Regret

Rupilee killed the bear when he was fourteen. My father was proud, as any father would be, and when the neighbors came to look at it, he came out of the house pushing Rupilee in front of him. They were both surprised when our neighbors made it clear that they found it abhorrent that Rupilee had killed this magnificent animal and I will admit to feeling the same way. That was the first time I felt welling inside me a feeling of pure melancholy, a deep sadness for everything gone wrong in my world, for the day Rupilee and my father dragged the carcass out of the northern forest.

Shifting and still settling, our world was young and we were always finding things we had never seen before. Sometimes from the hills I could make out the massive forms of airborne things far out over the ice, circling, looking for food, although there's little for beasts this big, I thought. Trees grew to their full height, then, and the deep forests where the men never went were very dangerous and wild. There were things there that had never seen us before; even if in those days we were fierce, and frightening, we were alone. We knew so little about why we had been left here, or why this world should seem so inhospitable, but it was our home and all things lived together on this earth, sharing in it's misfortunes and it's glories.

There were some who believed that this place was a gift to us and that what we found we could take. I suppose my father was one of those and Rupilee, too. I couldn't tell you why but that was the first time I sensed a difference in the way I saw the world. There were secrets here, hidden and that belief was enough to separate me from them.

Rupilee cried himself to sleep that night. I could hear him in the bed next to mine, whimpering into his coverings, lost and frightened by these things he couldn't understand. My father roared at my mother and she cautioned him, that in his anger he should not do anything rash.

When I woke, there was too much activity outside and I dressed as fast as I could and went outside. My father was in his nightclothes and he was ordering the other men to harness the horses. My mother stood near the door with a blanket wrapped around her and she stared into the eaves of the forest. "He's gone.", was all she would say when I asked her where Rupilee was.

They were gone for four days, into the forest, and the day-to-days weren't getting done. No one talked to us and some of them made a point of ignoring me altogether. Without anyone to tell me what to do I was bored and spent my afternoons in the hills watching the ice for anything out of the ordinary. When at last I could hear the horses coming I ran to the house and waited. My father stood on the platform strapped to the first horse and he stared at me without saying a word as it came to rest in front of the house. It wasn't until I heard my mother cry out that I realized the others were lifting something down from the last horse. Wrapped in layers of coarse cloth, Rupilee looked sick and I wondered if he had caught a fever in the forest. It wasn't until they covered his face that I realized he was dead. He was the first, and the last of us, who ever died.

Later, years later, when the whole world died, I used to sit and think about Rupilee and all the wonders he never got to see. And I cried, with a sadness wrought from the regret I felt at being angry with Rupilee and from the regret of not consoling him in his anguish and from the regret at feeling nothing, then, except sadness for a doomed bear. Everything dies. I know that now. Everything dies except for me and my regret.