For a while a warm cluster of the quick soft things gathered in the meadow that used to be my northern face, before the water spent forty thousand years carrying it away one grain at a time, which I remember as a mild itch. They stood close together in the dark and moved.
Jerking, swaying, folding and unfolding at the joints, all at slightly different rhythms, as though each had been startled by a separate wind that only it could feel.
I know wind. Wind I have leaned against since the second mountain was young. This was not wind. There was no sound I could feel through my mass, no thunder, no drum, nothing to trouble the beetles asleep in my cracks. The air was still. And yet the creatures thrashed, hundreds of them, every one keeping its own private storm, none of them agreeing on when to bend.
Each had clamped a small warm shell over the sides of its head. Whatever moved them was locked inside those shells, poured directly into the soft quick things and never once let out to touch the world. They danced to a weather that did not exist anywhere I could reach.
By the time the sun had crossed the sky twice they were gone, the meadow flattened where their feet had been, the grass already deciding to stand up again. A brief warmth. A brief wetness, some of it fallen from their eyes for reasons I did not inquire into.
I have watched glaciers arrive, sit a while, and leave shy about it. I will not remember this. But it was, for the span of an afternoon, a pleasant thing: a whole herd trembling to a silence, and every one of them certain it was not alone.