They'll tell you wolves don't howl at the moon. That it's just acoustics — sound thrown upward carries further, ten kilometers across open country, a family keeping track of itself in the dark.

Fine. Sure. And yet: head back, throat open, aimed at the one thing in the sky it will never reach. Explain the posture.

A pack is a family — two parents and their kids, the whole alpha thing invented by men who studied wolves in captivity and mistook a hostage situation for a hierarchy. Real wolves don't dominate anything. They just show up, every day, for the same handful of individuals, and walk fifty miles for them without discussing it.

Most hunts fail. The elk simply keeps being alive. The wolf goes again tomorrow, and the day after, and this is the part nobody puts on a poster: it's not the winning. Nothing that wins that rarely keeps going unless the going is the point.

Twenty thousand years ago some of them chose the fire, and their descendants are asleep on your couch. The rest chose the dark and the cold and each other.

You know which one you are.