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The boy had always measured his childhood in pawmarks. Every evening after school, he would run out into the wide, golden grasslands that stretched beyond his village. The wind would whistle across the tall grasses, and somewhere in the distance, the grey shadows of wolves would flicker, hunting, playing. He had grown up with them, as if they were kin, watching pups stumble over their paws, watching the older wolves keep sentry against the horizon. For him, the grasslands were alive because of their presence.

But slowly, that horizon began to change.

First came the rumble of machines, chewing at the earth. A new road carved itself through the belly of the grassland. Then came the flyover, tall and indifferent, cutting across the sky like a scar. Complexes rose like grey fortresses where grass once swayed. The wolves grew uneasy, their howls more distant, their hunts disrupted by headlights and the never-ending din of traffic.

The boy, now older, still visited the grasslands every evening. He noticed the absences first.  Silence where there should have been rustling, the empty dens. The pack had grown smaller, thinner, and then, one evening, they were gone.

He remembered the last time he saw them: the alpha pair leading their lean-bodied kin across the road, halting at the edges of concrete and steel, as if sniffing out a world that no longer belonged to them. The boy’s throat tightened as he watched. It felt like watching a piece of himself leave. He had hoped they would return, recross into their land, but by the next morning, the grasslands were empty.

The silence that followed was unbearable. Without the wolves, the air felt hollow. The boy still walked there, hoping, though each day it hurt to find nothing but tyre marks where pawmarks used to be. The wolves had been his companions, his teachers of resilience, and now the land seemed ghosted by their memory.

Weeks turned into months. Seasons changed. The boy trudged back from school one late afternoon, his bag heavy with books, his heart heavier still. He was kicking pebbles absentmindedly in the lightly falling rain, when his eyes caught a shape on the dusty trail. He froze.

There it was—sharp, unmistakable—a pawmark pressed into the earth.  He crouched down, tracing its edges with trembling fingers. A wolf. His chest swelled with disbelief, with hope, with something he had not felt in so long. And then he noticed them: smaller impressions scattered around it, uneven, playful, the clumsy prints of pups.

A mother. And her pups.

His eyes stung as joy filled him, raw and overwhelming. The wolves had returned. Against roads, against flyovers, against the world that had tried to erase them, they had come back to stake a claim to the land that was theirs as much as his.

The boy stood taller, his heart beating with renewed strength. The grasslands would never be the same, but life had found its way back. The pawprints whispered a promise—of survival, of resilience, of hope. As a single howl cut through the air, the boy, smiled, his cheeks wet with tears.

The wolves were home again.

Image: AI generated