For a long while, a hundred summers or so, the small warm one who used to lie against my northern face in the mornings has been gone, and today the tall warm one comes carrying a smaller warm thing wrapped and trembling, quick heat in a bundle it holds the way water holds itself in a cupped hollow before it spills.
They wait. This is the only human thing I have ever fully understood, waiting, though they do it wrong, all clenched and vibrating, when they might simply let the years pass. The little one's heat is going out of it. I have watched heat go out of a great many things: embers, glaciers, whole seas of soft flitting bodies that swarmed the shallows and then did not.
It leaves the same way each time. Slowly, then all at once, then not at all.
The tall one presses its face into the fur and makes the shaking that they make, the salt-water leaking, the low sound. To me it is the same brief wetness a rain leaves, and it will dry before noon of my kind of noon. I felt the same trembling pass through the ones who raised the standing stones in the field, then through the ones who knocked the stones down, then through no one, because they were all afternoon-quick and the field is only grass again.
The little warm thing goes still. Its heat spreads thin into the tall one's arms and then into the air and then into me, faintly, a last small pressure I will hold a while, being unhurried.
By the next ice, I will not have noticed either of them left.