When Rae let the last of the echoes die away, she opened her eyes to find Mop staring at her. His face had twisted strangely.

“Where did you find such words, child?”

“They just came to me, Mop. I listened, like you said to do. Was it not good?”

Mop hesitated, looking from the girl to the hills, where the words still seemed to be winding their way through the foliage. “It is… the oddest shepherd song I’ve ever heard, Rae.”

“You didn’t like it?” Rae’s face fell. She had wanted to sing like her father.

“I didn’t say that.” Mop ran his hand over Rae’s hair, plucking out a few flossy seeds caught in her locks. “It is just… unusual. Surprising. You are surprising.” Kneeling as much as his knees would allow, he rested his hands on her shoulders. “And I mean that it was lovely, and I hope to hear it in the meadow every day. The sheep want to hear it, too—whatever kind of song you want to sing. Even songs about wolves.”

Rae grinned, her gaggle of teeth each a happy grin on its own.

All that afternoon, as Rae and Mop watched the grazing flock, Rae sang her song. Sometimes she sang it quietly, half under her breath, so it floated just over the waves of grass and the rippling light of the stream; sometimes she shouted it toward the sky so it crashed against the distant mountains and startled the birds from the trees. And when the sun began to dip behind the hills and it came time to lead the flocks back to their shelter, she took Mop’s hand and sang it again as they walked to their house and Nessa waiting in the doorway to wrap Rae in her arms.

“Wolf in the den

the dark of the earth

the creeping of root

the scruffling of dirt

all-belly beast

and all-toothy fur

empty of all

but wordlessness words.”

XVI

WHAT ANIMAL?

Four legs stiff on the rocky ledge, the wolf stood. The wind pushed against his fur. The sun pushed against his fur. Smelling, there was a smelling of sun against rock, metallic and dry, and farther, the heat of dirt around pine. There, too, was a burrowing, a shrew burrowing in the hot, dry soil around the roots of the pine; he could taste its shrewish hide squirming.

He flicked his ears. The scrabbling shrew, the wind against rock, the wind against tree—the noises came to him. He flicked his ears again. There was another sound, something else carried on the wind. What animal? He sniffed. He could not taste it. He did not know the feel of its fur or its feathers or bones. The wind again, a thread of sound. Distant. Soft. What animal? He sniffed and stood and flicked his ears. What animal? What sound?

The wind pushed against his fur. The sun pushed against his fur. Deep in the wolf, something turned toward the sound carried on the wind. What animal?