Wolf Dreams

Chapter 1-2

OKAY, SO PERHAPS silence was a bit of an overstatement. Sunlight was obscured by overhanging earth and rock, so even the drip of distant water became as loud as a roaring school bus. My feet scraped against pebbles while my breath echoed in the enclosed chamber. And my hand moved without conscious volition to uncover a smoldering coal housed within a tallow-filled lamp.

Light emerged slowly as the body I inhabited fed moss into the minuscule fire. I was here, but not here. Present inside this woman, but unable to do anything other than watch her actions unfold.

The first time this had happened, I’d been terrified. A mere child, I’d thought myself transported into a nightmare and had spent the entire trance struggling to get back out again. Now, though, I was an adult obsessed with archaeology. I could do nothing to hasten my return to the modern world, so I relaxed and took in every wonderful vision as a many-thousand-year-old cave painting gradually flickered into life.

Red and black animals danced across the rock wall before me. Today it was horses, so many horses, with one big bison smack dab in the center. It looked similar to the French cave I’d visited on a research expedition one year earlier, but with different paintings covering the curved and irregular walls.

Even though I knew this experience was merely my imagination playing tricks on me, I began taking mental notes the way I always did. Perfect curves made the animals lifelike, overlapping legs gave the illusion of three dimensions....

Distantly, I knew that my living body would be catatonic and terrifying to my students back in the lecture hall. Distantly, I accepted the psychiatrists’ assessment that these visions were nothing more than a rehashing of materials I’d pored over and studied ever since becoming obsessed with archaeology as a kid.

I knew all this...yet I didn’t care what I was missing in the real world as I gazed greedily at images that both did and didn’t match current scientific knowledge. My hands were speckled with red ochre—the cave person’s favorite pigment. Words I didn’t understand tripped off the woman’s tongue. Then she sucked up a mouthful of paint in preparation for spitting it back out onto the rock face.

Meanwhile, her hand rose to clasp fingers around the eight-inch-long fang that had hung around her neck for as long as I’d been visiting. As always, this single jarring element pushed me out of the daydream. “Saber-tooth cats are from the Americas,” I protested. “This type of cave art was made in Europe.”

Only then did I realize I was speaking aloud, the cave flickering away as a bevy of worried students clustered around me. Meanwhile, tapping against my forehead, was the exact same tooth I’d worn a moment earlier, this time threaded onto a modern metal chain.

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