The Bird Princess
From Tales the Wind Told

By Brooks Mencher

Some say a huge stone with a tail of fire fell from the sky with the roar of a great, mad beast and burst into a thousand pieces of flint at the foot of the old tree that grew at the edge of the village of Mielnisha.

Others said it was ball lightning that had formed high in the blistering summer sky, up higher than the feathered clouds, and it was cast like a millstone to the Earth, and to the village, and to the tree at the edge of Mielnisha.

And there were a few who claimed it had not happened during the summer at all, that there was no storm and that it was neither comet nor millstone. For they say it was midwinter, the sky elderly and gray and wheezing, the forest icicled and frosted, and the great tree with the twisted grain at the edge of the village, which had frozen to the core, had exploded like a bomb in Mielnisha.

Perhaps all were true, as metaphors or symbols or fantasies, but none was real; for in truth, the season was the cusp between spring and summer. The melons were round and still green and the cucumbers as numerous as small fish. A bear had wandered down from the northern hills and sat against the old tree in the glen, facing the forest and river to the east, and he watched the bees and studied the deadwood nearby, and he watched the river which took a bend near the tree, and had thoughts of honey, or leaves, or rough tree bark against which he might scratch.

On the opposite side of the tree sat the boy, Szymon the Melon, oblivious to the presence of the bear, his head buried in a thick book of some arcane topic, its pages crowded with small print. When the boy had arrived at Papa Misha's some years ago, he was a spindly child, an infant, really, and Papa named him "Szymon" and called him "the Melon," so he might grow round and healthy and safe, whatever his name and circumstances might have been before. What should he have named him, "Szymon the Thin?"

The tree, the bear, the boy. In Mielnisha, they say that three wonders bring tragedy. It is an old saying the villagers brought with them when they crossed the steppes on their long journey north and settled in this shallow river valley. They brought many things with them, both possessions and habits, but most were lost or forgotten over time. They kept the sayings!

The first wonder: A bee stung the old bear on the nose, and he yelped and swatted and stood on two legs and dashed to the side of the thick trunk of the tree.

Second, at almost the same time, a large roving wood ant bit the boy, Szymon the Melon, on the leg. He yelped and swatted and stood on his hind legs and dashed to the side of the tree where he came face to face with the bear.

Three: On the village road above the tree, a woodcutter happened to be hauling split hardwood in his horse cart to the weekly market in the meadow, and a wasp stung his mare on the nose or on the face, and she yelped and whinnied and shook and reared on two legs. The cart toppled onto its side and was ripped clean of the horse and halter and it tumbled down the hill toward the tree.

Szymon and the bear screamed when thy saw each other in the shade of the leaves, but barely had their mouths opened when the wood cart came crashing into them at a terrible speed, its shear weight bringing a horrible destruction upon them like a millstone and like a lightning ball, like a hail of corewood.

When it struck the tree -- and the bear and Szymon -- the cart exploded into pieces. Splinters of cart and chunks of hardwood rained down as if it were the end of the world. Szymon was thrown like a marionette into the air and landed uphill toward the road, and when it was all over he lay sprawled on the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He was bruised and broken and buried in wood, and he was not all in one piece.

The bear, who had wanted nothing more than to breathe the fresh air at the edge of the forest and rest in the shade of the glen, was similarly disposed.

A dreadful silence fell and nothing moved. Time passed. Some leaves fell. Finally, in the distance, there was the sound of running, the crunching of gravel and dirt, and the silhouette of Papa Misha appeared above on the village road. He had a cap and coat, a beard and a sturdy belly. He had a shadow, too, and the shadow was little Feiga Malka. Papa had named her Feiga Malka, which means Bird Princess, because the windows of his stick house had been visited by songbirds on the day of her arrival.

"Szymon! Szymon!" shouted Papa Misha as he hurried downhill to the site of the tragedy. "Syzmon!" he said and knelt at the boy's side.

"Run, get the doctor, little bird!" he said to Feiga Malka, who fought the desire to stay at her poor brother's side. She turned and loped uphill to the road, up the road to the village and through the village to the doctor's house.

There, in a breathless torrent, she explained the terror of that afternoon, and the doctor and Feiga Malka ran and walked and ran again to the big tree at the edge of the village below the road.

"You must save the boy," Papa told the physician.

"From your lips to God's ear, Papa Misha," said the doctor. "It's not up to me. I will do what I can. I am a simple man with a very sharp knife, that is all." He paused and looked at the boy. "A needle and thread, and little more have I! A few books I may have, which I stumbled upon here and there."

"Years of training!" said Papa.

