Werewolf Pack Slaughtered 40 Cattle in One Night — Then They Came for the Farmer’s Family

The Night the South Pasture Went Silent

The first thing I noticed wasn’t the blood.

It was the quiet.

In thirty years of ranching, I’d learned to read mornings the way some men read ledgers—by the small sounds that meant everything was where it belonged. A horse nickering for feed. Magpies arguing in the cottonwoods. The far-off complaint of a calf separated from its mother. Even the wind had habits.

On the morning of October 23rd, 2019, the world outside my kitchen door felt like someone had pressed a finger to its lips.

My name is Marcus Holloway, and I ran Barh Ranch in the Flathead Valley—2,400 acres my family had held since my grandfather carved the first field out of timber in 1947. We weren’t rich, not in the way people imagine wealth, but we had land, water, and enough stubbornness to keep the whole thing running. My wife, Sarah, handled the books with a patience I didn’t deserve. My daughter, Emma, was sixteen and already smarter than most adults I knew. My son, Connor, fourteen, had the kind of quiet focus that made me think he’d make a better man than I ever had time to become.

We knew predators. We’d lost cattle to wolves, bears, a lion once that slipped in like a whisper and took a calf so clean you’d think it had been borrowed. We’d even lost a steer to lightning—nature’s reminder that sometimes the sky simply chooses you.

But nothing I’d ever seen prepared me for what waited in the south pasture that morning.

## 1) The Field of Wrong

I stepped out with a coffee mug warming my palm and expected to see Dakota’s head pop up over the corral fence, ears forward, demanding breakfast like a spoiled dog. The old gelding had been with me long enough that he didn’t bother hiding his opinions.

No sound.

No shuffle of hooves, no snort, no impatient knock of hoof against wood. The barnyard looked staged—frozen grass glittering with frost, the outbuildings sitting too still, the dark line of timber at the edge of the property swallowing light.

I started walking toward the south pasture because that’s where I’d moved forty head of Angus two days earlier. Badger Creek ran clean down there, and the grass stayed decent late into October. I’d been proud of that move, like it was a small victory over the season.

Halfway to the fence line, I saw shapes scattered across the field.

At first, my brain tried to be kind. It offered explanations that would keep my heart steady.

They’re bedded down. They’re just resting. It’s cold; they’re conserving heat.

But cattle don’t bed down like that—random, spread too far apart, in positions that didn’t look restful. A few were on their sides with legs stiff. One looked folded wrong at the neck.

My pace quickened without my permission.

I climbed the fence and walked into the pasture, boots breaking the frost crust with a sharp crackle. It smelled faintly metallic, like pennies held in your mouth. Then the wind shifted and the smell became something else entirely.

Blood and torn gut.

Thick. Sweet-sour. Heavy enough to taste on the back of my tongue.

The first cow I reached had her throat opened so wide I saw the pale arc of vertebrae. Not punctured like a wolf bite. Not chewed. Torn—as if something had hooked its hands into the soft place and pulled until the body gave up.

I stood there a long moment, mug forgotten, my mind refusing to catch up. Ranchers aren’t fragile people. You learn early that meat comes from something that once had eyes. I’ve butchered more cattle than I can count. I’ve seen injury, illness, death.

This wasn’t death.

This was punishment.

I moved from body to body in a numb sequence, counting automatically like my brain thought numbers could make it manageable.

Seven.

Twelve.

Eighteen.

I kept going.

Twenty-five.

Thirty-one.

Thirty-seven.

Forty.

Every single animal dead. All forty. A complete wipeout in one night—nearly forty thousand dollars of livestock gone, plus the weeks of feed and care and planning that meant nothing now.

And the part that stopped me cold wasn’t the scale. It was the pattern.

They weren’t eaten.

A wolf pack kills to feed. Even in a surplus kill, they come back. Bears take what they want and leave a mess, but the motive makes sense—hunger, territory, a bad surprise.

Whatever did this had killed with a purpose I couldn’t name.

Some cattle were throat-torn. Others had deep rakes across their flanks—parallel gouges that looked like someone had dragged a rake made of bone through hide. Three were gutted, organs pulled out and left steaming in the grass like the night had been warm enough to keep them alive.

It didn’t look like feeding.

It looked like a message.

