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The neighbour knew that his time was limited. Soon enough, the girl and the lad would find their way back up, ripping through the wound. His visitor would provide no salve a second time. When they concluded their search and returned with the sisters, he’d be left to bleed out here, on the floor beside Catherine’s bed, to be found rotting whenever the Bear returned home.

Ah, Bear, you wretch. You, the best of us all, a wretch. The beloved guardian. And how come you by these opportunities of guardianship? Is it not always by violence? I’ve watched your burial, you know. I’ve seen the mothers pour the dirt over you. Your mask of guilt was perfect, your shame delightfully timed. Casting a shadow over your deep mourning of the loss of the girls. But when did they first bury you? Was it not long before your three daughters gave up their lives? Did they not bury you the first night you laid them in their beds here in this house? Yours was the perfect theft, how you brought these ones back to us. Your obsession with the old legends. You saw these three and somehow believed them the living embodiment - incarnation - of what? Of the very spirit of sustenance and nutrition for the earth? These three sisters. What was it you told me? That no one else ‘appreciated them’ as you did - your Great Law of Peace, your harmony. Recall Sunday school, brother, ‘unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains but one seed, but if it dies, it becomes many’. Your harvest is rotten. Your fields lie fallow. You, the masked man, grieving over the ones you lost. Dear Bear, you grieve the ones you stole. Your deep is shallow, I watched your world shrink to this field alone. Never enough room inside. How am I the one here with this beast? And here I believe you! Still! I believe you did find the ones - some living embodiment of the spirit that nurtures and enlivens the world, but you turned them into something sick. You gave them over to this man and left them bleeding out in the river. A guardian they call you. They called you father. Join me, Bear, Chief in the council of eaters.

The eyes had heard every unspoken word.