Time Out of Mind

Who is the fly that draws blood from your eye / and why do you leave it open?
How long have you known this man / that you should drink from his cup and call him brother?

The back of my neck is stiff, where the god first placed his hand and asked me to run with him.

I am old, but each day younger than I have been.

This day I see a man and a bear, standing at the edge of a wood.

Says the bear, "You speared me before I could run from you; now spare me."

This man has listened to the songs and sung them, since he was a child at his mother's breast. It is long known, by him and his people, that this is not how it ends. Time out of mind, man and bear have been brothers by law, since the Great Bear took the chief's daughter to wife, and got on her fifty sons and fifty daughters. The cousins, come of age, could not be contained, and oftener warred with each other than shared a bed or dining hall.

There is one that goes like this, as played by a small woman on a fiery drum.

Goodbrother Bear, I will hold you over the hearth fire, and share you among my kin.

I will make you into a hood, that men should be in fear of me; and I will ever wear you, that you should watch over my shoulder. When I am dead, my sons will wrap you around my shape, that you should lead me to the other world, as a friend.

If the brother wishes I will burn his skin, and his soul with it. For bearskin is a poor shield from the rain, and collects snow, that melts. When a stranger meets me, he will say that I am a man of valour, to have killed a bear and be wearing the bear skin.

I will lay the pelt with the bones that I buried under this rock, and there I will burn them. This if he gives the sign. But if the brother does not protest I will carry him on my back, even if a king asks for him, as a gift.

So it was, in the days of the fathers and grandfathers, that no man could continue to call himself a man who had surrendered the skin of his bonded brother. But the late men and women of the hill would put anything in a stranger's hand to get in turn sweet steel, and wine, and finely carved pipes, and handsome youths made slaves.

The wound is weeping near the breast. It is deep, but the man draws no nearer. Is this the time? It is the time he became a man. He does not utter breath, nor does he raise the end of his spear, the jaggedness daubed in aconite. Forgive, brother, the fair death I give you, says the man to the bear, after a long moment. There is no knowing if the bear consents, when he finally hangs his head, but there is no preparing either for the shot of lead that bursts his valve, no repairing the farmhand's reproach that he should be more careful, son, and next time bring a gun.