"A year here, a year there."

"You saved Mrs. Landau when she choked."

"Choking is not the same as losing a leg, Papa Misha," for that is what had happened to Szymon the Melon. The doctor tightened a band of cloth on the boy.

"It's the same! It's the same," said Papa, almost crying.

"May it be the same for us," said the doctor.

They gathered up Szymon the Melon (his leg was nowhere to be found) and put him on a thick cloth and carried him to the road and up the road to the village and through the village to the doctor's home. But Feiga Malka did not return with them and they were too worried about Szymon and the horror of it all to remember to ask her to come along.

Feiga Malka had spotted the bear. It, too, had been buried in wood splits and splinters and was pinned to the ground by a large and heavy portion of the cart, bloody fur beneath all the ruin, and he had been forgotten by all the world except for the girl. She very slowly crept closer to the big creature and sat down some distance away. She sat and sat, being very quiet and still, and sang a little to pass the time. She could finally tell that the old bear was still breathing, for the wood that covered him was moving gently up and down. A number of hours passed, and eventually the bear lifted his head and looked at Feiga Malka. He squirmed this way and that beneath the wreckage of the cart but could not free himself. The girl crept closer and sat, tiptoed closer and sat. ... Quietly and delicately she climbed onto the rubble and removed the logs piece by piece until it seemed possible that the bear could pull himself from beneath if he had enough life left in him to do so.

And he did manage, somehow, to stand up, but one hind leg was missing. Nevertheless, the pressure of the cart had stopped the bleeding, and he began to limp slowly off. He stopped to sniff here and there, and made his way toward the wood.

The bear had awkwardly crawled just a few paces when he came across Szymon's leg. Despite his pain, he picked it up and looked back at Feiga Malka. Then he turned and lumbered slowly and painfully into the forest, carrying Szymon's leg in his mouth.

But the bear had left one of his own hind legs behind, and it was buried in the rubble on the other side of the cart. Truly, it was more of one piece than Szymon's leg, and Feiga Malka had neither the heart nor the strength to try to take the boy's leg from the bear, so she removed her outer dress and with great effort managed to wrap the heavy, fur-matted bear's leg in the cloth and then with even greater effort she pulled it all the way uphill to the road and finally to the doctor's house.

While Feiga Malka had been down in the glen by the tree with the bear, the doctor had been busy trying to save Szymon's life. When the girl walked in, backwards, exhausted, dragging her blood-stained dress behind her, Papa ran over to her and lifted her onto his hip. He leaned over and opened the bloody cloth and stared wide-eyed at the matted, furred hind leg of the bear.

Feiga Malka explained that the bear had recovered sufficiently and had lumbered back into the forest, but had left its leg behind. Then she went over to her brother and felt his forehead. "You must save my dear brother," she said to the doctor. "With your smallest and most delicate stitches, you must sew our bear's leg onto Szymon."

The doctor raised his eyebrows. Papa stroked his beard and they thought together in silence. Then they set to work, and Feiga Malka made mint tea for the surgery team -- and also for Papa's few goats, which had followed him along the road to the doctor's house.

A few weeks went by and all was well. Szymon had begun to heal and his sister was happy and helped him first with standing and later as he learned to walk again with the bear's hind leg in place of his own. A few more weeks passed and Szymon was greatly healed. It was by now midsummer and he was, in fact, putting on weight. Once a thin child, he was now built more like a barrel. He had grown as strong as a bear and worked hard, loading Papa's vegetable cart for market. He helped the horse pull the load. He gathered herbs and mint for Feiga Malka and split wood for the fire. Szymon the Ber, as he was now called, repaid the doctor many times over by doing chores that required his great strength.

Papa wondered about the power that Szymon now had, but he set any worries aside and was happy the boy was alive and healthy.

As the end of summer approached, the tide of contentment abated, for while the villagers accepted the extraordinary fate of Szymon the Ber, their talk had gone far beyond the village and attracted the attention of the district magistrate.

One morning the magistrate arrived, pulled slowly up the dirt and rock path to Mielnisha by carriage. Never had the village been visited by a man of such high office and never had it been visited by an entourage of soldiers that required two more full carriages.

The magistrate was remembered for many years and by many generations for his scowl and his white-knuckled grip on his silver and ivory cane. He had come to determine the truth of the rumor of "The Boy and the Bear," and had taken lodging in a tavern near the center of the village. Because every villager was truthful and simple, and did not know the ways of the wider world, they all spoke glowingly and endlessly of the miracle of Szymon the Ber, who had been Szymon the Melon only weeks before and should actually have been called Szymon the Thin. They spoke of the heroism of Papa Misha and the skill of their doctor -- for how many villages could say that a doctor lived therein?

