The shore was awash with glass that sparkled under the moonlight. The wolf sat at the edge, watching the water and sniffing. She had eaten many a time on similar nights when the glass was thrown up, but not always. She got up and paced back and forth then stopped to listen to the wind from the dunes. There were footsteps carried on the air. She sniffed but could not dectect who it was. She laid down behind a dead tuft of grass with one eye on the dunes and one eye on the lapping water.
It was a man that emerged from the dunes, with equipment. He found a spot that was as good as any, and using a shovel he cleared the layer of glass a metre around himself. He stabbed something into the sand, repeatedly, until it was level, a tripod. Onto this he attached a cone and faced it towards the water. A light ignited on the side and then after one last look he retreated back into the dunes.
The wolf watched him silently, not really understanding what he was doing. When he was gone she went over to the tripod and sniffed it. It smelled faintly familiar. It came from a building a hour or so away by foot. She went back to her spot to wait. Clouds began to obscure the stars and the glass stopped sparkling.
Then it came, the hulking form, the mother of the sea. The wolf crouched lower even though she wanted to hold her head up high to get a good sniff of that intoxicatingly pleasant aroma. It made humans flee, but it was amazing for a wolf. The mother lurched and shuddered her way up onto the glass, her limbs splaying out and struggling to move forward. The glass cut at her again and again until fronds spilled forth and as each unfurled, hundreds of her spawn detached and popped, sending them cascading in the air and into the dunes. The wolf sat very still, anticipation building. The spawn would attack if she moved too soon. Her mouth frothed with saliva.
Then just as the tasty fronds started to detached from the mother as she dragged herself back to the sea, the cone on the tripod made a loud low noise that was so painful that the wolf had to rub her ears into the sand. She couldn't run away from it, the spawn would catch her. The spawn reacted to the sound, turning all at once and skittering towards the tripod until it was seething with their bodies and it fell over.
The man came back from the dunes with a gun and he shot into the mass, over and over. The wolf had heard the sound before, a sound more fearful than the spawn. She looked at the nearest frond in the glass. The tip had unfurled into the clear sand and was free from the shards. Perhaps the man would not see her if she went for it now. The spawn where completely distracted. She made her calculations and then ran for the tip of the frond, clamping onto it and pulling it back. It broke in half as it slid across a particularly large shard of glass and she could more easily move it. It was not a loss, as it was enough for several meals for her pups in their burrow.
She stopped to recover her energy, just before the dunes, and then the shooting stopped. She looked to see if the man had seen her, but he was now covered in the spawn instead, even though the cone was still making its awful noise. He made no noise as he was consumed. She watched longer than was sensible, until there was no mass of the man left, just the spawn. They went back to the cone, but were unable to bite into it enough to stop it. It was not flesh. She looked back down at her frond, gelatinous and full of protein and she picked it up again and dragged it back towards the den to share.
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