The soft creature pressed a curl of white bark into my shade and then went away faster than a startled shadow, and now I have leisure, an ocean of it, to consider what it left.
It is thinner than the wing of anything that has ever tried to nest on me. It weighs so little that the first honest wind will take it, and I have known winds that took hillsides, so this is nothing. It carries dark marks in orderly rows, the way lichen once grew on my north face before it, too, gave up and blew off.
The quick ones make marks constantly, on bark and on the glowing flat stones they carry, as though marks could hold a thing still. Nothing holds still. I say this as the stillest thing they will meet.
Already the sun is working on it. The dark rows are fading, browning at the edges, curling inward like a leaf deciding to be soil. Whatever the creature wanted remembered here will be gone before the moon has finished one of its little circuits, and it makes so many little circuits, so fast, that I have stopped counting them.
A rain is coming, I can feel the cold gathering in my western seams. When it arrives the white bark will go to pulp and the pulp will go to the low ground and the low ground will one day be my brothers, pressed and patient, waiting their turn to be a hill.
The creature thought it was keeping a record. It was only feeding me, very slowly, the way everything does.
I will have forgotten this by the next ice.