Heavy Load, Light Heart
A disheveled figure emerged from the dense forest to stand squarely in the middle of a path he seemed surprised to find beneath his hooves. The surprise in his eyes quickly faded into a vacancy that matched the holes of his tattered robes. From well within the no-critter’s land between detached and deranged, he watched a critter grow larger as its saunter brought it slowly, steadily closer.
The figure coughed, suddenly becoming aware of the eons that had passed since he last spoke to someone beyond the confines of his own mind. Then again, some of the wise ones would say it would be no different with the approaching bear. His fuzzy eyes brows, wild and straggly as mountain top brush, hopped once at the thought. The figure coughed again and stepped to the edge of the path.
A deep groan grew louder as the bear drew closer. The figure’s mind whirled at the possible explanations for the noise, nothing that moved so easily should make such a racket. Yet, a racket was to be heard. Until it wasn’t.
The bear came to a halt even on the path with the wayward looking figure and was glancing at his sidelong with a massive grin visible upon his titled head.
“Are you a prophet?” asked the bear after a long silence in a tone that suggested it already knew the answer.
The figure snorted at the ridiculous notion.
“If you must know, I have no idea who I am. Nevertheless, I most certainly know what I am not.”
The two waited in silence, eyeing each other through grin and scowl.
“A prophet” the figure said slowly, as if forcing the words through his downturned mouth, uncertain if the bear had properly filled in the blanks.
“I thought so” replied the bear with a happy nod of his massive head.
“What? Wait” said the figure, scratching his head vigorously. “A prophet is what I am not.” His eyes darted from side to side as it was his turn to fill in blanks he never even knew existed.
“If it looks like a prophet and sounds like a prophet” said the bear with a playful grin that boasted yellow daggers for teeth.
The figure stared at the ground. Between hooves he rubbed an orange robe lined in yellow, tattered and soiled as if it had endured many years of mindful neglect in the wilderness intrinsic with the pursuits of deeply hidden inner truths.
“Damn” said the figure in a voice that now struck his as oddly goat-ish.
“Damn” he said again.
The bear nodded with the same contented smile that had been plastered across his face sine the goat first saw him, which was much longer ago than he cared to admit. A past life, perhaps, he thought.
“Damn.”
Gilbert, the bear’s name pranced into his mind with all the hair-raising irritation of a one-critter marching band complete with kazoo and symbols for shoes, wore the same green and black plaid shirt thrown loosely over his hulking shoulders that he always did. The yellow hard hat sat just above that stupid grin that only left his face when in deep thought.
Nothing ever changes, thought the goat.
He noticed that Gilbert’s paw held something gently within the clutches of his gargantuan paws. It proved to be a rope. The goat’s eyes followed the rope that trawled behind Gilbert and nearly toppled over at what he saw.
A bundle of logs, though bundle should never be used to describe something so colossal a herd of mammoths would need some serious strategy just to get it to budge, twice as tall as the bear himself and three times as wide, was secured to the end of the rope he held like an unwanted balloon. More surprisingly still was the trench which marked the course the bear had taken to reach his current position alongside the goat.
The goat looked to the bear, blinked more times than necessary to ensure his eyes did not deceive him, peered far down the path winding its way through the mountain forest, and repeated his display of disbelief a hoofful of times just for good measure. Absurd. Unbelievable. Clucking insane were a few of the terms which coursed through the goat’s mind. The goat walked towards the trench, stood at the edge with jaw agape, and jumped in.
He found himself submerged to his horns amongst jagged tendrils of exposed roots strewn about within a wasteland of stone, aged millennia and rudely torn from their eons old resting place deep within the mountain side. A score of beetles mournfully coursed over the desolate scene; the goat’s eye twitched. He snapped to from his beetle induced fugue to find Gilbert watching his every move with great curiosity. The goat’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. Something wasn’t adding up.
“Where are you taking these logs?”
“Just around the way” said Gilbert with a thumb jutting backwards over his shoulder.
The goat leaned to peer around the bear and nearly toppled over. After righting himself, he found only a path disappearing into endless mountain forest, nearly identical to the scene behind him. He gulped.
“How far have you come already?”
“Just over the hill or so” said Gilbert with a shrug. “Nothing to fuss about, really.”
The goat looked at the ravaged soil beneath his hooves. “Not a thing. Ha.” His eyes bounced from bear to trench to logs to his own tattered robes. The space between his horns began to throb.
“All this time I thought you loved the forest” said the goat while rubbing his head, wincing as if Gilbert himself was perched directly between his eyes.
“I do love the forest” replied Gilbert with a slow, honest nod.
A peaceful smile pulled at the corners of the bear’s mouth as a faint, yet warm light poured through his eyes. “I really do” he said under his breath as he took in the grandeur of the trees towering all around. Absent mindedly, he scratched at his belly, his massive claws doing their best to leave his green and black plaid shirt unscathed, but tearing through the threads like, well, claws through honey, nonetheless. “Even more than ever” he continued slowly. “It’s just different.”
