A Night With A Wolf
Bayard Taylor
High up on the lonely mountains, where whe wild men watched and waited; wolves in the forest, and bears in the bush, and only I on my path belated. The rain and the night came down, the wind came after, bending the props of the pine-tree roof, snapping many a rafter. I crept to a fir with thick-set boughs, and a sheltering rock behind it. There, from the blowing, raining, crouching, I sought to hide me. Something rustled; two green eyes shone; and a wolf lay down beside me! His wet fur pressed against me; each of us warmed the other; each of us felt, in the storm dark, that beast and man were brother. And when the falling forest no longer crashed in warning, each of us went from out hiding place forth in the wild, wet morning.
"If you talk to the animals, they will talk to you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them. And what you do not know you will fear. What one fears, one destroys."
