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Sometimes when the sun, the scents and
    the sounds made him dizzy with languid pleasure, a delight
    so sweet it almost tickled, he lay belly up, rubbing his back
    against the grassy carpet. He wriggled, his body coiling,
    front paws waving. Afterwards he got up quickly and shook
    his coat. When he ambled off he was himself again, composed
    and on guard. Behind him the grass was flattened and
    the thin blades of cranesbill and starwort were pressed down.
    Vessels had been broken, green blood was flowing. Slowly
    the work began to restore everything to its pre-disaster state.
    Fluids found their way to vessels that didn't leak. Wounds
    dried up and blisters healed. By then, though, he was already
    lying on a rock near the shore, licking his coat clean from
    everything that had stuck to it in the sea of grass.
    At night the large grey creatures emerged. They were often
    standing down where the forest met the marsh. In the stillness
    they resembled rocks and shadows, heavy shapes that
    dissolved in the dark and seemed to disperse among the tree
    trunks. His ears and nose told him where they were but his
    eyes could no longer make them out.
    Resting in his old sleeping place, he became accustomed
    to them. Their movements were slow and imposing and they
    made careless noises, breaking twigs and tramping through
    mud with their hooves. They made wheezing sounds and
    the bark ripped in their powerful teeth. He saw their legs
    moving, white in the dim light. They were always together.
    It was quite a while before he realised there were two of
    them. If one appeared at the edge of the marsh in the erratic
    dawn rays flickering before his eyes, if the shadows and the
    sound of snapping twigs coalesced into a single body, then he
    knew there would be another one down there too. He listened,
    one ear cocked, for the one who was missing.
    But he didn't know they were yearlings, or that the female
    moose who had given birth to them and nursed them last
    year was the carcass that had kept him alive from late winter
    to spring. The hunters had sent the dogs after her but she got
    away. She'd survived till midwinter with a shattered jaw, and
    had died of starvation.
    His nose was honed in on voles and mice and the concentrated
    smell of bird nests; he ignored most of what the
    ground and grass could tell him. There was a blur of smells
    everywhere.
    But he followed the tracks of the moose. Plunging into
    the fresh trails they made gave him intense pleasure. His
    entire body quivered in a frenzy of joy. But when he picked
    up their scent he stopped. He could hear them wheezing. A
    yelp forced its way out of his throat, confusing him, and he
    pulled back.
    Restlessness came over him. All the creatures living in
    dens and holes, moving about in the pale light under the
    trees, creating new wafts of scent in the night, all of them
    had their own ways. Only he walked with his nose to the
    ground, searching and listening, waiting. When he'd found
    a mouthful that relieved the pangs of hunger he looked for
    a place to sleep, but he was always expectant.
    No one came. His restlessness stirred as the light faded. It
    became intense when the smell of moose in the tracks
    merged with their scent in the air. Bewildered, he withdrew
    under a spruce, licking his paws and listening. It seemed as if
    each and every creature around him had scents and trails that
    were their own and he was the only one searching for a way
    to make sense of a jumble of sounds and restless shadows.
    But he didn't find it. He could find no trace of the pack he'd
    once belonged to.
    He was on his own, working out what he needed to
    know. A short-eared owl had swiped him across the face
    with the side of her wing. He'd thought it was a game bird
    when he heard the swoosh, but game birds fled, flapping off
    between the trees, not even attacking in self-defence. Owls,
    though, dived down. From that day on he listened for that
    swooshing noise, distinct from the sound of game