But that was all the magistrate needed to know, and from his make-shift office at the tavern, he officially declared Szymon the Ber to be a "golem, an atrocity, and an unnatural soul," and he wrote out an arrest warrant for the bear-boy. Prison was to be his fate, and the offending hind leg would be removed, just as nature demanded.

Six soldiers of the magistrate were dispatched to arrest Szymon, but they did not have the innate speed of the villagers, who raced to warn Papa Misha of the impending tragedy. They breathlessly informed Papa Misha about the party of soldiers coming to arrest and imprison poor Szymon.

"You must escape, or you will be doomed to prison, my child," said Papa. "Quickly, quickly, through the window, to the forest. A loaf of bread! A corn roll! Here, my Szymon, a candle, an apple! My oiled jacket! Run, you must run!"

Szymon was able to escape with little time to spare. In only a matter of a few seconds he decided he must leave behind every minute of life he had ever known, every person and place, every leaf of every tree he had ever visited. He would leave Papa and Feiga Malka. What else could he do?

When the soldiers arrived, Papa hovered over his tea, and Feiga Malka cried quietly in a corner, a cup of tea in her hands, also.

"We are looking for the fugitive known as Szymon the Ber, and we know he is here," they said.

"Search!" said Papa, "search!"

They found nothing, of course, but Papa's old violin on the top of a small, scratched table.

"Are you Pan (or Mr.) Papa Misha, guardian of one Szymon the Ber?" they demanded.

Scowling, Papa nodded his head. They again demanded to know where Szymon was, this time more loudly. But Papa still didn't know. So they searched again, this time more thoroughly, and spotted the open window. Clearly, he had fled! The soldiers left the house and began to pursue Szymon into the forest, for the bear-boy was heavy and left an easy trail.

After they left, Papa put Feiga Malka on his knee at the table. Their lives would be different now, he told her, but even Papa Misha did not know how different their lives would truly be.

Papa and the girl had watched Szymon slide out the window in his escape to the forest. Szymon hit the ground with a thump, waved and sprinted to the edge of the wood where he waved again and dove like a large rabbit and like a cannonball into the underbrush.

Almost at once Szymon the Ber was confronted with a world of smells -- scents so vivid he could practically see them. He sniffed and could smell the soldiers of the magistrate leave Papa's house, he could smell them enter the wood in pursuit. But he could still smell Papa and Feiga Malka, so he knew they were safe in the house and not arrested for harboring a criminal. A criminal! He could, sadly, also smell Feiga Malka's tears, but he knew he could not go back without bringing danger to his family, and the forest seemed to call out to him despite his sorrow. He was, after all, a bear! Or part bear. In fact, it seemed he was mostly bear, for not only had his smelling and hearing changed, he had grown big and heavy over the last few months, and fur covered most of him. His eyes had grown small and brown and his hands were thick and well-padded, his ears soft and round.

Because his senses had become so acute, Szymon being, as it were, mostly bear, he sensed someone in the brush not far ahead, not far to the side. It couldn't be the soldiers, for they were behind him. He had stopped and sniffed, and could hear sniffing coming from whatever was hiding in the brush. He sniffed again; and it sniffed again. Slowly, he crept toward it, knowing that the magistrate's men could be getting closer and closer. "I must know what is there in the brambles," Szymon said to himself, and so he moved closer still. Suddenly, something leaped straight into the air, and Szymon, completely shocked, leaped straight up as well! They both came down with a thump and stood staring at each other with eyes wide and mouths agape. It was the bear!

Szymon and the bear stared at each other. The bear looked Szymon up and down, and saw that the boy had become a bear, and that he had two legs, one of which seemed very, very familiar. Szymon looked the bear up and down, and saw that the bear was terribly thin, and had lost clumps of fur here and there and that he was wearing Szymon's leg. Both sat down to catch their breath, and after a while they sobbed in each others' arms for they were alone in the world.

"I fear that I have taken your leg, and with various thorns and sharp splinters of wood have pegged it to my own body!" the bear said to Szymon. "I would not have taken even one stitch, but I was near death, you see, and unable to move more than an inch or two day after day and week after week, alone in the wood and uncertain as to the outcome of the tragedy beneath the tree. I saw the girl haul my leg up the hill and so I had no leg at all, but I feel strongly that it has come to a good end, for you have put it to good use. May it always bring you strength!"

"But what will my leg bring you?" asked Szymon, "For though the surgeon grafted your leg onto me with delicate stitches, you have barely managed to pin my old leg onto yourself with thorns and splinters! What ever will be your fate?"