“Sure is for those trees!” huffed the goat. “What about them? The forest is sacred!” he exclaimed dutifully, with enough vigor to convince both the bear and himself, he hoped, the latter of the two being the more difficult. “It was crafted by the Great Acorn to provide all we critters need.” He stuffed an edge of his hoof into the other which was balled into a fist just before he turned it upright while wiggling like buds of a sprouting tree blowing gently in a spring zephyr.
Gilbert nodded reverently at the sign of the acorn he, as well as all the critters of Wilderness, had learned as cubs, kids, pups, and all sorts of defenseless fluffballs.
“So?” blurted the goat as his arms sprung towards the logs attached to the rope in Gilbert’s paw.
“Gifts” replied Gilbert with a warm smile.
“Food and lumber!” proclaimed the goat with hooves now stretched towards the heavens above and a look of serious piety pinching his eyes closed.
“Nibbles and roofs” agreed Gilbert with another scratch and tear at his ever more exposed belly.
“Wait” the goat said suddenly as his eyes shot open and his arms feel to his sides. “They were gifts, certainly. But now they’ve been desecrated!”
Gilbert tapped a claw at his upturned bottom lip as he did his best to guess at that last word he’d never before heard.
“Ruined!” shouted the goat.
The bear gave him a look as if he should’ve known better. “You can’t ruin a gift from the forest” he said with a chuckle.
The goat’s mouth opened to offer a retort, but none was to be found. He closed it reverently and snorted. “It doesn’t make any sense” he said to himself after a while.
“None!” agreed the bear happily.
“Then why do it?” asked the goat with his head cocked at an angle. “What do you get out of all of this work?”
The bear’s bottom lip curled forth again while he thought.
“For quite a long time, eons, you could say, food and shelter was all I needed. All I wanted.”
“Critters need nothing more!” declared the goat with his bottom lip now shoved forward, though in determined self-assurance. “Simplicity is the key to salvation!”
“It certainly is” agreed Gilbert with a knowing smile. “That’s why things are different now. Before, the forest existed because the Great Acorn planted it for us.”
The goat nodded with eyebrows raised blissfully, like a critter listening to its favorite melody gently cascading down a cool mountain brook. “Wait” his eyes were jerked open once more. “That’s how it is. How it’s always been. So” he stroked his chin while his eyes darted wildly from side to side in pursuit of a conclusion proving to be as elusive as hare with a fox nipping at its tail. “So” he repeated, “How could it possibly be different, if it is exactly how it always was?”
The goat pondered his own words with a face that betrayed a perplexity deeper than any mountain valley he’d ever known as his mind performed calculations upon his hooves that always added up to two because, well, hooves don’t have fingers.
“Two” he muttered unconvinced.
‘Nailed it’ thought Gilbert as he nodded at the goat’s impressive arithmetic.
“Why are you nodding?” asked the goat.
“You got it right” said Gilbert excitedly.
The goat nearly shook his widely peeled eyes right out his head.
“Two” offered Gilbert helpfully.
“Two?”
“Yup. More than one. Not alone, you could also say.”
“I’m not following” said the goat as he started his hoof-math all over again.
“Her” said Gilbert.
“What?” replied the goat with a scrunched face. “Who?”
“Maggie.”
The goat’s mind raced to place the familiar name. “Is that the feminine divine of the Great Acorn or something?” he said while scratching vigorously at his head, soon threatening to wear a trench in his own scalp to rival that which trailed behind Gilbert’s pile of logs. “I’m not good with the philosophical side of things. Too wishy washy for me” he said with a dismissive wave of a hoof.
Gilbert’s eyebrows bounced at the surprisingly apt description offered by the typically hardheaded goat. “You’re on fire.”
Panic shot through the goat’s eyes as they quickly scanned his fur while his nostrils strained to detect any sign of smoke. Once assured that nothing was in fact burning, he gave the bear the most dubious look he could muster.
“Maggie, from Foxtrot’s” said Gilbert slowly.
“The bunny?” scoffed the goat incredulously.
“That’s the one” said Gilbert with the deep, mountain rumbling laugh all of Wilderness recognized.
The goat shook his head with a determination to rid it of all the nonsense that dared traipse it was past his gnarled ears.
“What does she have to do with the forest, the logs, or even the number two?”
“Everything” smiled the bear.
“Everything?”
“All for her.”
At this, the goat went into a full spasm that looked much like a mixture of a seizure and a highly skilled bout of breakdancing. “Let me get this straight” he said while trying to steady himself from a particularly intense bout of skull rattling. “You think this, all of this” he flung his hooves in wild circles as he completed a full turn, “was created for a rabbit that makes your tacos?”
Gilbert nodded, smiling. “Well, she doesn’t make them. She brings them to me.”
“Ahaaam” replied the goat with his head cocked at an angle which threatened to become permanent if he maintained it for long. “Let’s recap.”
The bear nodded again, approving deeply of the suggestion.
“You drag these logs for acorn-forsaken miles through these woods, provided by the Great Acorn, everyday for…a rabbit? Is she into lumber?”
