An elderly woman lives in the woods with her husband of many years and few people around for miles. Their relationship is deteriorating; they no longer joke around and play imaginative games as they used to. Instead, he has become irritable and quick to assume she is trying to criticize him or start an argument.

One day, she hears him mutter the word "wolf" while reading the paper. She doesn't say anything or ask about it, though she reminisces how she once would've, ensuing a fun make-believe game where they conjured the wolf into existence together, in their imaginations. She decides it will be her wolf—she will imagine the wolf into being on her own, privately and secretly.

Her husband catches her crying over the sink, which she often manages to hide from him. She says it's about her brother—who evidently something bad happened to—though she seems to say it as an excuse for or oversimplification of her own grief.

She senses the wolf's presence in the woods one day. She begins to have conversations with the wolf, in her head. She can't tell if she sees its tracks in the falling snow or is just imagining them. She leaves nightly food out for the wolf.

One day she asks her husband if he ever misses the city—which she hated, not him. She looks at her grandmother's watch, which was broken until he fixed it one day. She hates to hear it ticking. She recalls her first love with great nostalgia for her youth. She grapples with depression, wondering: "could complicated people think themselves into being simple people?"

She is a restless sleeper and instead of doing chores when she can't sleep, she begins sneaking out to the woods at night to meet the wolf. Her husband becomes suspicious and says she smells like a wet animal. She's careful to shower after she returns and wash her clothes. Her husband takes longer and longer walks through the woods. She is worried something will happen to him—that her wolf will get him—but her wolf promises not to hurt him, nor help him. She notices her husband smelling like wet dog after one of his walks. They talk around the subject, him looking away.

She asks the wolf where her husband goes during the day. The wolf says he doesn't have his own wolf, but won't answer whether he has some kind of animal. The wolf notes that it could kill her, or her husband, but won't do either unless she asks.

The distance between the couple widens. One night, she extends her neck toward the wolf and asks the wolf to end her life. It will be better that way, she explains—she doesn't want a slow life and had planned to swallow pills she had saved up, but that would be harder on her family than if it were the wolf that killed her. The wolf tells her to ask him a second time, later, so he knows she means it. That, night, she and her husband share an intimate moment reminiscent of their youth. They each promise to never leave the other "unless something happens." When the woman next sees the wolf, she asks again. The wolf says that he will die too, starving himself in the mountains, and also alludes that her "husband and his dog" are soon to die as well. She asks about this, and he tells her to change her mind and he'll tell her. She holds firm to her decision, however. The wolf rips her throat open then walks away, his paws leaving real footprints in the snow.