"But I am alive," said the bear. "And with a little more time to heal, who knows what my future might bring? But for you, my friend, your future is in doubt unless you flee as you were told. Run! You must run, my brother, or all is lost. Have no worry for me, for I am alive and well."

They parted in sadness, for both knew that Szymon must flee, or else both he and his family would be imprisoned.

So Szymon the Ber traveled through the forest day by day, listening to the old stories that the trees tell in the rattling of their leaves, and to the ballads in the wind and the sonnets that the thousand little streams recited as he passed by -- sounds that humans could never hear. He spent his evenings making a small lute so he could play the harmonies and sing the words. He slept in thick grass and honeysuckle, monkshood and foxglove, and in the meadows, pennyroyal was his bed.

But his family was never far from Szymon's mind at first, and he often thought he saw Feiga Malka high in the treetops like a spirit or a wisp of fog or an ethereal bird with eyes like an owl's but hidden beneath gossamer wrappings. How could Papa get along without him? How could Feiga Malka survive?

He continued through the forest, sleeping in logs and hollow tree trunks, on grass and pennyroyal, and he dug in the roots of trees along riverbanks. One day he wandered into a great cave. It was dark as midnight, but Szymon the Ber had no need of sight, for he could smell the direction of the air currants and hear the echoes of the walls. He moved deeper into the Earth and saw no light for many days. Down, down he went. The air was at first warm, then cold and later frigid, and he came upon a lake of ice, its ringing echo telling him it was crystal clear. His small eyes, accustomed now to the endless dark, could see a sparkle on the ice like microscopic fireflies, which he took to be the exploding of atoms deep in the heart of the Earth. Beyond the ice he could hear the groaning of the stone beneath its own unfathomable weight, and there at the bottom of the world he could hear -- and feel -- the pulse of the Earth. There he remained until he could remain no longer, and knew he must continue his journey.

Slowly, day after day, he traveled upward until he could again smell fresh air, and sense a thin strand of fog and the aroma of grass. The light returned, dimly at first, then brighter and finally he left the cave not knowing how much time had passed or how many hundreds of leagues lay behind him.

Szymon the Ber gazed out over the landscape that lay before him -- it was an immense grassland, like an ocean with waves of straw for as far as he could see. Before him spread the steppes, and beyond the steppes, he knew, was the sea.

One night he made a small campfire and stirred the coals and sang the songs he remembered from the forest and the songs he had learned from the stone in the darkness of the cave and in a short time the wolves who had lived many generations on the steppes approached him. They were curious about this new person for there had not been a bear on the steppes for many long years, and they had a sort of professional interest in Szymon's songs.

Their campfire lasted many weeks and months. Szymon and the wolves traded songs and dances, and they taught one another about lutes and pipes, drums and flutes and bells, and Szymon learned techniques to add colorful thread patterns to his clothing.

The dances that the wolves had preserved over years and centuries told the story of the steppen people, the history of the world and its oceans, the land and the forests, spirits and gods, wind and fire. The dances were intricate and complex, the steps being very precise, the mere position of a hand or eyebrow adding to the tale the dance told. Szymon learned each movement and attitude, every longitude and latitude and every possible orientation of the dancing body beneath the sun or the moon. He practiced until the wolves, and the Earth itself, seemed satisfied.

But when the time had passed and the weeks had waned, Szymon the Ber went on to the sea, which seemed to call him, and there he made nets to fish and he fashioned round cork boats from which to cast the nets. Those who saw him thought they saw a young man, and at other times a great bear. And some saw Szymon as part bear and part human. They knew he was a thing of wonder, and they discussed this among themselves and left him tokens near his fishing shack. They left him bread now and then and were especially pleased when he ate it quietly as he watched the tides and waves of the sea.

In a matter of time, though, Szymon knew he must cross the sea. So one clear morning he stepped into one of his cork boats. He wore a necklace of driftseeds that he had gathered along the rocks of the shore, carried his lute and packed drums of water and dried fish. In this manner he left behind the lands of sand and of steppes, the cave, the forest. Dim were his memories now of home, of Papa, of Feiga Malka, and he composed new songs to keep them alive in his thoughts. Many were the eyes that watched Szymon the Ber set to sea on his boat of cork.

Szymon watched the moon as it rose and set, waxed and waned, from his boat of cork as he sailed the seemingly endless sea. It had been many nearly three years since he had slid out the window of his home in Mielnisha to escape the magistrate. He remembered sprinting through the grass and diving into the underbrush; he remembered loping along the trails between the trees. The day that Szymon the Ber escaped the magistrate's soldiers was the day that he met the bear whose leg he now possessed. How well he remembered, and how much he wanted to know what became of the bear who called him "brother."

