Dave woke up to the sound of shattering glass echoing up the stairs.

He was out of the bed before his brain had even woken up. It all came back to him as he was scrambling for a rifle that didn't exist.

Gun in hand, he made his way slowly down the stairs. On the counter next to sink sat a squirrel, he slowly approached while scanning for the wolf. A window behind the squirrel had been broken, but he couldn't see the wolf yet.

This squirrel must've been just as scared as he was, it was just sitting there in shock.

Dave tried to shoo it away, when that didn't work, he reached forwards to brush it onto the ground, to get a better view out the window.

He got a face-full of claws.

Reflexively twitching back in pain and shock he fumbled at his face with his left hand, but the squirrel was already gone.

“What the fuck.” He whispered under his breath.

In the bathroom mirror he examined his wound.

It was three shallow red lines running down his cheek, they weren't bleeding.

He felt a tiny bit violated.

Squirrels weren't supposed to get the drop on humans like that.

It had moved so quickly he'd only seen a brown blur before getting shanked.

He washed his face. Googled whether or not squirrels are carries of rabies. Luckily there were no known cases of transmission, even though this particular squirrel had behaved oddly.

The window was broken by something small, like as stone being thrown at it. Large lower shards were still sitting in the frame undisturbed, meaning that nothing large could've entered through it.

He went outside and carefully removed the large shards of glass and placed them against the brick wall.

Inside, he used a broom to clean up the smaller shards and a vacuum-cleaner to make sure that he got all the tiny ones as well.

Finally, he took a cardboard moving box apart and taped it across the missing window.

Hank's had Plexiglas panes for sale, for whenever a bear got into a hunting cabin while the owners were away.

When he'd made sure that squirrels weren't likely carriers of rabies he'd noticed that something odd was trending about animals, but he was too tired to figure out what new cat video had hit the scene tonight.

The next morning, after brushing his teeth he drove to Hank's to buy a pane of Plexiglas and some sealing strip.

Hank had the news running on his surveillance TV.

“This is some crazy shit.” Hank blurted out.

“What?” Dave asked.

“Animals are getting smarter.”

“Sure they are. You sure that we aren't just getting dumber?”

“Some dude in Ohio has a pet Raven and he was able to hold an actual conversation with it. Also, fuck you too.”

“Staged, probably.” Dave scoffed.

“I figured the same, they sent a news crew out there and they were convinced afterwards.”

“You can convince people about a lot of stupid shit. Ravens are smart, but not that type of smart.” Dave said with finality.

“By the way. What happened to your face? Did you get a cat?”

“Squirrel got me.”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“A squirrel... are you serious?”

“Fastest fucker I've ever seen. Got into my house and scratched me when my guard was down.”

“Do you need to get that checked out?”

“Nah, there's no danger of rabies, I should be fine.”

Their attention drifted to the TV, where a reported was standing in front of a picture of a raccoon: “A large number of raccoons in the LA area seem to have figured out how to open doors. They are running around in large Gazes and have ransacked houses in their path. It is recommended to stay indoors until further notice.”

“Those guys were already good at doing that to begin with. This hardly proves anything.” Dave protested.

“I'm not trying to prove that the end is coming or something, I don't remember this being in Revelations, so we're good. My point is that we have to be careful out here, we're all alone. You should buy a shotgun. Just to be on the safe side.”

“There it is. Should've called it.” Dave said, with a small eyeroll.

“No matter how smart a bear gets, it ain't gonna outsmart buckshot.” Hank, laughed.

“Here, I'll give you a ten dollar discount.” He said victoriously.

Dave left the store with a new Remington 870 and three boxes of buckshot, with fifty shells in each.

He had to go back into the store to get the Plexiglas pane he'd originally set out to buy.

Back home he enjoyed his day off, he'd decided to wait with fixing the window until the following day, because the weather forecast looked fine and he didn't feel like doing it right away.

Instead he did some cursory research using the internet.

There were a lot of videos of pets supposedly behaving oddly, but most of them were only actions that seemed off to the owner, but were still well within expected boundaries of normal pet behavior. Mostly opening doors or some social interaction that was supposed to prove their newfound intelligence.

A very unsettling video of a parakeet questioning its owner about whether or not it was human, was hopefully just a doctored video.

Honestly, watching videos of other peoples pets doing funny stuff could hardly be called research and he might've done it anyway on his day off. Regardless of Hank bringing it up.

This time the wolf met him halfway between the treeline and his house. Standing across from him it became clear how truly enormous it was in comparison to a normal large dog.

Dave put down the chunk of venison and backed away slowly.

He decided to stay, watching at a distance.

Watching the wolf eat the meat was educational. It seemed concerned about not wasting any of the meat, in stark contrast to some dogs.

He walked backwards until he hit the door of his house with his heel. Turned around and hurried inside.

Getting more meat from the freezer was a bit messy since the pieces had frozen together. He hoped that the wolf wouldn't mind some frozen meat, since this piece hadn't been thawed out.

The wolf was laying down in the grass where he'd last seen it. It stood up when he approached it. Dave held out the meat and the wolf took it from his outstretched hand. The wolf carried the piece of meat in its mouth and walked off into the woods.

Dave returned to his house, took off his shoes and hyperventilated from late-onset fear. Calming his breathing he remembered the exercise he'd saved from the previous day. It should help him get his mind off the danger in his backyard.

This exercise was more complicated than he'd initially thought and the creator had tagged image-training onto it, probably in some attempt to appeal to a younger audience. Dave figured that doing it as accurately as possible would give him the ammunition to discredit it afterwards, there were a lot of bogus training-routines floating around. Some of them did actual harm. If this was the case here he wanted to help stop it before someone got hurt.

It took a while to figure out what the original writer had tried to convey, the language used was unnecessarily flowery and at times even seemed arrogant. As if the author was looking down on the reader.

The method itself was a collection of stances that strained his body when he held them for a period of time, while doing image-training, probably to distract from the pain.

A few repetitions later he was too exhausted to continue. His muscles hadn't start to hurt yet, but he didn't want to overdo it and become incapacitated from muscle-pain the next day. There didn't seem to be any immediate issue with this method of training.

It just seemed to be playing into mystique and needlessly complicated language to entice people to follow it.

Nothing wrong with that if it encouraged more people to stay in shape.

Dave turned on the TV and crashed in front of it.

“-experiencing a crisis in material science. A lot of measurements from just a few years ago are no longer reproducible, with increases or decreases in hardness of more than ten percent from previous measurem-”

“-living in changing tim-”

“-tracking a boat on radar, before it vanished in the Baltic sea. A search and rescue operation is currently lead by the USS Providence, the same ship that originally tracked-”

“-Hanna Cortana has had her second-”

He turned the TV off again. Questioning why he even owned a TV when it was just a continuous stream of ads, fear-mongering and celebrity bullshit.

The next morning he found road-killed deer on the main road. He hauled it onto the bed of his truck. It would serve well as food for the wolf.

Something odd was definitely going on, but he wasn't certain if he wasn't just getting cabin fever.

He passed Hank's, who was closed for today and went to church.

The sermon was about standing strong together.

Leaving church, Dave felt refreshed.

He drove home.

At home he looked up a video on how to skin and butcher a deer, but the one he had was mauled beyond recognition.

He ended up just cutting off bits and limbs before stuffing it in the freezer.

Dave fed the wolf and left out a bowl of water for it, just in case.

He once again postponed fixing the window and went to bed instead.