The old woman grew hungry.
It was so hard to bear, poor thing, with her stomach so withered and aching, so she raced aching-bellied across the lands and leapt at the largest thing she saw, which was a moose, and rolled over and over and over with her hands around its giant furry neck. When she was done it was gone and she was hungrier.
So she ate. And ate. And ate. Blood and sinew and muscle and bone and organ flowed down her throat and oh she was no longer hungry and she was happy, so happy that she belched and picked her teeth with the animal’s antlers and threw them into the dirt and went off to sleep.
Rains came, and the antlers were broad and wide and held the water like cupped hands. It drained into their spongey insides and filled them to the brim and moss grew on them, and ferns, and they filled with muck and pond scum and life and frogs came and newts and turtles and a thousand thousand things that crawled and sang and flew.
It was a bog, and it was just about the perfect place for more moose to live. And so they did, in their hundreds, in their thousands, and the old woman was never hungry again.
***
The old woman grew thirsty.
It was so painful, poor thing, with her mouth so dry and crackling, so she leapt into the air and clawed and grasped and came down with a bird in her two wrinkled hands. She bit its head off and drank all the blood from it in one long gulp so strong and so smooth that the bird’s flesh and feathers withered up and turned to dry dust, and when she was done she breathed a sigh of relief and threw the bird’s bones to the ground.
They shattered, poor dry bones, shattered and splintered and shuddered into long, delicate fragments. But it was a fine day with a warm sun, and soft rain came overnight, and shy growth came to peek from the ends of the broken bones, and soon they grew in new ways, then more, then more, then more and more and more until they were bigger than almost any other living thing – and certainly taller.
They were trees, and the birds loved them, couldn’t get enough of them. They roosted there in thousands and millions and billions and the old woman was never thirsty again.
***
The old woman grew tired.
It was so hard to feel the hard dirt on her aching bones, poor thing, so she roamed and shivered and clutched at herself looking for a softer place to sleep as she grew wearier and wearier. She was so tired that she walked into a buffalo without noticing, and he didn’t appreciate this, and she didn’t appreciate THAT, so she head-butted him (once) very hard and he died. The buffalo, she noticed, had a very fine thick coat of hair, and he wasn’t using it anymore, so she tore it all off him and licked it clean and rolled herself up in it and slept like the blessed dead, after eating the rest of the buffalo for an evening snack.
All around the sleeping old woman the fluffy hair that had been torn free in the ruckus wavered in the midnight wind, billowing softly. A lot of it was plucked up and taken away, but some of it dug deeper, put down roots, and stayed – as stubborn as the buffalo had been. And the dawn dew fortified it, and the morning sun straightened its back, and the old woman awoke in a long meadow of tall sprouting plants.
They were prairie grasses, buffalo grasses, the sort of plants that will eat up a whole horizon like only the sea can, and the buffalo came and loved them dearly, so the old woman was never cold and tired again.
***
The old woman woke up and her bones did not ache, her stomach did not complain, and her throat was smooth and unparched.
But her back felt sort of funny and lumpy, so she scratched and scraped at it with whatever was close to hand until a lump fell off, which she took a good look at. It was some sort of ape that she’d rolled over and squished in the night, and it was pretty funny-looking.
“You’re pretty funny-looking,” she said (her first words), “and not good for much,” (her second) and so she threw it away across the grasses, over the trees, past the bogs, and so on and so forth until it landed somewhere.
It lay there, stripped of its hair from its long flight, and it was still pretty funny-looking. And sooner or later more funny-looking apes came to be, all of them, standing there around looking at each other in confusion and wondering where the heck they were. It wasn’t a bog. It wasn’t a forest. It wasn’t the plains. It was just a bunch of funny-looking apes staring at each other until the sun went down, when they couldn’t see anything and wandered off and got lost.
That was us. And we still haven’t quite found anywhere we really properly fit in, have we?