I knelt near a patch of softer ground where frost hadn’t hardened the mud yet. Tracks were stamped there—dozens, overlapping, cutting through the herd’s final panic.

At first glance: canine.

Then my stomach sank.

Too big. The pad width looked close to seven inches. The toe impressions were wrong—more separated, with a sharper end like claws.

And the stride pattern…

The stride pattern made my hands shake.

These weren’t the prints of something moving on four legs. The gait showed weight landing in a paired rhythm like bipedal steps, the spacing too wide and even to be a bear’s awkward stand-walk.

There were multiple sets.

Five, maybe six different individuals.

And they hadn’t moved like frantic animals. The tracks suggested positions—as if something had circled, flanked, pushed the herd like a coordinated sweep.

Wolves hunt in packs, yes, but this looked… organized in a way that felt human.

I stood, wiped my hands on my jeans without thinking, and finally remembered the coffee mug. It was still in my hand, and it smelled absurdly normal. I set it down in the grass like it offended me.

At 7:15 a.m., I called Sheriff Rawlings.

## 2) The Sheriff Who Wouldn’t Say “Wolf”

Tom Rawlings arrived forty minutes later with Deputy Chen. The sheriff had been in office long enough to see trends, and if there was one thing trends taught you, it was that predators don’t suddenly change their nature. When Tom got out of his truck, he looked around the pasture and his face did something I’d never seen.

It drained.

He walked the field slowly, breathing through his mouth like he was trying not to smell the truth. Chen photographed everything: wounds, scatter patterns, track lines, the fence line for signs of entry.

Tom crouched beside the clearest footprint, stared at it a long time, then stood and looked out toward the treeline.

His hand settled on his sidearm like a habit he didn’t want to admit.

When he came back to me, his eyes were tight. Not the squint of sun or wind. Something else.

“Marcus,” he said quietly, “I need you to hold off on the insurance claim for a few days.”

“What?” I snapped, because money was already ticking in my head like a clock.

“There’ve been similar incidents in the county,” he said.

The words landed like a rock.

“Similar how?”

Tom’s jaw flexed. “I’m making calls.”

“Tom—wolves don’t do this.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t reassure me. He just looked at me in a way that said he’d been carrying something heavy for a long time.

“Don’t touch anything else,” he said. “Keep your family close tonight. No one goes out after dark.”

Then he left.

And I stood alone in a field of dead cattle and realized I wasn’t dealing with a predator.

I was dealing with something that wanted me to understand I was being watched.

## 3) The County’s Quiet Pattern

Three days passed with no answers from Tom Rawlings. That silence did what silence always does—it forces you to fill it with possibilities.

So I started asking questions.

I drove to my neighbor Bill Keller’s place on October 26th. Bill ran cattle on a spread about four miles away with national forest between us, the kind of neighbor you trust with equipment and time because he’s earned it.

He was in his equipment barn, hands greasy, wrench in his grip. When I said I’d lost forty head, he didn’t act surprised.

He went still.

“Forty,” he said softly. “Jesus, Marcus.”

Then he set the wrench down like it had become too heavy.

“I lost twenty-eight in early September,” he said. “Same damn thing. Throats. Claw marks. Not eaten.”

“Fish and Wildlife?” I asked.

Bill laughed once—no humor in it. “They came out. Told me it was wolves. Handed me the paperwork. Told me not to ‘spread panic.’”

He led me into his office and pulled out a folder thick with photographs. If you swapped the landscape angle, I could’ve sworn the pictures were my pasture.

The same torn throats. The same slash marks. The same unnatural scatter of tissue. And the tracks—too big, too strange.

Over the next week, I talked to ranchers within a thirty-mile radius. A grim list formed:

Dave Morrison, sixteen head in July.
The Patterson family, sheep killed near Hungry Horse in June.
A small outfit east of us, calves lost in August—found in pieces.

Every time: nighttime attacks, multiple animals dead but not consumed, weird tracks, and federal officials arriving later to stamp it as wolf activity and shut down questions.

It was a pattern. Not random. Not a “bad year.”

Something was moving through the region like a storm front—hitting, disappearing, circling back.

And for the first time in my life, I felt what it’s like to live under a truth nobody wants spoken.

## 4) Joseph Running Bear and the Old Name

My ranch hand, Joseph Running Bear, had worked for me eight years. Blackfeet, in his sixties, the kind of man who didn’t waste words or respect on nonsense. He knew those mountains the way my grandfather knew fence lines.

