The tribe sheds skins. This I did not know until now.
Each night they climb from their soft hides, the second furs, the ones with no beast left inside them, and they drop these skins into a woven mouth in the corner. The mouth waits. It does not chew. It only fills, higher and higher, a nest of collapsed people. I count them there: the small skins of the young, the big skins that still smell of the strong one who leads.
I put my hand in. It is warm at the top. This is a good sign. Warm means a body was close, means the tribe was here, means I am not alone in the dark den. I sleep beside it some nights, breathing the smell of my people even when my people are gone into their sleep-caves.
Then the sun comes and the tribe does a strange thing. They carry the mouth away, gather up all their shed selves, and give them to the roaring wet spirit that spins and spins. The skins come back changed. Cold. Flat. No smell. No warmth. Their own scent, hunted out of them on purpose.
I do not understand. A wolf marks what is his. The tribe hunts down its own mark and destroys it, again, forever, every turning of the sun.
Then the mouth is empty. Waiting.
It will fill again. It always fills again. The tribe cannot stop shedding, cannot stop washing the shedding away, cannot stop.
I have decided. This basket is not a nest.
It is a hunger that eats the tribe slowly, one warm skin at a time.