The Hunter and the River
The hunter followed the river’s path, his footsteps sure and swift upon the riverbank. It was the summer after his wife’s death, and though the forest around him was in full bloom, flush with the colors of aster and goldenrod, his heart was still locked in winter. Locked in the memory of his wife’s cold hands, her rigor mortis skin, her body rotting deep in the earth. Sometimes he swore he still felt grave dirt caked beneath his nails. Sometimes he dreamed that he was buried beside her, and woke gasping as if he’d been buried alive.
By midmorning, the river led him to the maw of a cave. Nothing but shadows within, the whisper of running water echoing off the stones. Here the hunter paused for a moment, tried to catch his breath. Tried, dimly, to keep his hands from shaking.
From within the cave, there came a voice: “Have you any tribute?”
Without a word, the hunter reached into his belt pouches, and proffered a handful of offerings: animal bones, crow feathers, stones etched with runes from the village wise woman. A lock of his wife’s hair, braided with a lock of his own. Everything the legends said he needed, everything he’d spent this past spring struggling to find. His wife’s hair had been the hardest. There hadn’t been enough stuck to her comb, or clinging to her garments, or collecting dust in the nooks and crannies of their cottage—and so he’d had to dig up her grave again, hard-packed dirt scraping his palms raw.
“Hmm.” That voice within the cave trickled, burbled; slid across his skin like liquid. His ears couldn’t quite make sense of the sound. It was like trying to make sense of music from a god.
“Set them on the riverbank,” the voice said. “You may enter.”
The hunter obeyed. He laid down his offerings, and walked inside, the sound of the river echoing all around. Somewhere behind him, a crow shrieked a single mournful cry, then fell silent.
***
“You are a hunter,” the spirit said to him.
“Yes, spirit,” the hunter replied.
“You are a skilled one. The blood of your kills, it soaks your soul through and through.”
“Yes, spirit.”
“Spirit? Is that what you think I am?”
“I don’t know what you are. Only that you are powerful.”
And he did know. Within the bowels of the cave, enclosed by miles of granite and bedrock and cold, ponderous earth—the hunter could feel the spirit’s power. Feel it down to the marrow of his bones.
A single sunbeam leaked in behind him, casting his surroundings in tenuous light. He saw runes etched into the walls, so archaic in their design, he doubted even the village wise woman could make sense of them. Stalactites hanging from the ceiling, sharp and pearlescent as polished white fangs. And at his feet, there flowed the river, coming to rest in a wide, deep pool. That pool was dark as night, dark as oblivion; dark as the innermost chambers of the soul. Dark enough that if he were to step into it, sink beneath the waters—the hunter felt certain he would sink and sink and never surface again.
“Hmm.” The spirit’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once—above and below him, within and without. From the stones he stood upon to the very air he breathed—the spirit’s voice imbued it all, saturated it like water.
“I’ve had many names, throughout the centuries,” that impossible voice mused. “Spirit. Liar. Healer. Trickster. Which one do you seek today?”
“I seek only a bargain, great one. I have given you my tribute. I was hoping you might give me something in return.”
“I suppose that depends on what you’re bargaining for.”
“Your waters. I’ve heard tales of them…”
“Tales?”
“They say a drink from this pool can erase a man’s most painful memories.”
And with those words, the memories surfaced—his wife’s final days. Her pallid skin, hacking coughs, the chill of winter sinking into her bones. The way her sweat-soaked hand felt clasped in his own, as her pulse stuttered and fell into stillness.
“Human memories are such fragile things, prone to fading and unraveling with time,” the spirit said. “To wash them away takes no great power.”
“Then your waters. They can do it?”
“They can. But tell me, dear hunter—which is worse? Mourning the one you loved? Or forgetting you loved them in the first place?”
The hunter did not reply. But perhaps the spirit sensed his answer in his silence; in the grief-carved hollows of his soul. The spirit sighed.
“Well. If your mind is set, then you may drink. But take heed: water is the most mercurial of the elements. Water spills, it seethes; it leaks through even the thinnest of cracks, but it rarely ever does as it’s told. And so, if these waters do not bring you the peace you seek…remember that you were warned.”
The hunter swallowed. He knelt by the pool. He cupped the water in his hands. Just barely enough liquid to fill up a drinking mug, yet somehow it looked immeasurably deep in his palms. He couldn’t see his reflection in it. He couldn’t see anything, nothing but a pure, lightless oblivion.
Perhaps the sight should’ve frightened him. But to a man as mired in grief as he—oblivion was a mercy.
The hunter lifted the water to his lips. Then he drank.
***
Some time later, the hunter staggered out from the cave, his footsteps slow and shambling as a drunkard’s. He tripped over the offerings left at the cave’s maw, caught himself against a nearby tree. Tried, dimly, to ground himself in the pain; in the way the bark’s jagged edges cut into his palm.
Something had gone wrong—the waters had taken too much, drowned his mind too deeply. Instead of washing away his beloved’s memory, they’d washed out everything. He couldn’t remember his own name. He couldn’t remember who he was or how he’d gotten here. He couldn’t even remember what he’d sought to forget. All he remembered was a lingering, all-consuming grief—the grief one felt in the wake of utter devastation, grief for all he’d loved, and all he’d forgotten. Deeply and viciously, the hunter grieved—but he couldn’t remember what he was grieving for.
The hunter took a shuddering breath. He lifted his hand, scraped bloody by the tree bark. And upon seeing the blood…he felt something stir inside him. Not recollection, precisely. But perhaps a ghost of it.
A hunter. He was a hunter. Yes, he remembered that much. Although the contents of his mind had been washed out by the river, his body still remembered how it felt to hold a bow, to pare flesh from bone, to feel the blood of his kill sluicing between his fingers. Even if he remembered nothing else—he remembered how to kill.
Something inside him hardened, then. The hunter clenched his blood-stained fist. He stepped forward. And into the forest, he wandered—guided by nothing but his own hunger, and the aching chasm where his memories used to be.
From the cave behind him, there came the spirit’s sorrow-laden sigh, quickly drowned out by the river’s dull roar.
