The tribe is gone. All of them.
I stand in the cave and it is wrong. Too big. My voice comes back to me off the walls, which means no bodies are here to catch it. In a good cave, sound dies fast, soaked up by fur and breath and sleeping kin. This place gives my voice back like a stranger mocking me.
I have piled my things in the center. A soft flat rock for sleeping. A box that keeps meat cold, humming its low spirit-song in the dark. This is all my tribe now. Two objects. I have known packs of wolves with more members.
I make the little sun burn from the wall. It does not warm me. It only shows me how much floor there is with no one on it. So I let it die again and sit in the true dark, where at least the emptiness stops bragging about its size.
No breathing but mine. This is the sound a man hears before a big cat finds him, or after the whole tribe has. I keep waiting for the shape of someone to shift in the corner. Nothing shifts. Nothing will.
I have hunted alone. I have slept in trees with the cold biting my back. But a man alone in the wild is still part of a tribe that waits for him somewhere. This is different. No one waits. The waiting is done.
I lie on the flat rock and stare up. Somewhere close, walls away, other fires burn, other people breathe, and none of them know my name.
Bad cave. Safe from rain, safe from beasts.
Not safe from the quiet.