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U nder quiet trees, the pack tensed. They scanned the trees to the east until one appeared to split and a man emerged.

He was tall. They knew him. They sniffed the air and smelt on him the scent of home and the scent of memory.

One by one, the pack stood, circled round their young female and faced him.

The man opened his mouth as if to speak and then closed it again.

He opened his hands and then his long coat as if to say ‘I am unarmed.’ The younger wolves did not understand, but the older ones remembered.

They started to turn, tried to move with the young female.

But she stood firm, still facing the man.

The pack stopped moving and the young female pushed through their ranks. In front of the human she stopped, still standing, alert. Her ears twitched and she glanced backward at the pack. It waited.

The man crouched down until his head was almost level with hers. He did not touch her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I cannot. Not anymore. Not like this. Another way, but not like this. You will have to do it.’

He took off his coat and held it up. The young female sniffed it and then curled onto the floor, arising naked and human, the tracking collar heavy across her breasts. She took the coat and wrapped herself against the cold.

‘I didn’t recognise you,’ she said. ‘You’ve changed. Your smell has changed and now that I’m human, I can see that you have aged.’

‘It is what happens,’ he said. ‘It is what happens when you live like this all the time.’

‘My … mother … she left and now she’s dead.’

‘I know. It’s cruel, the human world. Humans say that animals are cruel, they talk of cats and weasels and parasites and wasps. But humans are worse. They kill for fun and they kill when it isn’t fun. They kill when they’re bored, they destroy because they can.’

‘They killed my mother…?’

‘I think so.’

‘Yet they can love. They can make music.’

‘Yes, but so often the love is smothered and the song is drowned.’

‘That’s true, they surround themselves with noise so they can’t understand.’

‘Yes. Will you stay here now?’

‘I don’t know. I am afraid either way.’