The Man With The Wolf In His Belly

Once, there was a man who could not stay in one place for very long. He was a shy creature who loved to roam the world, alone. He went on many journeys and travelled very far from home. When he returned, his family would say, “Now, he’s home to stay”. But before long, the man would grow restless and he would, once again, say “good-bye” to those he loved. “I’ll be back soon” he would shout, as he started off on another new adventure.

One day, the man decided that he would travel to the north part of the world. So, off he went. He walked and walked and walked and after many, many moons he reached a far, far, far away land of ice and snow.

It was a cold and lonely place, where the sun only shone in the summer time and the wind howled through the night. Most men would have turned around and returned home, but this man was a curious sort and he wanted to learn all that he could learn about this new land. He stared across the landscape and whispered, “Home”. And there he stayed.

He built himself a simple house out of moss and stones. It was on the outskirts of a village. There, he learned how to hunt and how to fish and how to gather food. He even learned how to make his own clothes and his own tools out of almost nothing at all.

Over time, his hair grew long and a beard covered his face. He carried a long walking stick wherever he went and he seldom bathed. So, the villagers thought that he was a wild man. Some said he was crazy. But he was a harmless man, so the people of the village left him alone. He preferred it that way.

He spent many years wandering in the wilderness, sometimes walking for days and days. He would eat what he found, which was mostly meat, and he would sleep wherever he happened to be. In time, he grew very lean and he rarely spoke to anyone. Sometimes, he would talk to the animals he met, but they never spoke back. Most of the time, he just talked to himself.

One day, the man saw his reflection in a river. He was so surprised by the face that he saw, that he almost fell into the water. He was amazed by the wild looking eyes that stared back at him. He saw that his teeth had grown sharp, and that his hair had turned silver. “I didn’t realize how much time had passed”, he thought. Then, he looked at his reflection more closely. He stared for a long, long time. A smile spread across his face as he noticed, for the first time, that he was a happy man. He had only one question that returned to him, again and again. “Why”, he asked himself, “Do I feel most alive, when I am alone?”.

As the years passed and the man aged, he found himself sleeping much less than he did when he was young. The older he got, the later he would go to bed. Sometimes, he would sit up through the whole night. He loved the silence at the end of the day. He found that there was something in the night air that couldn’t be found in the daytime. “My eyes”, he thought, “see things better at night than they do in the light of day”. He began to believe that all of his senses worked better at night. “Especially my ears”, he thought. “The daytime is always so loud. There’s always some kind of racket from town. But in the night”, he thought, “I can hear the world around me”.

He was fascinated by the sounds of the wind. “How the sound changes with the seasons”, he thought. He loved to listen to the crackle of snow, or to the deafening crunch of ice floes bumping and scraping, or to the quiet murmur of the fire in his stove. The world was so full of sounds which he had never heard before! Over time, his ears became so keen, that he could hear a whisper, from miles away.

Soon, he could tell when an animal was lost or hurt by the sound it made. He knew where a mama bear and her cub were when they were separated and calling out to each other. He liked to think that he could even tell what the weather would be like, by the sound that travelled with it. And so the years passed…

One day, the man walked across the land, like he’d done a thousand times before. He walked silently now, so that his footsteps would not drown out the other sounds of the world. Late in the day, he stopped to rest in one of his favourite spots. There, he sat on one of his favourite stones and closed his eyes. He stayed a long time there, listening and listening and listening.

He listened so closely that he felt like he was at the very centre of the world. It seemed that all the sounds in the universe had begun to circle around him. For the first time in the man’s life, he was completely and utterly still. And then he heard a sound, which he had never heard before. It was the sound of his heart. It filled him with joy and sadness at the same time. And then he was, for the very first time, completely and utterly silent…

He realized, in this moment of silence, that he hadn’t spoken to another soul in many, many months. This saddened him, but although he had been alone for so long, he did not feel lonely. He felt overwhelmed by the power of silence and solitude, but he felt no fear. He continued to listen, and ever so slowly, a new sound came to him. It was not a sound from the world around him.

When the man heard, for the first time, the voice inside of him, he heard only the sounds of nature. He heard the wind and the snow and the birds and the water. He heard the footsteps of the bear and the thunder of a herd of caribou. He heard the grass pushing through the soil and the moss withering in the fall. And then he heard a sound that he knew had always been inside of him.

It was a small, quiet sound, that pushed its’ way gently through him, but he could not make it out. It was a whisper in the midst of all the other sounds that swirled around him. Still, he listened for it. Patiently, he strained to hear it clearly. He covered his ears and crouched down onto his knees. He wished that he could crawl inside of himself to pull the sound out. He tried and tried with all of his might to separate it from everything else. He grew so tired that he put both hands on the ground to rest. And then he heard, one, quiet growl. “Like the sound of a wolf” he thought… And then the man was never heard from again.

If you believe, like many people do, that each person is born with an animal inside of them, then the mystery of a man, who became a wolf, is actually no mystery at all. You might say that he was born that way.

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Tags:

children, fable, myth, story and wolf