Here is what had happened: The bear watched Szymon wave and turn his big body to lumber off into the unknown. After Szymon had left, the bear sat back down and hid in the brush, more alone than ever. Though it had been several months, he was still weak from the tragedy beneath the tree and he tired easily. He had a slight cough. Barely able to fend for himself, he now ate mushrooms and such things as could be easily found beneath tree roots and flat stones, or along the banks of rivulets close by, and he listened to the frogs and crickets by day and night and so passed the time while he healed.

But fate would not be easy on the bear. Not many minutes after Szymon had left, certainly not more than half an hour, the fractious noise of many steel-shod boots could be heard tramping into the forest. Voices shouting! Sabers rattling! The bear sniffed, sniffed again, and then poked his head up over the leaves of the gorse bushes. The magistrate's soldiers!

What should he do? They were headed straight after Szymon! They could capture the bear-boy; his trail was fresh! They could capture the boy and cut off his leg! So the bear, gathering all his strength, sprang from the bushes and landed heavily immediately in front of the soldiers, and he flashed his frightening teeth and growled. But, alas, he could not raise himself on his hind legs, as bears do, to frighten them further, for he had only one strong hind leg, and because of the other weak one he fell over and hit the ground with a soft thud on the side of the trail. His ferocity vanished like a puff of smoke.

This was all the soldiers needed to see. At once they were on him, all six of them, and they bound him with a thick hemp rope and iron shackles and they taped his mouth shut with tree bark and pulled him behind them along the ground back to the tavern where the magistrate had taken lodging.

No sooner had they brought him to the steps of the old wooden lodge, than the magistrate stepped out into the daylight, cane in hand and declared that Szymon the Ber had been captured! "The gollum is ours!" said the magistrate, "and prison is his doom!" He ignored the fact that the bear was a bear with the leg of a boy and was not Szymon, who was a boy with the leg of a bear. As far as the magistrate was concerned, the case was closed, the fugitive caught, and his mission accomplished.

The magistrate, the soldiers, the bear: They left Mielnisha by night, though some said it was during the quiet before dawn when all the village was asleep. The magistrate and his personal aide were in the first carriage, the soldiers in the second and third, and the bear was pulled behind. He was thrown into prison and forgotten, as if a black velvet curtain had been thrown over any memory of him and for all that anyone in Mielnisha knew, that was the end of the story, sad as it was to all of them.

A bear in prison. During that time his fur fell out entirely. His skin grew thin, his face, thin, and he had a red beard for he was not allowed to shave. As time passed, the guards no longer thought he was a bear at all, but a young man with tossled hair, raging mustaches and dark, fearsome eyes beneath bushy red eyebrows. And they did not treat him with kindness, neither did they speak to him. He was so thoroughly ignored, in fact, that the magistrate forgot his threat to remove the hind leg.

Among themselves, the guards referred to him as Omash, for that is what he sounded like when he growled, and they thought Omash to be his name. But they never addressed him or spoke to him personally.

Alone and forgotten, Omash began to sing. He sang the popular songs he heard outside the window of his cell; he sang the folk songs he remembered hearing when, as a bear, he wandered close to human habitations. He sang and sang, softly sometimes, loudly at other times; during the day, or in the solitude of the night. Soon, Omash began making his own songs, which he sang in a deep and sonorous voice and when he sang, the birds would gather at his prison window and try to get into his cold jail cell. The guards turned their ears toward him, yet never did they speak to him for they were afraid. Even the moonbeams tried to shine into the depths of his prison to hear the great ballads that Omash sang.

Some said it was a spell cast by wandering spirit that turned Omash from a bear to a boy. Others said not; they decided that since Szymon the Melon had become a bear, the world required that some bear, then, become human, thus maintaining the delicate balance of the universe. But still others said that when Omash pinned the leg of Szymon the Melon on himself, his fate was sealed, and so it was. Week by week he continued to change, his thick red fur becoming long red hair. Omash spent his hours in the magistrate's prison, far from the sight of all, even the guards, cut off from all sight and sound but the light of the moon, a voice from the road that passed in front of the prison, or the chirp of an occasional cricket.

Some nights Omash would sing a delicate aria, and the world would weep. The wind, the trees, the gravel in the road would strain and cry at the beauty of his voice. Then he would stop, and silence would descend like a blanket. Omash would sit on his cot utterly still until he could no longer sense his own body, or hear his own thoughts, and he would travel in spirit across the world and through it, visiting, at times, the great tree at the edge of Mielnisha. Then he would return to his body, to his cot, to his songs, to his prison.

