When he named the world his family,
he became different, but whole.
The pup was not a pup.
He roamed and hunted and fought and found no equal in pure might above or below the mountains.
He could feel the borders of his mountains like he could feel the borders of his bones, his territory. Home and family, one and the same. He could taste the dark and know all the creatures it touched. Already, he had learned something of his mother’s old strength; already, he felt the dark stone lending him a tiny fragment of itself, the inertia of its unquestionable, ancient existence.
Perhaps one day, he would have his mother’s strength.
Perhaps even the mountain would grant him kin.
Yet, “one day” and “perhaps” weren’t of much help when the cursed day came that the air betrayed the mountains and let in a trespasser from outside the world of real things.
Too early.
He was not ready.
He had seen the creature before, in his mother’s mind. The frozen deer. The moonlight fawn. The parody of life that slid through the barriers like a glass splinter.
It wore its shape in mockery of the natural world.
It was a deer the way ice is an imitation of stone.
No.
There was no metaphor in nature to explain the outsider.
A wrongness in the mind and an insult to the land.
A famished absence with a body.
He was not ready.
He was not his mother.
It didn’t matter.
He loved his mountains and he loved the duty that transformed his hours from numb waiting to needful purpose.
He would answer what the deer was with what the mountains are, with stone teeth and the places kept forever holy with unseen eons.
He chased it.
When it turned to fight, when it reached for his mind to unmake him, it was like a thousand years of frozen wind biting at the stones.
In other words, it was nothing.
His mind was the mountain’s mind and the wrongness of the deer had no power over the billions of years enfolded there, of all those countless tons of simple, blunt existence.
Yet, neither could he will the outsider away in the manner his mother had done, sending the smoke of its intent fleeing back through its hole to the outside.
He couldn’t force the sky to be unmarred through tooth or mind.
Neither could he catch it and tear it, litter the woods with its shredslike torn moonbeams fading in the dirt with the rotting sycamore leaves.
He was not his mother, but nor would he turn from his duty, even though failure felt like a burning ember balanced on the back of his neck, sinking deeper every day the deer continued to stain his homelands.
