Two soft warm things came and pressed themselves against me before the last ice retreated, and they have been coming ever since, though never the same two, and never for long.
They do not touch me directly, these quick creatures. They wrap their undersides in a skin that is not their skin, a shell that clacks and scuffs where flesh would only patter. I have felt many of these shells arrive on me and depart. They land, they push off, they wear a shallow gloss into my back over the passage of a few thousand seasons, which is nothing, which is a single held breath.
I have noticed that the shells wear out faster than the creatures inside them. A pair comes light and stiff and loud, then softens, then thins, then one day the creature comes with different shells entirely, and I understand that the old ones have gone wherever the soft things send their discarded skins.
The creature does not seem to mourn this. It simply grows a new shell and keeps moving, always moving, as though the ground beneath it were about to be taken away.
It never is. I am the ground, and I am not going anywhere. I have watched the fashion of these little foot-shells change perhaps a hundred times, pointed then flat then bound in strings then not, and each change seemed, to the quick things, enormous.
By the time the next glacier comes to scrape me clean, I will not recall a single pair.