One day Omash decided he must somehow escape. The seasons had turned three times -- summer had dwindled into autumn, then came the snow of winter, the melting ice of spring -- and he had seen neither beast nor human, had spoken to no one, had heard of no man's sorrows or triumphs, no bear's brooding or glee. That night, the prison clock struck 1: one hour after midnight and all was quiet. The guards had been sung to sleep, unable to keep their eyes open as Omash rumbled through a long-forgotten lullaby.

He leaned against the big iron doors of his cell. He pushed harder, leaned more and pressed with all his might. The iron doors moaned but held tightly. He pushed again; the doors moaned and held tightly, but the hinges began to bend. Omash pushed a third time and the doors held tightly but the hinges snapped like old bones. Omash pushed one of the doors aside and slid out into the night. The moon was full and the night birds sang, and though he wanted to sing along with them, he remained silent and slipped through the streets to the outskirts of the magistrate's town, into the forest. It was midsummer's eve. The moon was a crescent which held the evening star.

But what of Feiga Malka? The summer that Szymon the Ber had escaped, the summer that Omash was captured by the guards, Feiga Malka, saddened by the fate of her brother and knowing nothing of what had become of the bear, began to cry. From morning until night she wept and in her sleep her tears flowed even more freely. What little she ate was drenched in tears and her clothing was always soaked. Papa worried. He had three worries: First, for her grief, for no girl should be so unhappy in life; second, for her tears, for she became thin and pale; and third, he feared the cold winter chill would eventually settle in on the little wet girl and bring with it some sort of illness.

"Doctor," he said one day, "You must help me in this matter. You must find a cure before my little Feiga Malka begins to cough."

"I will do what I can do," said the doctor. "And we will see if it is enough or not enough. What can I do, as simple as I am, for a grief such as Feiga Malka's?"

"Something! You can find a clue in your books!" coaxed Papa Misha. "One of the old books with drawings of herbs, one of the volumes that speak of full moons and horsehair, surely."

"How can I find such a book?" asked the doctor. "How can I read such books, if there were such books, for my sight is poor as a lizard's!" But the doctor shuffled over to one of his bookcases, put on his spectacles and pulled down a thin volume that was so old it had been written by hand. He turned to Papa Misha and said, "We will try something. It will work, maybe. We can try." He shrugged his shoulders.

"We can try it," said Papa. "It could work. I have great confidence in the old ways and you have never failed me."

The doctor looked at Papa.

"No, never!" said Papa. "You saved my poor Szymon from certain death. You remained silent during the magistrate's terrifying search and did not convict me! True, my Szymon is gone. True, he's a fugitive, a criminal. A bear!"

"Nothing is perfect," said the doctor. "But we will need some beeswax."

By the next day the doctor had fashioned two thick, coin-like disks of beeswax mixed with herbs, and these he pressed over the eyes of the bird princess and her eyes were sealed. Since the warm wax was soft like putty, it covered her eyes gently and thoroughly. The doctor then took several strips of very soft wool and wrapped it around her eyes and head several times, like a bandage or blindfold, and with this treatment he hoped to dam up Feiga Malka's endless tears and soothe her with herbs and thereby save her health.

The wax seal worked, and the aromatic herbs were helpful. Yet the welling up of tears could come again at any point, and so the prescription was this: The beeswax seals to remain in place, wrapped gently by the woolen bandage, until such time as Szymon returned safely, or until the heat of summer days returned and the threat to the girl's health was not severe.

So many days passed that the blindfolded Feiga Malka had stopped bumping into the stick chair or the table or the door jamb of her home. It was as if she could see after all, and she walked about outdoors and neither tripped nor fell. Weeds did not entangle her feet, and rocks did not cause her to stumble. Papa marveled at her grace, and her health seemed to be returning.

"Let's walk to the old tree," said Feiga Malka. "I miss it, and I have not seen its branches, neither its stout trunk nor large leaves for many long months. I miss the river nearby, and the sound of water on the rocks and the bank."

They began their walk hand in hand, but as they approached the tree, the girl's steps seem to grow softer and softer, and when Papa finally looked down at her feet, he could see she no longer touched the ground. Feiga Malka floated a few inches above the gravel and dirt and the long dry grass. She seemed to be skating in the air. But because she wasn't used to weightlessness, she leaned over and felt around until each of her hands came across a large rock. She picked up the rocks and was pulled gently back to Earth by their weight. Then they continued on.

