I am cold. My bone marrow feels the pain of a gentle, but knifing morning breeze that followed me to the chasm where I now sit. My heart has yet to race with the anticipation of a morning kill. But I am hunting, I am a hunter. I am of the wolf…
Somehow on this yet dark morning his spirit seems gone from my heart. And although I know it shall return soon, still I ask, “Please hurry…” I mention my need?
The one most graceful of The Great Spirit’s creatures, furtively and cautiously moves up the chasm. Directly toward me; the whitetail buck. His neck still swollen with the urges he felt beneath the Rutting Moon. I have come to rob him of his spirit. That which Wankan Tanka has given him. I wonder if he is ignorant of that and in that same instant, I doubt it…
I await the awakening of the fury of the wolf which lives deep inside of me, that which I need just for that moment when I choose to kill. It doesn’t come. The predator within me sleeps for now. I feel a strange gladness rather than that which most who do not know of me, think I feel. They do not know of my love for Mother Earth, my Mother. They do not know of my respect. My reverence, for Her children, thus they often wrongly accuse me of cold bloodedness. I mind not their ignorance for they don’t speak to the same Great Spirit as I. And that is good for it allows me more time with Him…
I know, as I watch this symbol of grace and beauty that we never step twice into the same sylvan cathedral. For nothing her, nothing in the wilderness is constant. Nothing under the sun. The hollows of the whitetail, that within the hunting man, are never constant, but instead under a constant state of change, however subtle…
The buck stops. We look into one another’s eyes, each of us questioning the pungent taste of the moment. Steam funnels from his flared, black nostrils while my breathing I try so hard to subdue. His eyes glow like fragmented obsidian, but they are without fear? I question that which is softly tugging at my heart as he passes beyond the knoll and into the shadows of yet another, changing places beneath the Hunger Moon…
I console myself, my inner-spirit. Satisfied that he did not scent the sleeping wolf within me. Satisfied am I, that for the moment, the wolf sleeps?
And I somehow, though my talks with the Animal People, he shall return when I most need him but today, on this steel-gray morning he must have seen my heart and learned it was already full? He must have scented the sustenance I carried within and I know that he is more aware than I, myself. For I am of the wolf, he knows me well. And he is not of me…