When I showed him the photographs of the tracks and the cattle, he studied them for a long time.

He didn’t scoff.

He didn’t call me dramatic.

He didn’t do what white men like me sometimes expect when we bring up something that sounds like folklore. He simply looked at me, and his eyes held a tired recognition.

“My grandfather told stories,” Joseph said carefully, “about the skinwalkers. Wolf-men who don’t belong to one world. Different people have different names, but the thing is old.”

He paused, then tapped one photograph where the stride pattern showed bipedal movement.

“Older than your fences,” he added.

I wanted to dismiss it. My rational mind reached for every alternative like a drowning man reaching for floating sticks.

But the evidence kept pushing back.

That night, I pulled the SD cards from my trail cameras.

Most footage was normal: deer, elk, a bear nosing through brush. A coyote at dawn.

But one camera near Badger Creek caught something at 2:17 a.m. on October 22nd—hours before my herd died.

The image was dark and motion-blurred, but the shape was clear enough to take my breath.

A tall figure moving through the frame on two legs, at least seven feet, with shoulders too broad and a head shape that suggested an elongated muzzle.

Behind it, partially visible, were more shapes—moving with spacing that looked like coordination rather than chaos.

I watched that clip ten times, my finger trembling on pause, my mind still trying to make it into a bear.

It didn’t move like a bear.

It moved like something that knew exactly where it was going.

## 5) The Vet Who Was Forced to Edit the Truth

Doc Peterson, our veterinarian, examined three of the carcasses and initially kept her tone neutral. But when I pressed her—quietly, privately—she admitted what she’d measured.

“The bite radius,” she said, “is too wide. Eight to ten inches.”

“Wolves max out around six,” I said, because I’d looked it up already, desperate for an anchor.

She nodded once. “And the pressure… the tissue damage suggests jaw force far beyond any known canine.”

She’d taken samples—saliva swabs, tissue scrapings—and sent them to the state lab.

Two days later, federal wildlife officials showed up at her clinic.

They confiscated the samples.

Then she received a call instructing her to “amend her report to match typical wolf predation patterns.”

When she told me that, her voice wasn’t angry.

It was scared.

That’s when I realized something worse than the creature in my pasture.

Someone already knew.

## 6) Telling the Family Without Breaking Them

That evening, I sat Sarah, Emma, and Connor at the kitchen table. The overhead light made their faces too bright, like a scene staged for confession.

I’d installed motion floodlights around the house and barn. I’d moved my gun safe up from the basement. I’d been doing things I told myself were “precautions,” but the truth was I was building a line between my family and something I didn’t understand.

“There’s something hunting in these mountains,” I said. “It’s not wolves. Not in any normal sense.”

Sarah didn’t flinch. She’d married a rancher; she knew fear comes in practical forms. Emma watched my face like she was reading for lies.

Connor stared down at his hands.

“Nobody goes out after dark alone,” I continued. “We stay armed. We stay aware.”

Emma asked what I’d been dreading.

“Dad,” she said, “are we in danger?”

Before I could answer, Connor spoke, his voice quiet like he’d been holding it back for days.

“I’ve been seeing huge dogs at the edge of the woods,” he said. “After sunset. Past the fence line.”

He swallowed. “I thought they were wolves, but… they were standing up.”

Sarah’s fingers tightened around her water glass.

And the kitchen, for a moment, felt like it was shrinking.

The next morning, I found twelve more cattle dead in the north pasture.

And this time, the tracks led straight toward my house.

A hundred yards from my back porch, hanging from a low branch like some kind of sick decoration, was a gutted mule deer—still warm—with its organs arranged on the ground below in a pattern that looked deliberate.

They weren’t just hunting cattle anymore.

They were announcing themselves.

## 7) The First Siege

Two weeks after the pasture massacre, darkness came early. Montana in November doesn’t do long goodbyes to the sun. By 5:30 p.m. the valley turns blue and cold, and every shadow looks like it knows a secret.

After dinner, I told Connor we needed to check the cattle I’d moved into the barn. Twenty head, close to the house. Close enough to defend, I’d told myself.

Sarah didn’t like us going out. I could see it in her jaw. But ranch work doesn’t pause for fear.

