III. The Mark That Became a Path

The creature began to visit the sheltered pool each winter.

At first it came alone.

Then another creature followed.

Then another.

They did not know why they came.

The path was not marked.

No stone pointed toward the pool.

Nothing had been built.

Yet the ground between the water and the shelter slowly changed beneath their feet.

Grass disappeared.

Soft earth became firm.

A narrow track appeared.

The path was made by their coming.

And now the path made their coming easier.

Something had turned back upon itself.

A past event had changed the creature.

The changed creature had altered its behaviour.

The repeated behaviour had altered the ground.

And the altered ground changed what the creature could do next.

The path had become part of the world.

But it had also become part of the creature's way of moving through the world.

One winter, heavy rain came.

The creatures reached the path and stopped.

Water had cut across it.

For a moment, the old way was impossible.

Then one creature climbed higher, around the flooded ground.

The others followed.

By spring, another path had appeared.

The old path slowly disappeared beneath the grass.

The creatures did not mourn it.

They did not remember making it.

Yet the world they inhabited had been changed by what they had done before.

And the changed world now changed what they could do.

The first warmth had become a tendency.

The tendency had become a path.

The path had become a condition of further movement.

The creature was no longer carrying its history alone.

Its history had entered the world around it.

And the world, changed by that history, had begun to carry it back.