The moon was full and the reflection of its light off the newly-fallen snow lit up the house almost as bright as daylight. I liked these cold, still nights when the moon was high and full. Rather than try to go to sleep and miss the magic, I always hung out on the front porch with my wolves.

I watched them as they moved in the otherworldly light, their eyes glowing a feverish green and their thick coats glistening with health. The strong muscles underneath were clearly defined: a testament to their impressive power. They were restless, as they always were during full moon.

As I was…

I saw Koa, the biggest of the pack lift his nose to the sky and howl, long and deep, a wild cry that still had the ability to give me chills, even after all this time. One by one the others followed. I closed my eyes and let their haunting calls caress my skin and move through me. It awakened ancient memories, old spirits, sleeping shadows. And there were many of those buried in the graveyard of my soul.

When I first wound up at the edge of this mountain I was a fucking mess. Driven nearly mad with the raw brutality and senseless violence I had seen in the Military, I was a disaster waiting to happen. Like one of those tortured men, who got himself a gun, walked into a shopping complex, and blasted everyone, man, woman, and child away, thinking they were doing them a favor, because the world was so fucking irredeemably ugly.

PTSD. Awww … looked like it should be a box with a pretty red ribbon around it. I’ll tell you what it is. It was raw screams that infected every damn thought you had during the day, and chased you into your dreams. You woke up screaming, tearing at your own hair. I began to question everything about humanity. Even my own.

Yeah, I thought about putting the barrel of a gun into my mouth.

Only the image of my mother in her house surrounded by her white picket fence and flag flying proudly in her immaculate yard kept my brains from splattering out behind me.

I had two options: Dive into therapy and deal with all the things I had seen, or get the hell out of dodge and hide from the stupid idea of confronting the nightmare. Only an idiot could come up with such a shit idea – how did one confront what I had seen? The innocent children blown to bits, your mate’s steaming guts in your bare hands.

Guess which option I took?

They gave me meds and wished me luck. What a fucking laugh! The plan was simple. Withdraw from it all for a while. I got into my pickup and began driving, away from anyone and anything I knew. Crossed two state lines and would have driven right through Durango Falls too. Not in a million years would I have dreamed of staying in it. A town forgotten by time.

Fuck, I could smell the backstabbing, fake, two-faced judgmental breeders. I had lived in a small town like that when I was a kid. I knew all about their small-time gossip, their nasty little secrets, and the incestuous bonds between them all. It was the kind of place I’d rather die than live in.

But thirty minutes out of town and I saw a sign:

Thirty acres! The road was snarled up with weeds so I couldn’t even drive into it. I had to get out of my pickup and walk up the long, rutted road.

It was more of a goat’s trail than a road.

But it was also summer, and it was gloriously beautiful: the land, the creek, the forest behind it, even the old house in its sad state of disrepair called to me. I rubbed the dirt from one of the glass panes and looked in through the window. It was all wood, with a big stone fireplace, sparsely furnished, and perfect for my needs, but most of all it was so remote and isolated I knew that it was the right spot to waste my life for a couple of weeks. Out here I could hunt and fish and recover. Get my head straight before I moved on.

As I walked around the property, clearing overgrown creepers and brambles out of my way, it never even crossed my mind that I’d make a life here, but a couple of weeks turned into a month. I felt a new vigor come into my body. There is nothing like hard, physical labor and living off the land to heal a man’s body.

I flushed the head meds down the toilet.

One month slipped into another, and soon the forest was changing into golds, russets, and browns. No amount of books, Youtube videos, websites, documentaries, or award winning photographs could have prepared me for the beauty of what appeared before my eyes. Even as I immersed myself in the spectacular blaze of color, I knew I was facing down a harsh winter on my own. However hard life was, it would be ten times harder once the snows came.

I had to make a decision: stay or go? I decided to wait just until the show was over, last leaves had fallen away, and the first layer of snow had drifted in. After that I would go.

The real truth was I was waiting for the snow because I wanted to see the tracks of the creatures that I knew were playing a game of hide and seek with me on my hiking expeditions. I sensed that they were close, a hunch, a side effect of war, but they never revealed themselves to me.

I chopped six cords of wood, covered them under a tarp, and waited for the first snow to come. I didn’t have long to wait. Overnight it blanketed the ground in white, hushed the air, and changed the landscape into a Christmas picture card.

I packed a bag and left early.