starxgoddess:

The rain has softened the Earth. All paths leading to hidden burrows and nests beyond my home now bear a virgin layer of moist Earth to be molded by passing footsteps. The sun struggled to remain when I set out, still feebly conceding light and warmth to those below. A glow in golden field. Unable to convince sleep to grant me the rest I sorely need even now, I set out to feel the cool night air on my face. I needed night to fall on me. I needed to be in my element, if only for a moment, to center myself and find a moment of internal calm. I walked. The day died. Good. Kill and blacken the sun. Moonlight. It is an inadequate form of lighting for most, especially for those unaccustomed to the nocturnal life. I though am no stranger to the life offered by the night. The world takes on a different breath under cover of darkness. The night is so much more alive than the day in many ways, in most ways, passing from being a mere temporary state of time to mark the death of one sun before welcoming the birth of another. It becomes a creature. A living entity. And it welcomes its children home. There is nothing to fear in the dark. Often those most afraid do not realize that it is they the world fears most. My boots left behind their signature in the moist Earth, to serve as evidence of my passing and state of mind. Until the next rain. Lost in thought, I looked at the ground as I crossed fields and wandered beneath the cover of tree and thicket. It was at the moment when I decided to return home once again that I saw the paw prints in the soil. The coyote who passed through before me continued on the path north that I travelled. And so I followed. I allowed the prints to lead me until a deeply disturbing sensation set in. Something about the prints had become very wrong. I could not place it at the moment, but something had changed. A cloud obscured the moon for an instant, but when the light returned I noticed the unnerving change in the pattern of the prints. I turned around and I followed my own footsteps back one quarter of a mile. There. The prints. I looked closely. Metacarpal, metatarsal, metacarpal, metatarsal. The heart of the print changed in size. Concave. Then convex. The metacarpal is the pad at the center of a forepaw, identified in a print by its size and shape, always larger than the metatarsal at the hind paw. The coyote moved on all four limbs. I walked north once more, counting each individual print, looking at the depth of the impression, and most importantly, keeping an eye on the pad at the heart of the print. One eighth of a mile. And I noticed the change once more. At the change, the impressions in the soil became deeper and closer together. Metacarpal, metatarsal, metacarpal, metatarsal, metacarpal, metatarsal, metatarsal, metatarsal, metatarsal. The coyote began to walk on its hind limbs. It travelled north. I followed in the few slivers of moonlight the night granted me. I came to a land for no man. A blank, dead space within the field. A circle of wet Earth untouched by vegetation. The paw prints led me into the scar in the field. And they disappeared. There was no evidence to show that the animal ever left the wound in the Earth. The prints simply vanished. Nothing led east. Nothing led west. There was only the nothingness beyond. I looked up at the sky. It began to rain, ever so lightly. The sky’s gentle caress on my face. The final sliver of moonlight disappeared when the sky finally fell. Everything became black. And I was home.