Lonely God

There is a legend that a bear haunts these woods. Not just any bear, but an ancient, majestic bear from a proud lineage of bygone time. What I never understood was whether the bear was ghost or flesh. The main story was about a ghost, but the sitings and the killings were anything but ghostly. This creature was a beast of mass and heaviness.

The pine trees would be slashed and left gaping. Green needles littering the floor, sap sticky and fragrant, and in the middle of it all, some gory detail: a boot, a glove—all that was left of a lonesome hiker.

“Never go into the woods alone,” the old timers all said. It seemed like a universal rule of The Woods, but this particular admonition held special meaning. The bear would never strike a group, nor even appear when there were several people in the party. Even the sightings were universally made by ill-advised solo adventurers. I aimed to tread the fine line between sighting and encounter.

It came at night. I heard the lumbering gait drumming through the ground as I lay. Luckily, I hadn’t fallen asleep. I rolled over and fumbled for my flashlight. The grumbling turned to a discernible plod of enormous footsteps. I listened for the sounds of breaking branches, but heard only the bassline of this primal song. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. I grasped my rifle with sweaty, adrenaline-laced fingers.

I was ready for this king of bears, but it was no bear that stood and brushed a tree aside on the edge of my campsite’s clearing. The fear in me died, and I cast the gun to the side. There were no weapons that could touch this lonely god of fur and bone. Dying would give me a place in legend. Why waste my final moments in futile struggle?