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As a bear, you do not know of many things. Make no mistake, you know every intricacy of the hunt, each note and twist to every scent, but concepts -- thought-things are not yours to have. There is naught but what exists. Sometimes you awaken ravenous, crunching your way through dandelions and popping berries between your teeth, supping on doe's flesh on lucky nights. You remember a time when all grew cold, and you were drawn to the snugness between a tree's roots… but the days you gobbled down salmon roe were always your favourite, but the river was no easy place to approach.
Bull bears, shoving one another in a ripple of fur and muscle amid the roaring rapids. Not that you'd know them as such words, you are a bear after all. They were the large and bitter smelling animals that often bruised you in your attempts to reach the river, often enough that you found yourself at the sharp end of another's claws.
One swing and the bitter bulls collapse to the riverbank, and you see him. Ardbert. He’s bloody, beaten by the river spray, but his face is kind.
You, as a bear, have never known anything. Yet now you know Ardbert from titular mmorpg final fantasy fourteen. This means very little to you, as you are a bear, yet how novel it is to be a bear who knows something! Briefly, perhaps, you wonder how this may help you survive the winter.
He looks at you. And you look at him. Snuffling the air as bears are wont to do, looking at him with your bearish eyes and bearish mannerisms. Yet he makes a bit of a face, inquisitive in disbelief, as you are not much alike the bully bears he put to the claw.
"What. You get hit in the head?" He speaks. Or he would, you think, if you could understand him. A blunt moment passes, and he looks at the distance between you and him. He kicks a salmon from his quarry's paws at you. "Stay out of trouble, then."
It's noise to you. You eat the salmon. And then another, the leftover scraps of picky bears. Then, while this Ardbert fellow lingered, you began to fish. He had something smelly on him, something that he ate? Yet your curiosity of him had been sated for the evening. After all, you had an entire concept in your brain now. A thing. A thought. It would take much mulling to get to the bottom of it.
Eventually you left, unceremoniously, after awhile, out of sight. You have no concept of propriety, goodbye is not a word you know after all. If he noticed your departure, it was not on your mind. There were blackberries in the burn that called to you. Not magically, no, the wind has simply turned direction, and you smelled them.
Many days pass, and you fail to realize this thought has not yet left you. Ardbert. He had brown hair. You had brown hair. Many similarities, you and this Ardbert thing. Perhaps, if you were not a bear, you would wonder if he thought the same. Alas, you are a bear, and so you do not.
The summer cools, and you find yourself gnawing wild ginseng and squinting through its powerful taste, all the while suddenly - for the briefest of flashes - concerning yourself with 'rotation'. It seems important, ‘rotation’. So you turn around, and you are relaxed once more, having rotated to your own content.
It is good to be a bear.
Fall comes to a frosty end, and so very round and fat you have become. Your fur is thick, you've done your socializing, and you are a large and foreboding beast once again. The bulls could not get past your raw strength, and so you walk into winter's first snowfall unburdened by concern.
It is the day where you smell blood, where you follow it in hopes of finding a wolf kill to claim. Yet as your nose puffs its silver lining you note something, as bears like you do not have the best of vision. It is the Ardbert smell.
"Just my luck." It's an Ardbert noise you hear. "Down on my luck and eaten by bears."
Awful sound, it is. But instead of mauling the poor-off Ardbert you sit. Ardbert sits too. Bite wounds, slashes, it matters little to you what exactly he bore as you have no methods of solving such aches for yourself, much less another. Bears are not so overtly social, much less curative.
You grunt. Ardbert turns his attention. Rising to your heels you shift as to heft your weight against his side. The cold of winter is sheer against your outermost skin, your blubbery layers keep the two of you warm. It was, to all extents, among the finest nicety a bear could do for another. Sharing warmth.
Perhaps, just maybe, it did not spark aggression within you to have another bear so near. Your ears, so round and stout as they are, keen against the quiet as the snow begins to pile. It is cold, and your eyes are winking and blinking so bleary for a bear as rotund as you.
Ardbert shifts. Out from under your flank. He moves into the white wood, and thus you follow. There is naught much else to do, as a bear when the snow is falling.
You walk for miles. Miles upon miles, in silence, as twigs snap and shrews dart into their dens. It is the sort of travel humans, with their large and calorie hungry brains, would sorely lament. Oh, what a long walk. They would whine. Oh, it will take forever to get there . Not you. No, you are simple. At best you think to yourself, pray return, pray return.
Yet, you stir with concept. There. You do not know what draws you, but you find your claws prying apart wood and making entrance somewhere. An old den. Stale. Had you been here before? It felt as such, though you would not know. For now, you squeeze your fat bear ass through the gooseneck and into the belly of the den.
It's cold in here. Colder than outside. Your velvet muzzle shocks with cold, and as you settle you turn your paws to not have their leathers affronted by the chill. You bid yourself stay. A loss of something, a stasis, to get through a tough time - Holmgang? You haven't a clue what that means.
You breathe, Ardbert breathes, and the den warms. Ardbert heaves his heft through.
You decide not to attack him, a high kindness for a bear. While he shuffles his way to the back of the den, you feel something. Camaraderie, maybe? The merest notion of a bond? You cannot tell. It is enough to have you push your tush to the cave entrance, plugging it, insulating it against the winter.
Hibernation. You did not know it as such. If it was ever a bliss to not know, it is a bliss to not know the discomfort of cyclically waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping, for an entire season. It was the time where you did not quite sleep. And this time, it was good.
You nose into Ardbert's side. Your heart rate slows. Your temperature drops. And yet, you do not sleep. Sleeping is for those who hibernate, and you, as a bear, enter torpor.
Shocking. A tremorous fact for the poor, thinking human. It is wonderful you have no such divide of knowledge, and no such concepts to weigh you down. No, you simply exhale as the frosty den grows crisp with winter air, and you do not sleep, and you do not wake.
Topor, you see, is what bears undergo in the winter. Yes, this is solely a human issue. To put an animal as the kingpin of an act, only to realize, they do not actually do it at all. However, you are a bear, and you are not asleep, and you are not awake.
Each muscle in your powerful forelimbs grows soft, your neck loses tone as it realizes it has no need to lift your head. Down your spine, down each rib, your muscle tone forgets its purpose. Soft. Your big head rests upon Ardbert, the press to his flesh a comfort as thoughts fail to pass through your head.
He sighs.
You sigh.
The wind blusters in, spatting you with lukewarm snow. Or, to you it's lukewarm, for your body hovered above freezing. You wake from your lack of slumber. Slowly, you remember the dozens of times someone kicked or repositioned, yet they are behind you, and the draft is now.