When I was but a small tyke, I used to play with my cousins during the long summer evenings, when the sun would linger in the sky as if it didn’t want to set anymore. And I remember that, every so often, I would notice that one of them, usually the eldest, or one of the eldest, would not show up and never turned back.

One day, I asked my mother about that: did she know what had happened to them? But she didn’t answer, so I asked granny instead. When I did, she sighed, sat comfortably and said: “The howl in the dark has taken them away.”

“The howl in the dark?” I replied, bemused and frightened. “What is it?”

But granny looked at me with concern, and simply said: “You’re too young. I shall tell you when you’re older.”

The next few days I would wake up, convinced I had heard that howl in the dark. But I could never make out anything but the slow breathing of my siblings and my parents. With my heart pounding from fear, I would then crawl up silently to my mother’s bed and curl myself close to her before falling asleep again.

The moons waxed and waned. The seasons ebbed and flowed. Leaves became golden, rusted and fell, to be reborn green and strong anew with the following spring. More and more cousins vanished, and each time I would wonder about that mysterious howl in the dark. Granny died, and she never explained anything to me.

Then I became in turn one of the eldest.

One night during spring, like so many moons ago, I awoke with the definite feeling to have heard that howl resound in the dark. Silently, I tiptoed to the threshold of our home and looked around. But, under the pale moonlight, I didn’t see anything.

Yet I refused to give up. I set out through the meadows to the edge of the forest, that my parents had always forbidden me to enter. And that’s where I heard it, loud and clear. The howl. It was calling to me. Without a second thought, I sprang forward.

Deep into the forest I ran, paying no attention to the roots on which I stumbled or to the low branches that scratched my limbs. Onwards and onwards, to that mysterious call which, I was certain, became closer and closer.

Until I arrived at the edge of a vast glade. They were all there, my cousins and others I didn’t know, gathered around the huge stone that the greatest of them had climbed. And when he spotted me he lifted his face once more up to the moon and uttered that long, tantalizing howl I had responded to. Then he turned to me and in his deep, commanding voice simply said: “Come and take your place, as it was meant to be.”

And now, with many years gone, when one of the warriors falters and surrenders his soul to the great wolf in the stars, it is my turn to ascend that rock and howl to the moon, calling to me a new strapping youngling to take his place in the pack.