Lone Wolf

clung dumbly to the shelf that had joined the other flotsam in the river.
    It would have been easier, less painful, to release his grip, to slip off and drown. But there was only instinct, and the instinct was to grip. He opened his eyes wider and saw the gleam of the full moon on the river. The brightness made him squint.
    His first lesson: He could adjust his eyes to the light. His first thought: What else might he adjust or be able to change? Might he bring back the warmth he once knew? The smell of milk, the taste? The soft crush of those wiggling furry creatures that had tumbled about him as they all scrambled for the milk? The comforting rhythmic vibrations he felt as he pressed close to suck? There was something beneath the fur, deep in the Milk Giver, that beat.
    Icy water dashed over him, but still he clung. Occasionally, he felt the ice shelf spin round and round in one place. The light swirled and he experienced a dizzying nausea. To steady himself and keep his grip he had to shut his eyes tight. Then there would be a jolt and his raft would break loose and join the tumult of the stream again. He felt the ice diminishing beneath him. His hind legs hung off the raft now and were growing numb in the  water. The numbness crept through him. It was not an unpleasant feeling, but with it something else seemed to grow dimmer, to seep from the deepest part of him. His claws began to lose their grip.
    The last thing he felt was a tremendous jolt; the last thing he heard was the sound of his claws skidding across the final fragment of his ice raft.

CHAPTER TWO
    ***
    THE SPARK FROM THE RIVER

    ON THIS STORMY NIGHT, THERE was a sound that rose louder than the roar of the river and the howling of the wind. The anguished cries of the mother grizzly shook the banks on which she sat. Her great gulping grief seemed to suck the air from the earth. The long guard hairs on her back were sheathed in ice and trembled, creating a bristling litter of small sounds beneath the rage of her grief.
    When the river had threatened to flood her den, she had turned her back for a few seconds to scan for higher ground. In those seconds, cougars had erupted out of nowhere and made off with her cub. Her single cub. She had only grown one this time. All summer and fall she had eaten, fattened herself up, and for what? To have what would most likely be her last-born killed.
    Now, with her teats still dripping with the milk meant for her cub, she was ready to die. She welcomed the river that she had hoped to escape. Not since the mating time five summers before, when a male grizzly had killed one of her cubs to get near her, had she grieved like this. She would not move from the den where she had birthed and suckled the cub. She tipped her massive head toward the moon that watched her like a dead eye, and pleaded with Great Ursus, Take me, take me!
    ***
    The grizzly had lost all sense of time, but the night became darker as the moon slipped down in the western sky. Near dawn, the storm had blown out, leaving dark clouds on the horizon like smoldering ashes. The river flood had reached its peak, but still had not taken the grizzly.
    A dark sodden clot snagged on her half-submerged hind leg. She shook her foot at the annoying scratching sensation. But when she shook, the clot clung tighter. It made her irritable, and she dragged her paw up onto the bank.
    She would later wonder what it was that stopped her from reaching forward and simply scraping off the clot. It betrayed no sign of life. The scratching could have been  the prickly thorns of a bramble that had become entangled with the flotsam of the racing currents. River trash. That was all. And yet she felt something.
    She would think of it as a spark. She had seen sparks come from the sky, and sparks struck from rocks when tumbling boulders collided, but she had never imagined a spark coming from a river. A spark from a river, unquenched, undamaged, undiminished, flying upward from the watery turbulence and containing in its minuscule sphere of light, the promise of life. So she reached forward and carefully picked up the sodden clump with both her front paws. It didn't squirm. She couldn't see signs of breathing. But it was a cub of some sort, and when it opened its eyes with what seemed great pain, she saw the spark.
    As the sun lifted over the horizon, she saw its light reflected in the cub's two eyes. And then she saw an image that shocked her. It was her own reflection in the eyes