Beliefs

      It’s hard being left for dead when you’re really not. Your friends and family being torn to shreds when they receive the news of your “supposed” death. When what really happened was the betrayal of my own troops. They left me behind beaten half to death so much that they thought I was dead, but I wasn’t.
        It was almost two months before winter, stranded with only the leather armor and clothes on my back. The closest shelter was a cavern a few trees ahead of me. The only problem was that a family of bears consisting of two starved cubs and a wounded mother that wouldn’t make it though winter any way. I felt a tugging at my heart that made me think about my family and how my children, without their mother, taking care of themselves. This feeling just from the sight of two starved cubs was devastating me. I couldn’t let them die and a list of reasons run through my head and at the top of that list was the warmth of their bodies during the snow fall that would surly fall.
        I sat under a tree to watch the mouth of the cave into the night without fire. Howls of wolfs echoing off the full moon above startled me. The mouth of the cave was so dark, so weary that I didn’t see the mother bear leave the cave to defend her cubs from a pack of wolves. The growling of the wild dogs and the roar of the mother caught my attention.
        The wounded bear didn’t have a chance… so I thought.  One reason that was so oblivious to me was one I have gone through so many times before. She wasn’t going die, she was defending her own children. Her future kind was at stake. I noticed this from the vigilance and furry of her anger. Just because she was wounded didn’t stop her from beating down all of the attacks the wolves made against her.
        Outrage I saw in her eyes started to swell in my soul. This anger I would use against the people that abandoned me, not against the bear that shoved me back on the beaten path. I stayed under the tree until the fighting was over and darkness swept through my mind.
        The next morning I awoke to the sun shining brightly in my eyes. Dead wolves lying in front of the cave would make excellent traveling clothes when the snow came. The journey would be treacherous but my children, my cubs; they needed me that was all that mattered. I wasn’t going to let them down. Not now, not ever, not when I was still alive.
        It took me several weeks to get back to the children I loved so much. The devastation of the journey home cost me. I collapsed as soon as my kids saw me not because of fatigue but something I learned from the bear. The love I had for my children. A tear slid down my cheek and froze as it hit the ground. The anger from the mother bear was not what I thought it was all along. It was love for her cubs that pushed her to fight, and me to travel back to my family.