Connor grabbed his coat. I pulled two rifles from the safe—my Winchester and the Remington he could handle. He’d been shooting since he was eight. He was careful. That was why I trusted him.

We stepped into air so cold it burned.

The porch light threw a cone of yellow across the yard. Beyond that, darkness pooled like ink.

Halfway to the barn, the motion lights snapped on—harsh white that made the shadows beyond seem deeper by comparison.

Inside the barn, the cattle were restless. Eyes wide. Bodies shifting. Low worried sounds like prayers.

“Dad,” Connor whispered, “something’s wrong.”

I was about to answer when I saw movement through the gap in the barn doors.

A shape crossed the light outside—too large, too smooth in its motion. Not a deer. Not a bear. Not anything I wanted to name.

I raised my hand for silence and edged to the door.

Thirty feet from the barn, it stood on two legs like a man, but it was no man.

Seven feet tall at least, shoulders broad enough to make the human form look like an unfinished draft. Its body was furred—dark, almost swallowing the light. Its head was elongated like a wolf’s, but the skull structure looked wrong, as if it belonged to something that didn’t fit in any one category.

Its hands froze my blood.

Not paws.

Hands. Five fingers. Long claws.

I fired without thinking.

The rifle crack split the night. The creature lurched sideways, and for a half-second I couldn’t tell if I’d hit it or if it had simply moved like it expected a bullet.

Then it made a sound that I will carry into whatever comes after death.

Not a howl. Not a growl.

Something between them—layered with notes that resembled human vocal effort, like language that had been twisted into rage.

Before the sound faded, answers came back from the darkness.

Five, six voices, from different directions.

Surrounding us.

“RUN!” I shouted.

Connor was already moving.

We sprinted across open ground with rifles held tight. Heavy footfalls kept pace around us—two-legged, coordinated, close enough that I could feel them in the ground.

Connor slipped on frozen earth. I grabbed his coat and yanked him upright, my eyes scanning the dark for shapes I didn’t want to see.

We hit the porch at a dead run.

Sarah had the door open, Emma behind her, faces pale in the interior light.

We crashed inside. I slammed the door and threw the deadbolt.

I went to the living room window and looked out.

At the edge where floodlights met darkness, I counted them.

Six massive upright shapes, spread in a semicircle like a perimeter.

Emma made a small sound, hands over her mouth. Sarah’s grip on the chair back turned her knuckles white.

Connor stood beside me, rifle shaking.

“Dad,” he whispered, “what are they?”

Before I could answer, one stepped fully into the light.

The muzzle was long. Teeth yellowed and thick. Eyes bright—reflective like a dog’s, but holding an awareness no dog should possess.

It raised its head and howled so close the windows rattled.

Sarah dialed 911 with shaking fingers.

And I understood with horrible clarity: no help was coming in time. We were alone inside our home while something intelligent tested its boundaries outside.

Then the back of the house exploded with sound.

Wood splintering.

The mudroom door—our boot-and-coat entry—hung crooked on its hinges like it had been hit by a vehicle.

A massive shape filled the doorway.

I fired twice. Muzzle flash lit fur, teeth, and eyes that reflected red.

It roared—deep enough to vibrate the floor—and moved forward.

“UPSTAIRS!” I shouted.

Sarah grabbed Emma. Connor stayed with me, rifle pointed at the broken door.

We backed toward the staircase, weapons up, listening to the creature tear through the mudroom like it was rummaging with purpose. Coats ripped. Shelves snapped. The click of claws on tile.

Upstairs, we dragged furniture into a barricade—dresser, bookshelf, anything heavy. Sarah gathered every weapon into the master bedroom like we were building an altar to survival.

Two rifles. My Glock. Sarah’s shotgun. Boxes of ammo scattered across the bed.

Connor looked out the window and went rigid.

“There’s more,” he said. “Five… six…”

Emma stayed on the phone with 911, whispering updates like she was afraid the house itself could hear her.

Then, below us, the sounds changed.

The creature stopped destroying.

Silence.

The kind of silence that means thinking.

Floorboards creaked—slow, careful. Cabinets opened. The kitchen table scraped across the floor.

It wasn’t random.

It was searching.

Heavy footfalls on the stairs.

The barricade shifted.

A clawed hand reached around the corner, wrapped a dresser edge, and pulled it aside like it weighed nothing.

