Bygone Snow
Sewn up from the bottom of the pond the new bear rose. She reached her five curved claws over the ice and pulled down. The sheet gave like a trampoline and sent her into the trees. From her high perch the bear could see the smokey chimney of a lumber mill and promises burning up in their curls. With her permission she took a pawful of ponderosa, the kind at odds with the bristlecone and the char and the blemishes women find on their cheeks and men in their hands and sprayed, blew them across the power lines. A plane punctured a cloud. The moon rose like a night-reading face and tucked her craters tight. The comeuppance of a truck, the downblast of the morning, the bear dropped from her legal vantage point into a distance more sinister yet more appealing to the average-gate mind. Take the ink blots back, the hunter whispered coming up behind her without his gun. She listened to him ease into the snow. She drew her claws down the tree and let the lines run back into the pond.