At the base of the tree they could see what had become of the leaves of summer: they were spread upon the carpet of autumn. "Winter approaches!" said Feiga Malka, though she could not see because of the wax disks and soft wool wrapping. She felt her way to the tree. Now, when Feiga Malka reached out the touch the tree, she let go of the stones and rose slowly into the air. She felt the bark of the trunk as she floated higher and then put her hands over her head because she knew the branches would be next.

"Be careful!" said Papa, looking up at Feiga Malka in the branches. "When will you be coming down?"

"I cannot tell, Papa, for I have left the stones behind. You must tell the people in the village that I am in the tree, for otherwise they may become afraid. You must take care of me until I can come down, while keeping your eye out two things, Papa. First, for dear Szymon who has the leg of the bear and who fled Mielnisha to save us from prosecution. Secondly, for the bear who lost his leg beneath the tree and, recovering from death, took my Szymon's leg, for Szymon would surely have given his leg to the bear if it could have helped it to recover."

Papa delivered the message in town in so many words, and the situation was accepted in due course: Feiga Malka had taken up winter residence in the great tree, and there she would remain until she could again return to Earth. After all, stranger things had happened in the wide world.

She remained aloft in the tree, unable to return to solid ground because of her weightlessness. Not knowing what else to do, Papa set up a camp below the tree so he could care for Feiga Malka and be ready to catch her when her weight returned. But time passed and the camp became a tent, and with time the tent was replaced by Papa's small stick house, which he moved and rebuilt stick by stick beneath the tree, and he moved his tin woodstove and his few goats along with it. By the time winter set in, he burned a fire all day and night, the warmth rising from the house to the canopy of the tree. He made tea of dried mint and lemon rind and served a cup morning and night to Feiga Malka, pulling it up to her with a thread and pulley. He washed her clothes, mended her socks, which caught in the bark of the tree at times, ironed her blouses, played old tunes on the violin for her, steamed her vegetables and generally looked after her as well as he could under the circumstances.

Feiga Malka lived amid the winter leafless branches, her eyes bound and blind, her shoulders wrapped in a beautiful white wool shawl that Papa had acquired in trade.

Her movements in the canopy followed the sun and the moon. She would descend to the lower branches with the setting of the sun and ascend with the moon, then descend as the moon set and rise again at dawn, occupying the thinnest, highest branches at the noon hour and also at midnight. At night when the moon was full or nearly full, the whitish foggy glow of Feiga Malka could be seen at the tips of the tallest twigs. Some of those who saw her saw a beautiful girl with a white glow of fog around her, the tail of her shawl seeming to fade into the mist. Others saw a lightly colored bird who sang a strange and haunting song in the middle of the long night, and still others saw a girl who was partly bird, her wings occasionally stretching like a white lace shawl blown by the wind.

When the sun began to sink, Feiga Malka dipped lower, sometimes floating from branch to branch, sometimes rolling like a marble, or bouncing lightly like a balloon, and by nightfall she was so low in the branches she could speak with Papa without having to shout. But with the rising of the moon, she would float upward again, pulled like the tide.

From the treetop she could perceive, though not with her eyes, the activities of the wider world and in some manner she could see the life of her brother, Szymon the Ber, Szymon of the Forest and Cave, Szymon of the Steppes and the Sea. When dawn approached, she would descend and relate Szymon's adventures to Papa, and they would grow sad for their loss, wondering if they would ever see Szymon again.

When the day came fully and drew Feiga Malka back up to the heights, she would look out with her mind and see the world, or she would knit lace from silver spider webs she found amid the high, thin branches. The villagers would look up and find her knitting, though some would only see a wispy white shape and the gentle movement of long needles as she knitted.

In this manner three winters passed and the third spring arrived.

"Do you think," said Papa Misha, "perhaps as you go about your thinking, that you would come down one day and set your feet upon the ground, and remember the flowers and some of the insects and the leaves of the smaller plants that abound?"

"I cannot say," said Feiga Malka. "I do not know. I cannot see." She smiled, but Papa could not see her eyes. "I seem to be caught in the weave of my tree. I can see forever without my eyes, and at the highest limbs I can feel the world -- I am pulled once by all the sadness in the world, which floats upward . . . the immensity of the sadness, the complexities and chromatic tones of it . . . and then I am pulled once by all the joy in the world, first by the smallest joy of a singing cricket, and mice and bears that listen to the singing of the cricket, and then by the greater joys of the wind or of the forest, the joy of a mountain so far upriver you cannot see it. But I can feel it. I am pulled once, and pulled lightly, and the moon tugs at me, and the Earth, and it washes me with its sadness and with its joy until I dissolve and my arms are light, like feathers.

