THE BEAR COULD feel the cold seeping into his body, making his nose go numb at the tip as if there were snow falling outside and a wind howling deepest winter. But in a true change of seasons, he could still feel his heart beating, and the warmth at the core of his body. This unnatural cold made him disconnected from himself, as if his mind were no longer part of his bear’s body but rising above it and watching with no feeling at all as it lay down and began to die.
The hound tugged at him from her place outside the line of full gray, but his body was a useless weight. At last she went into the stream and pulled at his bulk from there.
Immediately the water warmed him, chill as it was.
There was a deeper warmth, of nature, that the water drew from other parts of the forest.
He and the hound rode the stream past all hint of gray on the forest floor. About half the distance back to the cave, they fell on a bank and lay there, side by side, panting.
It was some time before the bear noticed the quiet. The animals were afraid of the cold death. But fear alone would not protect them if the cold death spread farther into the forest.
And he had no idea how it could be fought.
Perhaps there was one who did, but the thought of the wild man made the bear’s jaw clench. He would not seek out that one willingly a second time.
Slowly he and the hound made their way back to the cave. He thought of how the death of that one section of the forest would affect it all. What of the insects that fed on the plants? The birds that fed on the insects? And those creatures that ate the birds?
It was almost too much to hold in his mind. He wished he weren’t the least bit human, that he could not imagine how much worse things might become. But then he saw how the hound walked, slumped to one side, with no hope in her. She seemed to feel it exactly as he did.
So perhaps it had nothing to do with being human, after all.
They reached the crossover to the cave, and the bear stopped short. It was the scent of cold death that stopped him first, and then he realized there was something else. A figure standing in front of the cave.
A man, but not a man.
The bear remembered how the hound had tried to describe a man and a cat to him, and her shivering.
She tensed now and the bear could feel her ready to spring, to attack.
He roared and went forward himself, the hound close on his heels.
But the man-creature ran with a wild cat’s speed and grace, leaping from stone to tree, and then from tree to tree without stopping.
The bear lost track long before he gave up the chase. The dark had aided the cat man, and the bear could see no farther than a paw in front of his eyes.
The hound whined at him, but he pushed her back toward the cave, toward home. Until they both felt the cold again.
Where the cat man had walked from the cave to the stream there was another barrier of gray and cold.
The cat man must have followed the hound’s trail from the day before, but it was too dark to do anything now. They would have to wait until morning, near home but not in it. Perhaps never in it again.
He felt the hound quiver and moved closer to her. There was only the shelter of a small, budding tree nearby.
It was the longest night in the bear’s memory, longer even than the first night he had spent as a bear.
He counted each heartbeat.
He had always thought he had found courage as a bear. He had not realized that it was in part that he had had nothing to lose.
Suddenly he was struck with a flash of memory from when he was very young, when he ran too early into his parents’ bedroom one morning, before his nursemaid could catch him.
He had caught them asleep, one of his father’s arms wrapped around his mother’s chest. His mother with one arm held up to catch his father’s arm, as if to pull it closer to herself. Their legs entwined, the blankets thrown off, as if they did not need any warmth but what they shared with each other.
He had run away, out into the castle gardens. He had pouted there for most of the morning, missing breakfast. Then he had been dragged back to his bedroom for a nap that he was determined not to take.
He could only think about his parents and how they had been complete. Without him.
The first light of dawn stretched like fingers through the trees of the forest.
The hound woke and pulled away from him, then stood on all fours and watched as the sun reached the cave and its surroundings. What the cat man had done was starkly visible.
Just above the stream was the shelf of rock where the bear often came out during the spring or fall to let the gentle evening light fall on him as he dozed and thought of the past and what might have been. It had once had tiny fronds of fern growing up through cracks. These were gone, as if they had never been.
The bear swallowed hard before turning his gaze to the cave itself.
The cave was destroyed, the rocks collapsed, as if some living part deep inside had been torn away.
The bear felt his own legs fall out from under him. As he fell, he cut his face on a prickle bush by the stream, a bush he had always hated.
But now he wanted to sing to it, to praise it.
The prickle bush was still alive. It was green. It might yet survive. If so, it was the only thing that remained of his home that was as it had been for two hundred years.
He felt as wounded as if he had been cut through by a sword, and worse, for a physical wound could be healed. This—never.