I fired three times down the stairwell.

Something howled—painful, startlingly human in its cadence—and tumbled backward down the stairs, thudding step to step.

Other voices erupted below. I heard dragging sounds.

They were pulling their wounded back.

They cared for each other.

Ten minutes passed in a terrible hush. Then Connor gasped.

“One’s climbing,” he said.

I reached the window in time to see a creature scaling the exterior wall using porch supports and window frames like a ladder. It moved with horrible grace.

It reached the second-floor window and Connor and it stared at each other through the glass.

The creature’s eyes locked onto my son with focused intent.

I fired through the window.

Glass detonated outward. The creature fell backward, scraping claws down the siding as it dropped and hit the ground hard.

It lay there, one leg bent wrong, then dragged itself toward the treeline.

Then—like someone had flipped a switch—the others withdrew.

In ten seconds, every shape melted into the forest and vanished.

Sirens sounded in the distance.

They’d heard the police coming.

They’d left before the humans arrived.

And as we stood bleeding from glass cuts, shaking and alive, I knew the worst truth of all:

This wasn’t over.

It had been a test.

## 8) The Sheriff’s Files

Sheriff Rawlings arrived with deputies and stood in the ruined mudroom staring at the shattered frame like he was looking at proof of something he’d prayed wasn’t real.

Outside, he motioned me away from my family.

“This has been going on for decades,” he said quietly. “My predecessor dealt with it. The sheriff before him too.”

He showed me incident reports on his phone going back to 1979—ranch attacks, livestock kills, strange tracks.

Then the part that made my blood go cold:

Missing families.

Complete disappearances.

Cases with blood evidence but no bodies recovered.

“We tried hunting them once,” Rawlings said. “Ninety-seven. After a family vanished. Put together a team—experienced hunters, tracking dogs, the works.”

His mouth tightened.

“Found three of those hunters dead a week later. Torn apart in the high country. The fourth was never found.”

He looked at me like he needed me to understand the weight of what he was saying.

“After that, the feds shut down any organized response. They monitor. They don’t intervene.”

A deputy found claw marks on my barn.

Exactly seven feet off the ground.

Deliberate vertical slashes—territorial in the way scratches on a tree can be territorial, only this wasn’t a tree. This was my livelihood.

The pack had claimed my property as part of its route.

## 9) Fortifying a Home That Shouldn’t Need Fortifying

Sarah said it first: “We have to leave.”

And she was right in the way truth is right—cold, unhelpful, absolute.

But leaving wasn’t simple. We were financially crippled. Insurance wouldn’t cover the scale of losses classified as “wolf damage.” And even if we sold, who buys a ranch with whispered history?

Joseph arrived that afternoon and looked at the damage with eyes that had seen older stories.

“Running won’t help,” he said. “Some families flee. The pack follows. Once you’re marked, distance doesn’t matter.”

Sarah stared at him. “So what do we do?”

Joseph’s voice stayed calm. “You prove you’re not easy meat.”

Over three days we turned our home into something it had never been: a fortress.

Steel plating on doors. New locks. Floodlights positioned to erase shadows. Trail cameras in a wide perimeter linked to my phone.

We stockpiled food and water upstairs. Sarah stopped arguing about leaving and started teaching Emma how to reload magazines fast, hands steady even while her face stayed pale.

Bill Keller and neighboring ranchers formed an armed watch group, patrolling roads at night with radios and headlights, ready to converge if anyone spotted movement.

My cameras caught glimpses—large shapes moving too fast for clear images, but enough to confirm: they were still there.

Still watching.

Still deciding.

## 10) The Second Assault

On the seventh night after the first siege, the temperature dropped hard. Fifteen degrees. Wind sharp enough to cut.

I was checking camera alerts when my phone lit up like it was catching fire.

Eight cameras triggered within seconds.

Not one approach.

Multiple.

They were coming from different directions in a coordinated pattern.

I grabbed the radio and called the watch group. Then I turned to my family.

“They’re here,” I said.

Floodlights activated in sequence across the property, turning the night into harsh day.

And in that light, I saw them clearly for the first time.

Nine creatures.

Massive. Upright. Moving with purpose.

The largest led from the front—easily eight feet tall, fur so dark it looked like it drank the light. It moved with the confidence of something that didn’t believe in fear.

