
Yes, I was going to challenge a grizzly bear. That sounds crazy, stupid, and so over the top nuts that it should have been the end of me. But Greyeyes, dammit anyway, saved me once again, without knowing me. How it happened though still boggles my mind at this point, since I was ready to go down fighting, which I would have, and a single arrow comes racing toward the bear and the next thing I knew, the bear was swatting at his face, howling in pain, and making tracks as he turned around and lumbered off.
“Come this way,” Greyeyes told me then, “He’ll be back.”
It was a pine-scented arrow, a scent that Greyeyes told me that grizzly bears hate. I honestly didn’t know that, and I would have died in a stupid, grand gesture had he not done what he’d done. But when he and I started to talk a while after that, he told me that he didn’t do this to save me, but to keep me from insulting the Great Spirit by insulting Mato, the bear spirit as I came to understand it. I thought I’d understood a lot about the world I lived in at that point, but Greyeyes opened my eyes.
I still don’t know as much as I thought I did.
(to be continued)
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