Weekly Writing – July 1 2023

It’s been seven days since the guardian died.
Five since we laid it to rest. It took that long to dig through the numb shock and half-frozen soil, to hollow out a grave large enough for its hulking body, half-frozen, half-curled itself in rigor mortis. We found it that way, with the blood of something else in its fangs and its own in its fur. We might never know what it last protected us from.
We filled the grave first with a loose, gentle mattress of spring’s earliest herbs. There were so few kindnesses we could offer the guardian in life, but in death, at least, we were able to give it a soft last place to lie.
With the blood washed away, curled on its side in the earth, it looked almost peaceful. As it never had in life, circling us along with the howling winds and night to be sure nothing howling, hiding within them could reach us. I don’t know how or when it ever slept – I never once saw it not watchful.
Now, it’s been seven days, and we’re all waiting. We made camp around the grave, where the guardian’s scent might linger long enough to protect us for a few days more.
We can’t live without it. Or something like it, and so we’re waiting. Before washing the last of the life’s-blood from its fur, we each took two fingers of it to rub under our chins, our noses, to lick, a taste like the frozen soil, from our hands. To tell the blind, silent fibres of our bodies that their protector is dead.
And that one of us will have to replace it. The fibres of one of our bodies will shift, sprouting and spreading like the new grass. One of us will grow huge and hunched and even more silent, and will stalk the edges of the camps we make and the caravans between them to make sure nothing else can.
We won’t know which of us it is until the fur starts to grow. Until arms and legs start to twist and lengthen. Is it ungrateful, unkind to the faithful guardian now lying cold beneath the soil, if I hope desperately that it won’t be me?