“Hold,” I said, my voice low. “Wait for my call.”

They closed to fifty yards. Then forty.

Their faces were too wolf-like to be human, too structured to be animal. Teeth designed for tearing. Eyes reflective but intelligent, tracking windows, angles, entry points.

At thirty yards, I gave the command.

Seven rifles opened at once—mine, Connor’s, two deputies’, and three from the watch group who’d arrived fast enough to take positions outside.

The gunfire was continuous, deafening, echoing off the hills.

Two creatures went down.

One took a chest hit and folded. Another spun with a shoulder strike, howling.

But the rest kept coming, zigzagging in a pattern that wasn’t panic.

It was tactics.

One leapt onto the porch roof with a bound that defied weight. Claws tore shingles. It began ripping at the roofline like it was trying to enter from above.

Connor fired upward through the ceiling. Three shots. Blood dripped through the holes.

The roof-creature slid off and hit the ground with a heavy thud.

Another slammed into the reinforced back door. The steel held, but the frame buckled.

Sarah fired through the door, aiming low.

A scream answered—disturbingly human in its pitch, like a throat forcing an impossible sound.

Emma cried out from the west side. “Dad—one’s at my window!”

I ran and saw it hanging on the exterior wall, claws embedded in siding, face pressed inches from the glass.

It opened its jaws wide, wider than seemed possible, teeth stacked like knives.

I fired point-blank through the window.

Glass exploded. The creature fell, taking part of the frame with it.

Then Emma screamed differently—a pain scream.

A shard of glass had cut her forearm deep, from elbow toward wrist. Blood poured down her sleeve.

Sarah rushed to her, pressing a towel hard. Emma went pale with shock.

We were down shooters.

And the pack sensed it.

The alpha made its move.

The back door, already damaged, gave in with one shoulder-driven impact. The steel plating tore off its mounts like aluminum foil.

The creature stood in my hallway, hunched under a ceiling too low for it, and for a moment we faced each other across twenty feet.

Its eyes met mine, and in that instant I understood something that still makes my stomach turn:

This thing wasn’t driven by instinct alone.

It was making decisions.

Evaluating threats.

Leading.

I raised my rifle.

Before I could fire, Sarah stepped beside me with her shotgun.

She fired both barrels into its chest.

The blast filled the hallway with smoke and sound. Blood spread through its dark fur.

It staggered.

But it didn’t fall.

It roared—rage and pain braided together—then did something I hadn’t expected.

It turned.

It retreated.

It barked sharp sounds—command-like—and the pack began pulling back, hauling their wounded, collecting their dead.

The assault ended as abruptly as it began.

They withdrew into the darkness beyond our floodlights and vanished as if the night itself swallowed them.

I watched from the window and saw the alpha limping toward the treeline supported by two others.

It looked back once.

In that glance, I couldn’t tell if I saw respect or a promise.

Then it was gone.

## 11) What the Morning Took

Emma went to the hospital in Kalispell. Forty-two stitches. The scar runs clean and pale now, a permanent seam in the story she didn’t ask for.

Before dawn, federal agents arrived—unmarked vehicles, calm voices, hard eyes.

They confiscated the two bodies we’d managed to keep from being dragged away. They loaded them like evidence, not like animals, and they warned us in language that felt practiced:

Talk publicly and face prosecution under endangered species laws. Cooperate and be “left alone.”

The official report called it a wolf attack.

Case closed.

Six months later, we sold Barh Ranch at a loss to a developer who didn’t believe in anything that couldn’t be marketed.

We moved into town—streetlights, neighbors, sirens close enough to be comforting.

Our marriage survived, but it changed shape. Sarah looks at me sometimes like she’s remembering a version of me from before the pasture went silent. Connor barely speaks after dark. Emma laughs again, but her laughter sometimes stops too suddenly, like she’s listening for something outside the window.

And me?

Some nights, when wind comes down from the mountains just right, I swear I hear a howl that isn’t a wolf’s.

Not quite.

Like a voice trying to become language.

And I know—deep in the place where ranchers store the truths they don’t tell at the feed store—that whatever moved through Barh Ranch that autumn didn’t disappear.

It simply moved on.

And somewhere out there, another family is counting their cattle at dawn, expecting routine, trusting the rules of predators they understand.

They won’t know the rules can change until the morning the pasture goes quiet.