this trapdoor’s lip up from the deep house. For some time the smoke still exited that hole and also some others, and its heat persisted for many months, a danger also made some grace, for that heat warmed the house that otherwise would have been so very cold, too frozen to hope to hold our happy living.
Returned to the house I had built, I found its rooms as empty of wife and foundling as ever, and also newly damaged, shattered upon their frames: Unguarded, our house had been visited by the bear, whose footprints now circled the house, and I found the windows smashed in by her blows, the logs of our walls tortured loose from their studs. Everywhere there was loosed fur and dried snot marking the house as no territory of ours, and then I knew what I should have suspected, that she had tried to follow us down into the deep house, that if she had fit through any of the openings leading below, then surely we would have seen her there.
What foolishness it was to return, I told the fingerling. What danger you have put us both in, and still we are no closer to your mother, to the better son that clings to her side.
To prove he could, he tortured me for my words, pressed in upon all the many nerves now at his command—and so our climb was ended by this homecoming celebrated only with weeping upon my knees, with beating my fists against the cursed dirt I found waiting outside the house, with hurling my voice at the moon-bent sky, its tortured gossamer hanging lower now than ever before.
A CROSS THE TREE LINE FOR the first time in years or decades, in perhaps some other longer length unreckonable as all time then was, I arrived there unprepared for the changes visited upon the woods, how its low spaces choked with rough-edged hedges, with brambles and thickets, so that all my old passages were no more. With some effort I reached the burying ground, and found within it the last fallow patch beneath the boughs and thorns, last remnant of my small incursion upon the land of the bear, where still nothing fresh would grow.
My traps had been set according to the dictates of experience and long routine, but with this new arrangement of scrub and thorn I could not easily find where I’d placed them. Warily at first, then bolder as over some days the bear failed to appear, I began to hack through the denseness of the brush until I thought I had found each trap, including some still containing the bones or part of the bones of some animal caught long ago, in the first days after I armed the steel jaws that undid them: Here a muskrat, crumbled into tiny ribs, tiny skull, here a wolf undone the same, here a trampled otter and there some fox.
I reset my traps, and each day after I visited that dark-soiled burying ground, carrying with me some new-caught wastrel nearly bare of fur and fight, and as I interred it into the cold, hard dirt, I checked again the newer graves I had earlier dug. None had been disturbed, and still there was no bear nor even any sign of her, and as I cut new paths through the trees I found I could not even find my way back to her cave, that entrance with which I was once so familiar. For a time I began to imagine that the bear had passed away in my long absence from the dirt and the woods and the lake, but the fingerling did not believe it, did not let me believe.
Long before, I had professed a belief that what a man did for his wife was to build her a house, and so in the absence of the bear and my unwillingness to leave I made some move to rebuild what had been broken, what worn-out house remained. The smoke from below had grown less strong, and the dirt even colder, and so I wrapped myself in new furs uncured and still smelling of the woods, then crossed the tree line to knock down some fresh trees from which to cut logs for our walls. It took some manner of days to drag each across the dirt, and by the time I had some sizable number beside the crooked house I realized I no longer remembered how I’d built
Returned to the house I had built, I found its rooms as empty of wife and foundling as ever, and also newly damaged, shattered upon their frames: Unguarded, our house had been visited by the bear, whose footprints now circled the house, and I found the windows smashed in by her blows, the logs of our walls tortured loose from their studs. Everywhere there was loosed fur and dried snot marking the house as no territory of ours, and then I knew what I should have suspected, that she had tried to follow us down into the deep house, that if she had fit through any of the openings leading below, then surely we would have seen her there.
What foolishness it was to return, I told the fingerling. What danger you have put us both in, and still we are no closer to your mother, to the better son that clings to her side.
To prove he could, he tortured me for my words, pressed in upon all the many nerves now at his command—and so our climb was ended by this homecoming celebrated only with weeping upon my knees, with beating my fists against the cursed dirt I found waiting outside the house, with hurling my voice at the moon-bent sky, its tortured gossamer hanging lower now than ever before.
A CROSS THE TREE LINE FOR the first time in years or decades, in perhaps some other longer length unreckonable as all time then was, I arrived there unprepared for the changes visited upon the woods, how its low spaces choked with rough-edged hedges, with brambles and thickets, so that all my old passages were no more. With some effort I reached the burying ground, and found within it the last fallow patch beneath the boughs and thorns, last remnant of my small incursion upon the land of the bear, where still nothing fresh would grow.
My traps had been set according to the dictates of experience and long routine, but with this new arrangement of scrub and thorn I could not easily find where I’d placed them. Warily at first, then bolder as over some days the bear failed to appear, I began to hack through the denseness of the brush until I thought I had found each trap, including some still containing the bones or part of the bones of some animal caught long ago, in the first days after I armed the steel jaws that undid them: Here a muskrat, crumbled into tiny ribs, tiny skull, here a wolf undone the same, here a trampled otter and there some fox.
I reset my traps, and each day after I visited that dark-soiled burying ground, carrying with me some new-caught wastrel nearly bare of fur and fight, and as I interred it into the cold, hard dirt, I checked again the newer graves I had earlier dug. None had been disturbed, and still there was no bear nor even any sign of her, and as I cut new paths through the trees I found I could not even find my way back to her cave, that entrance with which I was once so familiar. For a time I began to imagine that the bear had passed away in my long absence from the dirt and the woods and the lake, but the fingerling did not believe it, did not let me believe.
Long before, I had professed a belief that what a man did for his wife was to build her a house, and so in the absence of the bear and my unwillingness to leave I made some move to rebuild what had been broken, what worn-out house remained. The smoke from below had grown less strong, and the dirt even colder, and so I wrapped myself in new furs uncured and still smelling of the woods, then crossed the tree line to knock down some fresh trees from which to cut logs for our walls. It took some manner of days to drag each across the dirt, and by the time I had some sizable number beside the crooked house I realized I no longer remembered how I’d built
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