"Then, I hear your voice, Papa, and smell the mint and lemon tea, and think of you, the wind, the sea, the bear in the wood, the three stings, tragedy . . . and Szymon the Ber, the doctor, the cart and horse, crickets . . . "

"They say it will be a good year for crickets . . . " said Papa.

"I have visited the bear," said Feiga Malka. "I tell him of the world, of you, of my dear Szymon."

"Does he listen to the crickets, then?"

" . . . and did you know that when the tree buds in springtime, the bees and mayflies and honeybees travel from bud to bud on golden threads? And the threads, so small and delicate, float like strands of a spider web in air when the wind is still. And in the first light of morning, now, in the spring, it is as if my tree had golden hair."

"And the crickets will surely chirp through the night," said Papa, "which heralds all good things; rain and sun, a good crop, a good summer, sweet melons."

"At night I look down through the tangle of branches, even in my blindness, through the labyrinth of golden threads that wave and float about the branches and the blossoms and I can see your house and hear you sleeping, hear the candle sputtering, weeping, wax flowing in a rivulet onto the table that I remember so well, that little table with the nick on the corner, and I am sorry for your solitude. I draw down to the branches that are closest to the Earth and even sometimes I hover over the shingles of your roof, but I cannot touch them.

"A cricket chirps at either end of your house, a third lives in your violin case and a fourth sings below your window, and did you see, Papa, that their song is an echo of the stars at night, and the tune changes as the stars move? If I listen carefully to the crickets with all my hearing, I can tell the positions of the stars in the sky and which of the constellations gaze down on us and upon your roof or the limbs of the great tree, on you a-sleeping, or me, or my dear friend the bear who used to live beneath the tree but is now in darkness."

"Do you hear of our Szymon, then," asked Papa.

"I think he will return to us across the long sea," she said. "Soon, in a boat of cork."

"Is his voyage difficult, then?" asked Papa.

"Yes, Papa. But he has learned some old songs, and he has been taught the old dances. And his boat is round and made of cork."

"The bear?"

"In sadness, I see him. Alone. But I hear his voice on the wind."

Spring passed. The summer began.

On the morning before summer solstice, Papa saw the beeswax disks and soft wool bandages lying on the ground in the shade and thick grass beneath the great old tree. The wind was soft and cool, and he could hear the rattle of the green leaves. There was a small round boat bobbing on the river not far from the tree. He looked up but the sun was pouring through the branches and he could see nothing and had to squint and look away, back toward the ground.

And there he saw his Szymon! Szymon the Ber! Papa stood, silent and amazed, speechless, his heart pounding, Szymon stood beside the tree, huge, smiling, with Feiga Malka clinging to the lowest of the branches, a fading white, wrapped in glowing brilliant wool, her eyes wide like an owl's and the color of milky jade, her smile indescribable, Szymon reaching up to greet her.

"Szymon my brother knows the old dances, Papa!" said Feiga Malka. "Get the violin!"

"How should I play?!" asked Papa, who was almost too happy to hold his bow. "What do you wish?"

Szymon began to dance. Papa began to play. People began to gather beneath the tree and they saw clearly the old dance, and they seemed to remember it. A few joined in; some watched the dancers, others stared at the white form of Feiga Malka amid the low branches of the tree. She began to sing, her voice spiraling higher than the notes of Papa's violin.

More villagers arrived until every inhabitant filled the meadow below the tree, and many danced the old dances with Szymon. How long did the dances last? No one could tell, for there seemed to be no such thing as time. Yet slowly, all came to realize that they were not alone, there beneath the great tree: They heard a deep singing coming from the forest, growing closer, a low and lovely voice that no one knew and so they all grew silent, and the dancing slowed and then stopped. They stood still, and even their breathing seemed to stop.

Then Omash walked out of the wood, his red hair wild and tangled with twigs and leaves, his great red beard a knotted mass like a bird nest. He began to sing a great ballad, but few could understand the words at first. He sang and the trees rattled their leaves, the springs splashed, the rocks snapped. Then Papa took up his violin and Szymon began the dance, an ancient spiral dance that in only moments consumed everyone in the village. Omash sang the ballad of Szymon the Ber, of Omash of the Forest, and when he sang the verses of the Bird Princess, Feiga Malka floated down from the branches of the tree, down the trunk of the great tree in the midst of the spiral dance, and she lit upon the ground at the stroke of the solstice hour like a white feather released by the wind, and joined the dance.