Dear readers,
Unfortunately, due to my stubborn burning of the candle at both ends, I find myself with yet another fever (my body seems to be having trouble with this English winter) which I am trying to not have turn into walking pneumonia by taking a proper rest.
So, I’m very sorry that this second half of The Seven Dwarves of Mt. Diablo won’t have a recording with it, but I do hope you enjoy reading the rest of the text, and I’ll see about updating this post with a recording in the coming days when I’m stronger. The first half can be read here, for those who missed it!
To make up for it, I thought to share links to a couple other pieces of mine with powerful, shapeshifting mother bears in them, as they seem to be a theme through my writing these past ten years, starting with the very first story I ever had published back in 2013.
I think the fascination has always been there, because I grew up in a state that has a grizzly bear on its flag, with the knowing that these magnificent, enormous, terrifying and gorgeous animals were once kings and queens of all the lands of California, respected by every indigenous tribe, sung to, danced to, prayed to, beseeched, hunted, worshipped. Their hunting to extinction, largely during the decades after the gold rush, has always haunted me. Like this story, that first-ever publication of mine also circled this theme in a retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon called “Else This, Nothing Ever Grows.”
A fierce, protective, magical mother bear who nurses human twins also features heavily in my novella The Dark Country, set on a fictionalized Bronze Age Ionian island, because of my fascination with bear cults across ancient Greece. You can read this novella in my collection, Our Lady of the Dark Country, or listen to the whole novella told in three parts starting here on my podcast Kalliope’s Sanctum.
Finally, there are the famous Grizzly Witches in my children’s fantasy duology, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising— the spirits of all the bears ever killed by hunters across a fictionalized Point Reyes.
So, without further ado, here is the concluding half of The Seven Dwarves of Mt. Diablo, which opens as Grace is led by a pregnant grizzly bear into the heart of the mountain.
(*** above drawings are my sketches, from different story-projects over the last ten years ***)
The Seven Dwarves of Mt. Diablo, Part 2
xii.
The bear was broader, even, than Grace’s own grief. At least that’s how she felt as she walked with her hand and hip pressed against that coarse fur. The bear took big heavy steps and her paws landed flat, solid, her hips swaying like a human woman’s, her breath huffing slightly, calmly, making clouds that glinted in the cold night. The bear gave off heat and a smell of smoke and musk and honey and something too fierce for Grace to touch. She only knew that this near, a grizzly bear hummed ; a grizzly bear made you remember you were a woman with feet and muscles and hips too, a woman with an animal heart, who cannot just lay down and die. A woman does not just go still, like a stone. The grizzly bear thrummed the will to live right back into Grace’s bones, so that she looked down once, startled, at her own belly as it twinged with that tiny life. To the bear’s eyes, it glowed.
If Grace had been afraid at all of that long muzzle, those small eyes and black claws, the bear might have smelled at her a second time and grown fierce and hungry. She might have had her dinner of Grace’s empty ribs, and gone on into the mountain alone and a little fatter. But Grace was beyond fear. She smelled strangely like a sister and so the bear dragged her. She let her lean her hands and hips into that fur, straight into the heart of Mt. Diablo.
The bear could smell that the human woman had business there too, down at the beginning of the world. Every animal and plant of Mt. Diablo, in all the places its creeks and foothills reached, knew about the center of the mountain, the creation of the world, because they each had a matching place inside their ova, their pistils, their semen, their eggs, their pollen. A tiny map of that mountain heart. And if it came to it, if it comes to it still, they will know how to return, like a great contraction of salmon upstream.
xiii.
Grace and Edward had been married under the black locusts when they bloomed white on March 23rd, 1876. The locusts dropped small round petals on Grace’s black hair, black as the black olives of her grandmother’s trees. That’s what her mother told her as she rubbed a teaspoon of their oil into it the morning of the wedding and coiled it, shining.
Under the locusts Grace’s hair shone in the early spring sun like dark and polished glass, and Edward wore a neat wool suit which made his shoulders look more square, his waist narrow. His blonde-brown hair was combed. Grace laughed with delight, having never seen him so trimmed. Nobody, not the Metzgers nor Edward Landeg, had money to spare, though Grace’s father was a butcher and not a miner. So Grace’s wedding dress was made from her mother’s, and came only to the tops of her ankles, and the feast had pieces donated from all over town—pork shoulder from her family, dandelion quiche from the single Frenchman and his wife, bottles and bottles of homemade wine, whipped out of Italian cellars.
Under the locusts all of Nortonville came to watch them kiss and place silver rings on each other’s fingers and drink wine in the shadow of the hills veined with coal. They chose for the evening to forget the underground that owned them each—men with picks and lanterns, men who knew the men with picks and lanterns, wives who kissed their husbands forever goodbye every morning, who kissed them with thank god under their soft tongues every evening they returned.
For four and a half years Grace and Edward lived together in a little pale blue cottage glazed with a film of dusty dirt. The cottage backed up to steep hills crisscrossed with cow trails.
The first week living there together they laughed every time they pulled out the battered hand-me-down pots, and danced in the kitchen instead of making dinner, and kissed with the soap of washing up on their hands.
xiv.
In the heart of Mt. Diablo the seven dwarves had long ago built a house of glass. They made it from sand in the mountain veins that they heated and formed into a strange leaning skin around the very center-point of the mountain, to keep it warm, to keep it holy. The glass house had spires and an arched door. It was more the shape, spindled and strange, that lightning creates inside of sand than any human architecture, but still it was hollow, and there were seven glass beds where the dwarves slept. Down the center of the glass house was a seam of ancient oceanic crust, uplifted and buckled, full of the memories of seas, and whales, and the release of magma.
The dwarves carried Edward right to that shallow trench, nothing more now than a dip between two ragged, foot-high ridges of basalt. They laid him out soft and silent, hushed, having never touched a thing so brief, so quick, so beloved. They touched his scuffed work boots—cow leather—his worn denim pants, faintly striped and covered in dust and blood, his suspenders, his chest where his heart, a carnelian, sparked. