Heard the wolves today..

I was at the wildlife park volunteering today, though I wasn't actually 'Volunteering' because it was the first session and I just needed to fill out some papers.

So, I got to walk around the park, with no visitors around because it's the off-season.

I was alone, and walking in the gorgeous warmth of the sun that reflected off the bright snow. It was crunching under my feet, and the birds were calling, but there was no other human sound. I was walking past the deer enclosures where they stood watching me, wary but playful; flicking their ears. That's when I heard the wolves calling.

Their haunting sound carried mournfully across the snow, and I was compelled. I stopped, and just listened. Their calls echoed off the mountain but seemed ethereal and haunting. I felt at once primeval and free, but also longing and full of despair that the world was so changed from the way it once had been; tall mist-covered forests aching onwards for ages, only stopping in the valleys where they gave way to river fields and on the plains where they became stretches of thriving desert or endless prairie. They certainly remembered. It was infused in their selves; the drive to roam free through the forests forgotten.

I approached the wolves, and they knew I was coming long before I arrived. They looked with intelligent, fearless eyes; not with challenge, but with vague curiosity; not with contempt, but with a flicker of intelligence as if they knew so much more than their furred formes might othewise suggest. They did not centre about me, nor would I ever have wanted them to. They regarded this form as simply another thing to observe, gazing straight into my soul with their own yellow eyes before padding away again to tirelessly continue the hunt, the search for something in their barriered world.

I knew not for what they searched, for they know the smell of food and it wasn't that which drove them, but they padded ceaselessly between their chain-link walls, over the ridges and past the trees, roving endlessly in their tireless search. It was not anything but beautiful the way their muscles held taught and moved their limbs almost in a prance across the fallen snow. Their huge paws left tracks in lines over and over each print as they followed each other through the place, sometimes splitting off to wander from the main trails, only to reunite again on a hillcrest or pause for a moment and gaze across the lands with piercing eyes. The alpha's large frame was nothing but gracious elegance and concealed power hidden under miles of luxurious fur, and the others were nothing less than ethereal, each one burning with unyielding instinct and archaic grace that shone through in their locking gaze.

One could not look away, and there was no reason one would ever desire to. The howls of the wolves hold rapt the attention of all who will hear, and their ceaseless spirit will send a shiver through one's soul, for all who look upon them.

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