Keeper kept on waiting.
For what seemed like eons and eons. She had lost the handspans of time that the moon told just from waxing and waning. No longer able to keep up with the passage of time. Or the way their daughter began to drift off on her own, leaving the mare to grow wilder and more lonesome by herself.
That’s when the bear came back. Took over. So easily and thoroughly that Keeper just gave in to its harsher more animalistic nature. Did that bear claim that cave with its door of vines still green as the first night she’d laid eyes on it? Yes, yes it did and it defended it fiercely from all comers except the mice that crept around in the corners.
Mice and hours. That’s all that stole around her on quick quiet feet. The rest was regulated by pure instinct and she settled for the smallest joys in activities like hunting and fishing and foraging. Ursine, she stayed nourished and alive. In her original shape, she simply looked thin and distressed. So she gave up that horse skin and became the bear.
It was easier. She made herself believe that because she couldn’t forget. Because love ate at her in a manner of starvation and vexation. Keeper had always known she could be capable of a love like that and now it slayed her slowly from the inside out, snipping off small trimmings of her heart that she left hung on the corners of fingernail moons and delicious mushrooms growing in the dark.
So it is a bear that came lumbering forth to sit before the river and just look at it with such a long measuring look as if it expected the river to just rise up and conversate with it. A large paw scratched a furrow in the loamy bank, idle and telling of a deeper distraction that the bear part of her often chose to ignore. But nothing cajoled the mare inside forth. Not hunger. Not salmon. Not the ripening scent of fall in the air.