The mother tells her son about the wolves of her time. Under the full moon, there are wolves who turn into completely normal men and then turn back into wolves. Once, the wolves entered the city en masse, causing destruction and ruination as they went. Here, the mother is thirteen, fourteen. She and three other women, with a baby, run away on the first night, and they seek refuge in a tent restlessly. They all watch the city, where men they once knew may be wolves in disguise.

In the morning, the women are still alive. By afternoon, they hear wolves coming their way. They all run. In the cane grass, they cram together and bicker in hiding. The wolves run past. When the women clear out, they debate about whether they should go back or keep running away. At the top of the road nearby, they see a familiar wolf, who used to be a boy they knew.

The wolf makes its way toward one of the kitchen girls, who gets taken away. Everyone knows they should run, but they all freeze in terror, not knowing what to do or where to go. Soon enough, the kitchen girl comes out of the bush into which she was taken. She is covered in blood and guts with a knife in her hand. The kitchen girl then makes her way to the river and washes herself, and the other women follow.

The mother clarifies that there were two kitchen girls, not just one. The first kitchen girl knows how to do magic tricks, which she uses in order to calm the baby among them down. She eventually gets taken by a wolf, and it’s the second kitchen girl who bears a knife and follows the wolf. The mother thus clarifies that the second kitchen girl is the one who emerges from the bush covered in blood and guts—not just of the wolf, but of the first kitchen girl. Never again does she talk.

In the days to come, the wolves burn farmland, and the women retreat farther away. With every village they pass, they learn about more death. Now it is certain that they will never go back to where they came from. The mother herself is no longer interested in living, only interested in how far she can go before her life ends. All the while, the wolves are still on the hunt, looking for survivors. The women abandon more and more things as they go. The kitchen girl is leading, following the moon.

The mother tells a story about the boy who saw the alpha wolf. He tries to drown himself, and a fisherman intervenes. The alpha wolf takes his family months later, and the boy is furious. He tracks the alpha wolf and finds him one night. The boy freezes up, and he wakes up alive the next morning. As years go by, the boy realizes that his punishment is to keep living in spite of all the death around him.

The mother then returns to the story of the women, saying that all of them were cornered one day by the wolves. They all run for the river, but one woman says she cannot swim. Everyone tries to swim anyway, and the one woman disappears under the water with her things. Eventually, the mother loses everyone else too. She washes on a riverbank with the baby. From then on, the mother and baby travel together.

Whenever the wolves turn back to men during the full moon, they wonder how they could have done such horrible things, and they plead for forgiveness. However, it is only a matter of time before they become wolves again.