Day 3: (How to catch) Möntti
Today
Róisín is here to bring us fresh puddles
of tears and the delights which wait within.
Lying peacefully in the mud was sweet for the old bear.
He had struggled to reach the swamp as his body began to fail him, weak and feverish from this disease that had ulcerated his skin badly enough to make his fur fall out in clumps and cause every exposed patch of skin to itch and burn beyond enduring. Even worse were the urges that coursed through his fading awareness: the desperate need to attack any living creature he encountered. Not just for food, although he was certainly hungry. Starving. But even more strongly than hunger, he felt the mad urge to bite or claw any animal he met, or even to breathe at it or spit on it, anything that might transmit this alien sickness that had invaded his body to a still healthy creature.....no! He would not remember that! He would not do it again! He was a bear, not some unnatural.....thing.....
He had remembered enough of his life before these horrors had begun that he managed to find the cool peat swamp that his mother had shown him when he was still a cub. That had been another bad year. Hot, humid and sticky weather, clouds of midges, deerflies, mosquitoes and other biting pests crawling all over him and sucking his blood, creeping into his eyes, nostrils and ears to bite and suck from the thin, sensitive skin there, leaving raw areas that swelled, burned and itched.....
His mother had shown him how to lie in the cool, brown, astringent peat water, splashing it over his head, rolling in the dark mud beneath to leave him with a protective coating on his skin that kept all of the insects smaller than deerflies from biting him, and even they were slowed down by the mud. The comfort and relief it gave had been amazing. His many bites had begun to stop itching and to heal, and he had slept every night on the edge of the swamp, coated in protective healing mud. So it was no wonder that he had remembered this place when the Rash had begun to drive him mad with itching and lack of sleep.
But the swamp could not help him to survive the urges. Nor could it block out the voices, constantly crying in his head with the tones of mates, cubs, rivals, prey..... Only the voices of the forest gods were not changed, and even those felt far away and blurred. Tapio and Mielikki could not save him from this horror, yet he felt that in some way his pleas had been heard.
The other thing that helped him, as he lay in the cool water or rolled in the mud, was watching the frogs. He ate them, of course, when they came near enough for him to catch, as he ate everything that he could capture, trying uselessly to fill the bottomless pit of hunger that this disease had opened in him, but he also liked to simply watch them.
They did not seem to catch the disease at all. As the numbers of their predators reduced they had bred more freely, and since some of their prey, such as flies, had increased vastly in numbers, the land could sustain the increased numbers of frogs. The old bear liked to watch the frogs as they hunted insects, displayed for their mates or simply played in the water, leaping athletically among the stems of the reeds or dancing from leaf to leaf of the water lilies, snapping up flies, moths or mosquitoes as they went. He admired the freedom with which they moved through the elements of earth, air and water with such ease and freedom, and wished that he could be like them, free and playful and immune to the disease that had destroyed him.
He scarcely noticed as the progress of the Rash through his ruined body began to reshape it closer to the form most on his mind. Had he been able to see himself, he would not have understood what he had become. Yet the changed form seemed, somehow to suit him. The swamp was a comfortable place to be. Time passed.
The humans came. From the times Before he remembered humans, and knew that he was in mortal danger. Humans hunted and killed bears, and sometimes ate them. Yet the forest gods sang to him and told him to be still and to have no fear as the humans approached him.
The human mage began to sing to him, and his song echoed that of the gods. Peace, the songs said. Peace and no more pain. Peaceful sleep at last, and then a return to the world in a fresh new shape. He had only to be still and wait. He waited. He scarcely felt the thin sharp blade enter his brain, only the cool darkness that followed. Time passed.
************************************************************
Muscles contracted, flicking the tiny tail to move him away from the egg mass and into open water. He swallowed the scrap of egg membrane still in his mouth from where he had chewed his body free of the egg, and that woke hunger. He needed food and shelter. The clump of rushes offered both. The tiny tadpole concealed himself among the tall stems, nibbling at the coating of algae that covered them. He was safe and at peace, no longer a suffering bear beast but reborn into a new shape and a new life.
