Black Bear Ritual Trails

“There is pleasure in these pathless woods”  - Lord Byron

And through the woods, she points: a path etched of ovals, ephemeral 

fairy ponds skipping across balsam root and wild strawberry. Each print 

is worn smooth, deep into the hardened earth. For generations, 

Black Bear have danced this sacred trail. A ritual stomp-step: wide stance, 

locked legs, and then the spinning, grinding, marking of the pads 

of their paws that carves a path into the land’s memory.

The hunter teaches me that this land is woven by a thousand 

remembered paths. Trees raised by the flesh of ocean-fed fish, 

rotting on the river’s tendrilled shore. Dropped feathers tracing 

the migratory routes of raptors. Mud slicked chutes measuring 

the width of a family’s widest beaver while slime molds creep 

through a downed tree, skirting the slug trails beside them.

The sandstone bluffs are carved by prevailing winds, who spiral, 

twist, stomp across the rock. Paths form memory past memory, 

time immemorial yet here material: a living tapestry draped 

to the mantle from the sky. And through this organ, breathing: 

a cut, a slice, a wound. Severing the spawning streams, the falcon’s 

fields and beaver ponds—even the cliffs—a highway drives 

into the woods. In the first season after I learn about black bear ritual trails, 

snow falls on asphalt, and I accelerate to highway speeds. As I enter a paved 

over hyperspace, constellations disintegrate in my wake. The world collapses 

into the shallows of my headlights. It’s only from here 

that I can imagine the woods as pathless.