The Black Wolf

The Story:

The Black Wolf returns to my own life, but later.  After loss has already done its work on my soul.  By this point, my brother was gone to suicide.  My marriage was ending.  The ties that once anchored me to the world had thinned to almost nothing.  That day, I was alone in the backwoods, watching a clearing for hours while hunting wolves.  When they finally appeared, I saw them step into the open, cross the clearing, and then vanish.

I stayed still, not knowing if they had slipped past me or if the rest of the pack was already around me.  I considered it without urgency.  I wasn’t afraid.  I wasn’t angry.  Honestly, I didn’t even care.  I felt level with the land, equal with whatever came next.  If a wolf had appeared behind me, I would have fought it to the end.  Not out of defiance, but acceptance.

Years later, a dream rewrote this memory.  In it, there was no fight.  No final stand.  Instead of facing the wolf, I rose, shed my human form, and joined them.  Three shapes moving together under the moon, noses to the ground, part of the same silence.  The song lives in that space between what happened and what might have.  Between readiness for death and the quiet choice to remain.

Lyrics:

Snow drifts whisper on his skin,

Moonlight holds its breath again.

 

He lived where the pines forge men’s names,

In a house with a dying flame.

No love had stayed, no friend remained,

Just quiet debts and days unchanged.

 

He paid his bills, he walked the line,

A heartbeat fading out of time.

A man half-carved from loss and frost,

Living proof of something lost.

 

Still he walked the traps each dawn,

Wondering why he carried on.

In the hush of winter air,

Even the Gods forgot he’s there...

 

At the head of the bay, where the cold winds groan,

He knelt in the snow, feeling carved from stone.

Two wolves in the clearing, their heads bowed low,

Breath held steady, the shot they'd never know.

He blinked and they vanished in the moonlit white,

 

He doubted his sight..

It was a trick of light.

 

He froze with the rifle tight to his cheek,

Snow unmoving, breath gone weak.

The world stood still in a silent trance,

Then a growl behind him broke the stance.

 

He rose as the frost slipped off his back,

Turned slow to meet the coming black.

 

No hope, no fear, no words to say...

Just a life that drifted far away.

 

Snow slid off him like shed skin,

As he faced what hunts within.

 

There inches away in the moon’s faint flame,

A black wolf now stared, and he felt no shame.

They breathed the same frost, heard the heart’s same thrum,

Two dark creatures carved from the nights wild drum.

The wolf seemed to grin, as he narrowed his eyes,

The shadows they stirred...

As the human part dies.

 

No purpose is left, there's no fear left to bind,

The human shape slipped from his animal mind.

So now there are three, one more to the fight,

Their paws are the rhythm.

The moons their light.

 

At the head of the bay where the cold winds roam,

Three shadows hunt where he once walked alone.