The Bear

by Andrew Krivak

I’ve felt the same, she said. Out in the forest when I was hunting. Sometimes it felt like someone was with me. Other times it just felt still. Like not a single leaf was swirling. Like everything was where it was supposed to be.

I’ll miss you, he whispered. She understood now and held his hand tighter. I’ll miss you, too, she said. I’ll talk to you. Will you be there to listen if I need you? Yes, he said.

then gathered man and blanket in her arms, lifted him with one loud howl of anger and rage for her loneliness in the world, and placed him on the coppice she had gathered to receive him.

For a long time she remained on her knees, her hands by her sides, her eyes on the ground. Then she raised her head and began to pick the bones of the man from the ashes and the blackened sand, their size and lightness catching her as she lifted and held each one for a moment of longing before sliding it gently into the tanned skin. Arm bones. Legs. The back and pelvis. Neck and clavicle. She brushed aside a mound of charcoal to find the skull and she held this remnant in her hands and gazed at the empty eyes and nose, the teeth pearled like nacre from the fire, the top of the head cracked and smeared with ash. She pulled it close against her chest and cradled it, and again she wept.

They traveled north one day, due west the next, and northwest on a third, one always taking the lead from the other as they set out with the sunrise, so that, though they seemed content with their progress, their way resembled more the path of lost and superstitious rovers, the two wandering upward against escarpments and around valleys, looking not as though they followed the wildness of the terrain but as though a die were cast each night before they went to sleep and it was chance that shaped the direction in which they would set out come dawn.

The bear shifted and sighed and was quiet for a time. When he spoke finally, he said that long ago all the animals knew how to make the sounds the girl and her father used between them. But it was the others like her who stopped listening, and so the skill was lost. As for the bear, he learned it from his mother, who learned it from her mother. Not all animals had the range of voice that could be heard, he said, but all living things spoke, and perhaps the real question was how she could understand him.

The girl sipped at her tin cup of pine-needle tea and considered the question, then said she found it hard to believe that all living things needed to speak. Believe, said the bear. Whether you hear them or not, they need it like they need air to breathe.

Some animals of old have said it was the trees themselves that taught them to speak, for they never make an unnecessary sound. Each word, like a breath, carries with it some good, some purpose. For this reason, trees are the wisest and most compassionate creatures in the woods. They will do all in their power to take care of everyone and everything beneath them, when they have the power to do it.

when they spoke, they spoke with such indifference to time that it would take the girl several moons to hear one of their conversations, the better part of one just to hear a single word.

But to them it was no different from any story told to any other around a fire in the night, a word spoken in a moment, or a lifetime.

And the bow he made with her, the day he showed her the staves out of which he fashioned it, the carving and the tillering and the care he took to make it a bow she would have a long time, to feed her and protect her, though protection was never something she thought she would need in the forest, until they came to the place of the walls. That was why she had burned it on the pyre with the man’s body, so blind with grief and rage was she for not having killed first the animal that killed her father and believing she no longer deserved what had been given to her and so it should go back to its maker, leaving her to fend for herself and die if that was what it came to.

More than this will remind you of him, he said. And you will feel the loss like cold closing in around you. I know.

But I miss whom I once could touch, as all must do when we make our way through whatever forest or wood it is in which we travel or are raised. This does not mean the man is lost or has disappeared forever. For although he no longer walks beside you, he still remains in the time and place of memory and this is where he will appear again and again, as often as you will seek him. Not only in those places where he has always been but where he could not be then yet will be now. In the slant of light on a lakeshore. In the silence between footfalls along a path. In the scent of wood smoke from a fire around which you will sit alone. Have you not come to know something of your own mother in the stories your father told, the places she walked, the tasks she learned, which she knew her mother knew well?

You are bound to him now, as closely as you are to the bones you carry. If you don’t wake, this cave will be your tomb, and the bear will carry with him when he wanders a memory of an autumn when he traveled for a time with one who carried grief. But if you do wake and journey home, the bear and a line of bears after him will carry the story of the last one’s return to the mountain that stands alone. Carry it for the forest to remember for as long as there is forest beneath the sun.

Her father told her once that all animals were creatures of habit and so, too, were they. The difference was she could choose to change her habits. Animals changed when they were afraid. Change before fear has had a chance to overcome you, he said, or after you have overcome it and like a storm it has moved on. And so she climbed neither up nor down the mountain that morning, but followed the ridge, circling it as though to tie a cord around the mountain’s middle.

There was nothing in her now. No hunger, no sleep, no longing, and no cold. She understood what she had been told. She picked up her bow, nocked an arrow, and listened for the stag she knew was coming up the mountain to meet her.

And she told him how she had made snowshoes and a bow, but even so could find no game to hunt or hit with the arrows she had made, and she was certain she would starve. Then she dreamed of a bear who had given her a fish, and she woke and went to the river to fish through the ice. That was when an eagle brought her a goose, whose feathers she used to make better arrows, and she began hunting again by speaking first to the forest and the animals, telling them of her gratitude for what they would give her, but knowing she could not have survived the winter without what she had been given, regardless of what she had made.

And often on these walks the girl would tell the bear things her father had told her about the earth, the sun, the moon, and the oceans. And when they sat around their fire at night, they wondered together what it might be like to be on another part of the earth, or to cross an entire ocean.

It has been some time, said the bear. More summers than I have toes. We’re given that many years plus ten before we don’t wake up from winter. The girl sat and stared into the fire. You don’t know how many you are given, do you? asked the bear. No, said the girl. The bear looked through the fire at the girl and said, as though this would settle the question, The trees will know.

Now come the days when I’ll miss you.

felt all of a sudden what the man had told her he had felt when he had buried the woman.

Each morning, she rose as though from the earth, then lay down to sleep again when the sun had set and the only lights were the stars in the dome of the sky.

And when she came out of the water and sat down on the grass by the rock that held the noon mark her father had placed there long ago, it was to sit and listen still to the slow and susurrant voice of the trees.

He felt the fatigue of his task, as though he had come to a place where end and beginning were the same, and in the time he had spent on that mountain everything had changed.