“Good one” Gilbert said with a hearty chuckle that shook his sizeable midsection. “with every delivery I earn a Gilly Special.” The bear slowly raised a paw while scanning their surroundings. “Sometimes two” he added with a conspiratorial wink.
The goat’s eyes shifted back and forth between the massive load of lumber, the trench which served as its permanent wake, and the bear swaying slowly and easily from side to side. Still, something wasn’t adding up.
“There’s got to be more.”
Gilbert’s eyes widened to reveal a light so captivating that the goat momentarily forgot how to breath. He finally came round when a coughing fit nearly toppled him but was saved by a steadying paw from Gilbert which helped him keep his hooves but in doing so crushed his shoulder.
“There is and there isn’t” said the bear. “Simplicity, remember?”
The goat snorted doubtfully while rubbing his aching shoulder. Gilbert watched as the goat’s eyes continued to leap from the logs to the torn path extending beyond sight behind them, the untrodden path of equally eternal qualities vanishing in the distance ahead, to the bear who stood before him, unburdened by it all.
“Love” offered Gilbert, though the goat shook off the words with a twitch of his head. The bear laughed. “It’s why we do anything at all. It gives purpose to the drudgery of daily duties. Without her, this job is just a job. Thankless, dull, mind-numbing. But with her, suddenly it radiates with life. Every moment is an expression of joy. Every encounter a friend to be made, because this job allows me to go home to her, in a place where she feels safe, to a house that pulses with her love.”
The goat snorted again and crossed his arms before his chest causing Gilbert to emit another rumbling laugh.
“Chop more wood for you, sir? Gladly! Haul that log another forty miles? Nothing would bring me greater joy!”
The goat’s face softened. His bottom lip began to tremble as a glistening took root in his eyes. “Where is this home you share with Maggie?” he asked, imaging a warm hole in the side of a mountain somewhere deep in the woods where even the chill of winter dare not tread uninvited.
“Oh, we don’t have a home yet. Haven’t even gone out on our first date” replied the bear with a smile.
The goat’s eye crossed as his snout contorted and twitched. The convulsion spread downward until his hooves pounded a rhythm on the ground that made Gilbert break into a bearish two-step. Suddenly, the goat’s face shot upwards and locked eyes wild with frustration on the dancing bear. He tried to protest but only managed to gargle forth unintelligible babbling noises that ended in a high-pitched yelp.
“I see the way you’re looking at me” laughed Gilbert. “Lip curled beneath a scrunched snout, eyes threatening to never uncross. But it’s as simple as that. My life began the day I met her. Sure, I had laughed a bit, seen trees so tall you couldn’t climb to the top in a day, mountains so pale blue-grey in the distance you’d swear they were painted by the Great Acorn himself. For hours, I gazed upon those natural wonders and felt thankful.”
The bear fell silent and seemed to withdraw within himself. After a few moments, the goat began to doubt whether Gilbert was still alive and leaned in close enough to see if the hairs within the bear’s large snout swayed with life-giving breath. Not a single one so much as stirred.
A sound began to stir from deep within the bear’s gut causing the goat to startle and tumble backwards. He sat up and began wiping the dirt from his robe until he realized it looked the same either way. He shivered as a sing-song voice rang forth from the bear’s slightly agape mouth that seemed half his own, half something much, much older. “They all bow in awe of her life-giving presence, the joy she radiates, and the peace her warmth brings. Perhaps, the Great Acorn really did create all we see around us, but he pulled the soil from her laugh, plucked the sun from her eyes. She is the source.”
Gilbert’s eyes slowly opened to find a transfixed goat sitting on the forest floor before him. He extended a paw and helped the dazed critter to his hooves.
“So” started the goat only to cut himself off, fidget a bit with his robes while blinking furiously beneath the weight of mental calculations beyond the capabilities of an unschooled caprine. “So you wait?”
“And build” said Gilbert warmly.
“Build what?”
“Whatever she needs.”
“How” the goat’s face wrinkled, “how do you know what that is?”.
“The forest tells me” Gilbert said with a wink as his eyes bounced happily from tree to tree.
The goat breathed heavily as his shoulders slumped. “That’s a hell of a load to haul.” He massaged his forehead as he took in the daunting view of the mountain-like bundle of logs and trench of tattered earth trailing behind it. A single corner of his mouth lifted in a desperate, bewildered kind of smile.
Gilbert laughed. “You’re starting to get it.”
The goat’s eyes followed the rope and rested upon the paw which grasped it ever so gently. “Not you?” he asked.
“Not a thing to do with me” nodded the bear.
“Welp” said the goat with eyes wide and nostrils flared. “I think that’s about all the conversation I can handle for one day. I’ll be on my way.”
“That sounds about right. Thanks for the chat, Prophet Phil.”
“Anytime, Gilbert” the prophet said as he waved goodbye to the bear who was already whistling his way up trail, lumber plowing through the mountain soil with the ease of a canoe on a glassy lake. Suddenly, it struck him. The goat pulled at his tattered robe which proved much stronger than its frayed threads would have him believe. His arms went limp at his side. “Damn.”
