Chimera Fields a body moving through space

The night is hot and the air is heavy, and Yosemite feels himself at the beginning of one of his father's stories. The kind that start off: There was once a stranger in a strange land, and then he stumbles over the next words, and he knows true uncertainty for what might be the first time in his young life.

He is thirty-two days gone from the land of his birth, and many, many miles past the hunting grounds, the rendezvous, the pearly lake, the den — past everything he once knew.

There was once a stranger in a strange land, he thinks, sent from home to seek his fortune. One lonely night, he was walking along a starlit field.

It doesn't seem like a very good story. He is tired and hungry, and panting through an unfamiliar anxiety: That he is alone. That he is, perhaps, the last wolf on earth. That he might return home and find his family gone. That he might walk for eons and never meet another living soul.

Movement up ahead captures his attention. The thud of heavy paws, a voice: Gotcha, you bastard. Yosemite's heartbeat stutters in his chest, and he picks up the pace and crests the next gentle hill to spot his salvation: Another living wolf, pale and ghostly in the night and staring straight into his soul.

Yosemite stares back for a moment before his gaze catches on the rabbit, and a nervous, ravenous whine slips through his teeth. He bares them in a submissive smile, dropping to his belly and offering a whistling yawn as he crawls forward, tail-tip fluttering whiplike across the grass. He is sure he does not have to tell the other man he is hungry; he reeks of it, and of the general malaise of a lone and untried youth.