I feel their strange shambling rhythm pulse incessantly like a chorus of earwigs dancing in the daffodils. They circle us closer, twenty miles out still, clustering in packs, sweeping each other together from whatever scattered shred carries out its instruction in whatever desolate hole. They turn and perceive me here in the great lighthouse of the attic, glowing with all my terrible fire of being, what they have just remembered losing.
The unstoppable alignment of intention fixes me in its focus and comes on now towards our valley. In awe, in thrall, ensorcelled. Men and women chilled to the bone by snow, unprotected, exposed to the elements, raw, broken with falling like a herd of buffalo racing off a cliff to marry a princess. Tumbling and rising again. A slow stampede. Clumsy as ducks on the ground, clawing the air with little spasms.
They come mouthing a word like a mantra, those with voices still, others with an awful clicking of the jaw, others with a lifting of the head from its crook, some just with the sound of one foot and another:
"Wow. Wow."
My mind circles them, spiraling in with their steady advance, watching every face for some sign besides this one, some other glimmer than this pulsing, tumbling crowd drawing around me like another fire called from the darkness, burning all the land as it nears the larch swamps.