Image © Michael O'Toole"I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb." — Oscar Wilde
He comes out of the mouth in the rock, underneath dripping, towering cedars, and stands swaying in the chill March air. More brown than black, his damp fur is matted as fever. Alone on a gravel curve, he hears the rage of dogs behind him, ahead of him, in all the directions, and knows he has to pick some astonishment of a path, some unlikelihood, even as his head still throbs from a season of sleep.
Steaming in the late afternoon, he shows the wet earth to the pale ghost of a day moon, scuffs the moist dirt into sculptures.
The world is not the same. Will never be again.
Bare and rude, a strip of blond ground, boxy green buildings, a place without complexion, long abandoned. The planes and shadows and golden light of a full day move across this vista, and nothing, absolutely nothing, changes.
A child emerges from nothing. She sits by a mildewed wall and with wordless sounds she confers with the waning day and she waits. Coyotes answer but she sits stoic and unresponsive; her parley is not with them, those subtle dilettantes.
Loneliness threads this land. Eyes appraise it: the black terror of a doe's wet stare, the eagle's stern glare. In time, resignation afflicts even the artful coyotes. There will never be another train.
She sits and waits and she calls out like a lost bird. Her name is Lana, but she has forgotten this. She almost remembers flutes and honeycomb, dreams of primrose paths arrayed with bees.
The great silence is the largest voice now.
Feral dogs and the liquid throats of ravens gulping high up in the conifers are no match.
A sound in the undergrowth, at the edge of the forest, and Lana clambers to her feet. And then he is there, lumbering perplexed from the leaking shadows, and he hasn't yet seen the little girl, Lana, whose name means "wool" in Spanish, and who dances a sudden dance at the first happy thing she has ever known, the first good answer to her silent query of a quiet land veiled in rain.
"You came back," she says.
The bear startles, his fur like acres of dark wheat in a prairie gale, undulating, fluctuate. Then he crosses the span between them in seconds and stands like a steaming boulder before her. She touches his cold nose and grabs his fur and climbs on his back and laughs, ignoring his savage reek, which is like memory. She digs in her pack for the dead things she's saved and dangles them over his snout and he feeds and is glad.
"Of course I came back," he says between bites, his voice abrasive from neglect. "It's winter I don't love. Not you."