The bear roared, and in her roar she said, All our pacts have been nullified, revoked.
After my cub is restored to me, then I will kill the thief for what she took from me, for what that taking cost.
After your wife is dead, then I will take my new cub and return to the woods, the woods that will grow where my woods once grew.
You I do not want. You will leave this place forever, returning to the country across the lake, and if ever I smell your scent again I will separate it from your skin with every tooth and claw I have left.
She said, I did not mean to kill my cub, but in the darkness and the fire his shadow grew long, and when I saw its length spread across the wall of my cave then I mistook him for you, clothed as he was in your stinking clothes.
THE BEAR LOWERED HERSELF BEFORE me, all her remainder shaking with the containment of her rage. I struggled aboard her broad shoulders with the foundling clutched to my chest, and the bear’s armor cut my thighs as I tried to find some right place to saddle myself, and so each movement made a wound, and each wound itched and burned, and the burning bled the last sleep out of my legs, the body above.
The fingerling argued against my revealed plan, claiming that what had been impossible was made easy: Now there was a gap in the bear’s armor between its head and its torso, a space where two plates of bone ground with each step, where my blade might slip between to spill her out, no longer having to saw through the layers of hair and skin and fat that once blocked entrance to the bear’s jugular, its carotid.
The fingerling said, THIS TRUCE I CANNOT ALLOW, but by then it was too late, and the bear started down the great stairs with switch-backed bounds, plummeting from left to right of the fast-dropping spiral, and with my free hand I clutched at the sharp points of her shoulder blades, cried out as each leap cut me deeper, sawed at what little flesh was left.
The bear moved fast, and yet we seemed barely to advance, there being so many stairs above us, so many still dropping below. She leaped down the high and uneven steps, and while often she landed sure of foot she also sometimes stumbled, sliding sideways across the precarious stone of the steps. More than once I was nearly thrown from her shoulders, and each near fall left me shaken, clutching tight to all I needed to hold. At this depth, the walls around the stairs faded, and then sight and scent began to do the same, and even without the whole of those senses I perceived or believed I did that we were in a wide cave or carved chamber, farther bounded than any I’d experienced before. If there was sound at the edges of that space, then it did not reach us upon the stairs, and nothing flapped or flew or dripped through the yawning dark. Emptied of activity, the air thinned, and as we descended farther there was for a time only the bear’s footsteps, her harsh breathing, and also my own constant wheezing, some effect of age or injury I could no longer suppress, each of our base noises flatter without the possibility for resonance or echo.
As she navigated the great stairs, the bear’s growls of recognition turned again to speech and then to story, her heavy voice a tiring whisper, and through the fingerling she was translated and amplified, as she offered some last words into the grayer air where words could still be spoken.
The bear said, I do not know what you and your wife fled, but in my old country I no longer had any husband of my own. We had married and he had built a house, and then that house had burned, and then he had died in the fire, taking everything of him with him, and I had not even a child to remind me of him, only some wide scars of the burns I had suffered when I failed to save him, marks of what for some time I wished had consumed me too.
She said, Afterward I came to the dirt, but I did not build a house, did not know how, did not even want a house again, when houses had for me proved so temporary.
She said, From the first I lived in the cave, and in the day I walked the woods, picked its berries and dug its tubers, made for myself some simple life in which I owned nothing, in which I wanted for no other.
But there was already another here, she said, and he watched me, and later I felt him watching.
When I walked across the dirt, and then into the lake to wash myself and to swim in the cold gray water, there I found him waiting, and after he hushed away my reluctance he showed me many sights, both the surface of things and also what lay deeper beneath.
She said, It was he who showed me the black and also how to dive below it, first with him and then on my own.
It was there in the black that I changed for the first time, that I became some other shape than grieving woman, than widow bereft.
She said, I was not always a bear, but I was not before that just one other thing.
Neither was he, she said. He was both whale and squid, and once a man, once many men, perhaps.
He was so old when I met him, she said, but even in his old awfulness he could still be gentle, and in the lake-black our shapes did not matter, and so we were as one for a time, and the next time we separated I was two, one floating inside the other, and he was still his same multitude, his legion of possibility, a thousand shapes all wanting only to be made more, to be taken out of the lake and onto the dirt, then back into the other world, the country where what he was might spread.
All I wanted was one child, one boy to love, to take the place of the man I had lost, and when I saw I could not have just that then I hid his child inside me and refused all others, and with what strength he had taught me I kept him away until I could escape the black, the water above. Against his anger, I left the lake and went back to the woods, where I was sure he could not follow, and in my cave, among the dark shadows gathered between the world’s broad bones, there I saw that it was our children who gave us shape, as much as we shaped them, and for my coming child I became a bear, meant us both be bears forever, so that what human miseries I had known might never know him.
The light from the fires above had long faded, and the broken shafts of light falling from the surface could not reach this deep either, and now there was only darkness. Or rather, not darkness but the whole of that element that I had never experienced upon the dirt, with its moon and its moons, and only partially under the lake. Now here was the fullness of the black, the truth of that element undiluted and worse than I’d imagined. The black was thick in places and hot too, and also it was cold and thin at other depths, and whatever it was it was always there. Other senses failed too, so that sometimes I could not feel my skin, goosefleshed with chill or else sweating and bloody, nor could I any longer hear through the weight of the black’s silence. My tongue went numb, and the inside of my nose felt so full of silt that I could not clear it, and still the bear moved downward, still she bellowed soundlessly, as I felt her lungs fill and empty below my legs, when I felt anything at all.
Downward and downward she took us, navigating by something I could not sense, perhaps the smell of her cub’s last disguised passing, perhaps the scent of the woman who stole him away. I could not even see my fingers in front of my face, but I felt or else imagined that the way occasionally flattened, straightened, that we arrived at wide landings, at whole floors riddled with black passageways leading away from the stairs toward other black chambers. It was only there among those widest floors that the bear became confused, almost lost. There she had to put her bloody nose to the ground and sniff for her trail, and I wondered how much better even her weakened senses were that she could smell so much through the black when I could not, and if what confused her was not losing the trail but rather having it fracture, spreading in too many directions, for even though those passageways were as yet unlit they were not empty, and if they were like those above, then they might have held me, might have held my wife, and also the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the foundling, and I saw in the bear’s nosing of the stone floors that whereas the deep house had been mostly our past this deeper house could have been our future—but then that future was dark and cold, an emptied gulf where there was nothing to hear but silence, nothing to see but absence, nothing to own but our lack.