoughts too--and they looked confused, or wary, but he knew that they did not understand.

The side of the loud thing had opened up, and three two-leggers--the first ones he had ever seen, for real, and one of them was young and small--got out, and the wolves looked at the two-leggers, and the two-leggers looked back at the wolves. One of the two-leggers--an older male, he thought--had a little box with a round shiny spot on it, and held the box in front of its head, and the box make little noises. Then the alpha male had turned and trotted away into the woods, and the pack had followed, and he had stayed behind, staring, because he knew that the little box was nothing to fear, and he wanted to see what else the two-leggers would do. And the two-leggers had looked at each other, and they made sounds; and he whined a little in frustration, because he thought somehow that those sounds should mean something, and he should know what it was. But no matter how hard he thought about those sounds, they were still just noises to him. And then the two-leggers had gotten back in their loud thing, and a cloud of something bad-smelling came out, and the loud thing had gone down the trail and disappeared around a curve. And for a moment, he had gotten a strange feeling that he should follow that rock trail, that if he did, it would go to somewhere special, to one of those places in his mind with the shiny boxes that went to the sky.

But he had turned away instead, and run off after his pack. And he had not slept at all that night. And from them on, he never wondered whether the thoughts in his head were real or not.

From that day on, the two-legger's memories in his head no longer seemed so foreign to him, and even the strange feelings didn't seem so bad--perhaps that surge of pride he had felt at his first kill, his first successful challenge, had shown him that there was common ground after all. They could be useful, if they could show him what the two-leggers would
do. And they were interesting.

If he thought hard enough, he could do more than see and hear what the two-legger had seen and heard; he could know what it had thought as well. He couldn't understand most of it; even when the two-legger was thinking to