She thought it wonderful that if the bear ate her, some part of her would enter the bear’s body, would flow through her milk into the bodies of the babes, and the babes would grow to adult bears and would have their own babes, and some small part of who she had been would live somewhere within the blood and meat and fat of all of them. The only kind of eternity there would be for her, for she would never have babes herself, and no one still alive would remember her after she was gone.
