The tent was set up, the sleeping bags rolled out. They had eaten macaroni and cheese and sausage. The other campers, of which there were only a few, had turned in, but they kept the fire fed, and they drank their wine as the complexity of a summer night in the Great Smokies wove around them.
Really, she was tired. She was making excuses for going to bed. They were sitting at the picnic table. Everything was damp, especially her eyelids.
At first it did not seem real. A thin high sound, far off. He held up his hand, and their eyes met in disbelief, in awe as the eerie howls of the wolves–red wolves–touched their ears, their ear drums beating to this wolfsong, carrying that wild message deep into their brains.
She looked away from him, into the darkness, the chorus of wailing unhinging her, knots and bindings slipping, her heart memorizing this thrill, this ache of a beauty so rare, this song born in the throat of a small wolf, then thrown into the air, this song that had driven men to gather their guns and their traps, there are no words for the beauty of it, so deep it touches you.
And as quickly as the song had begun, it ended. The night became a scattering of crickets. They looked at each other, but said nothing. The night was finished for her. She went to bed.
But she made a place in her body that held the memory of that sound. She could enter that place, if she walked carefully in her thoughts, as one might enter a temple. It was near the center of her chest, with tendrils spreading to her throat.
There are very small things that change you. There are things so–beyond–that when you experience them they pull you into a place you could have never imagined. What could make her body rejoice like that? What sound had ever made her feel so alive? It was as if the wolves had sang her into creation.
