“Sleeping Bear: An Autobiographical Fable” by Fred Arroyo (fiction, ’97)

A story by Fred Arroyo (fiction, ’97) appears in Waxwing:

 

Sleeping Bear: An Autobiographical Fable

At the river’s mouth, where it poured brown with glints of iron into Lake Superior, the father stumbled on a lump of black coarse fur. It didn’t look soft enough for a dog, the shape of the upper shoulder too large for cat or raccoon, its arm streaked with a line of gold fur. Down on his knees the father cleared away the cold wet sand with a piece of driftwood, and in the bluing evening light he found the cub’s head, his eyes closed, his nostrils filled with sand, his paws frozen in the scoop of swimming through the wailing storm of the night before, or running along the shore as he bawled for his mother.  [… continue reading here.]