Written in November, 2019 for a short story contest hosted by Arundel Books, Seattle

(tillow: From Middle English tilwe: twig, or shoot)

The rain fell soft, relentless. It was almost, but not quite, sleet. The rain coated the great, shaggy fir trees whose tops were lost in the freezing mist. It landed on the forest duff in a slow, viscous wash that left the ground slushy and unwelcoming. The tired and ragged, almost gray leaves of salal and oregon grape drooped under the weight of the frigid rain, and all life in the great forest, both slow and quick, seemed to be simply enduring the first stabs of winter.

The slow ones remained in the places where they had sprouted and grown, stoically drawing their energy as far within as their bodies allowed. As for the quick—there was an occasional raven, a deeper black in the lowering darkness, hunched high on a limb and silently keeping watch on the world, not deigning to complain. All others had found a niche, or a sanctuary, a den or nest out of the dire chill, and moved into it.

Deep within a cave, well beyond its brush- and boulder-shrouded entrance on the slope above an alpine river valley, there was warmth.

It radiated from the bear. She sprawled all opened up on the cave floor when her internal furnace outperformed the cave’s sheltered coolness. Then she slowly contracted into an almost fetal curl when the freezing air noticed her relaxing, and crept closer. In her torpor the bear performed a sleepy, slow motion dance with the winter; the thick brown fur on her shoulders rippled when she snored.

Like all bears, this one had a name, but if one of us had tried to communicate to her what a “name” is, she would have snorted and turned her back to us. A bear does indeed have a name, but it is not a “name”. It is a place in the heart, a knowing, a knowing that she is exactly who she is, knowledge mixed with her own, unique scent, the particular sound of her own breath, the singular, fathomless deep brown of her eyes. It is much more than this, far more complex and at the same time an efficient distillation of life’s infinite expressions; it is her self, her tillow, her infinitesimal twig on a shoot that exists somewhere on the outer reaches of the tree of all that is alive. That tree is the tree of all that exists.

Were we to attempt to replace all of that with an arbitrary word—this bear or that bear—she would know us to be thieves, leap to her feet, and attack. Fortunately, we all had the wisdom to drift silently away as she ignored us, and slept on.

The bear dreamed.

Her tillow wandered through the cave, sometimes moving into the walls to feel the stone and dirt of the mountain ridge within which she lay. It stayed close to her body, the mortal envelope that was her home for the length of its lifetime. The tillows of most bears stay close to home, asleep or awake, unless there is something or someone compelling that calls them away. Bears, as with many other quick lives, are mostly homebodies.

She slept, almost woke, and slept again, over and over. The days passed with wind, snow, and ice, sometimes accompanied by the sunlight that does not warm. When the temperature rose just enough to make the snow sodden and thick, tree limbs and even tops snapped with a crack that reverberated across the forested slopes for miles. When the temperature plunged to its deepest winter lows, even the ravens sought refuge from the cold.

One day, even though no great tree had fallen, nor had any giant boulder answered the call of gravity and crashed into the valley, the ground trembled. All of the slow lives felt it; those of the quick who were awake felt it, though almost none of them could hear a sound such as this, so low and deep their ears were deaf to it.

The bear heard it, with her ears and her body. She also heard something else.

Something or someone was calling her. It was so very faint; was it really there? She thought it must be, and roused herself just enough to listen with all her faculties. Not just ears, but body, blood, and of course, the rest of her tillow. It was this last, far more sensitive than the rest of her, that understood, but was yet bewildered.

Her tillow was being called by itself. This made no sense; it did not fit into the scheme of a bear’s life. Why would it happen? The bear tried to rouse herself a little more to consider the problem, but her torpor had settled into its winter sleep, and would not move.

Nonetheless, she tried to dive deeper into ancestral memory, the million-year experience of being Bear. She wandered long through paths she had never trod, until a new understanding rose before her.

Ah, she thought. There is a little one inside me. She was pregnant, and her cub was so new that it did not yet have its own tillow. It was calling to her, before it was even ready to emerge into the world, to suckle at her breast in their cave, waiting for the sun that would warm. Why would the little one be calling?

The ground trembled again, and the sound she felt and heard was deeper, stronger. The call from her child was repeated, more urgently. The tillow that was hers but not hers beckoned her to come out of the cave, saying there was danger inside, that they could not stay. The bear tried again to rouse her body from its sleep, but it would not wake. It lay too deeply immersed in its warmth, shutting out the freezing cold.

The tillow that was hers but not hers drew all of her own tillow from the cave. They emerged through the cave’s mouth as the ground stopped trembling and instead bucked, cracked and leapt, breaking open and shaking with massive ferocity.

The bear could feel the cave behind her buckling, the ceiling of her warm den slamming downwards on her sleeping body, extinguishing it in an instant.

The tillow that was hers but not hers vanished in that instant, leaving her alone to witness, all disembodied, the ground heaving, trees being flung downslope, water rushing up through cracks in the earth and pouring down to the river below, life both quick and slow perishing all around her.

The bear’s tillow was unaffected by the cold, the wind, and the heaving ground. She watched and sensed helplessly until the ground stopped leaping. For a long time, though, it did not stop its trembling and shifting deep beneath the broken surface. If the bear that was no longer a bear could have made a sound, its wailing roar of rage and sorrow would have made a counterpoint to the low roar and crunch of earth settling into a new pattern.

The tillow wandered aimlessly over the shattered landscape for many days and nights, not bothering to notice or track them. Everywhere was devastation and loss, on the part of both the slow and the quick lives. Yet there was also survival of all types, and all the lives were working furiously—each in their own way—to save themselves from the winter. The slow lives all noticed the passage of a tillow without a body; noticed, but were busy with their own work. There were many of the quick—the animals—who did not notice the tillow at all, but some crouched down in fear without knowing why as she passed them.

One day she moved into a river valley she had never seen before, wandering along the broken riverbed and up the ravaged slopes above. She came upon a cave that had somehow been spared, and, feeling a spark of curiosity she had thought dead and gone, moved inside it.

She found another bear, still living, still sleeping. Her own tillow moved around the bear, seeking, probing. It was a female, as she had been. This bear’s tillow was quiescent, but she sensed something about the female that aroused her excitement.

This female was also growing a little one, but it was so tiny inside its mother that it didn’t yet even express its mother’s tillow. The bear who was not a bear carefully, gently moved inside the female, seeking the tiny little one. She found it, and wrapped herself ever so softly around it, questing, asking, until the little one said yes and she and it were the same. If she could have, the tillow would have sighed in contentment and closed her eyes. Instead, she settled down to wait, in darkness and silence, for her arrival in the world, when the sun would warm and she would begin again.