The soft quick one has gone still, which is my favorite thing it does, because when it is still it is almost like a small warm pebble and I can pretend it will stay. It is holding the bright cold sliver it holds so often, the one that glows against its face at night like a second, feebler sun.
Ordinarily it thumbs at this sliver in a blur, a hummingbird motion, faster than root growth, faster than frost heave, faster than anything that has ever meant a thing.
But not now. Now the blur has stopped. The thumb hovers. The warm creature has curled into a smaller shape, and its heat has climbed the way heat climbs a south face at midday, and its breathing has gone quick and shallow, the way the little burrowers breathe when a shadow crosses them.
Something in the sliver has wounded it, or failed to. I could not say which, and the distinction will not survive the afternoon. It stares at the glow the way water stares at a crack: with terrible attention, certain that pressure alone will make the stone give way. It will not give way in the span this creature can wait. Nothing does.
The light on the sliver dims itself and darkens. The creature lifts its head, sets the sliver down, picks it up again, sets it down. This happens perhaps forty times, which to the creature is an eternity and to me is not yet a thought.
By the time the ice comes down again to grind me smooth and carry me a valley south, this whole warm anguished season of thumb and glow and held breath will have dried, without a mark, into the same clean nothing as a single passing rain.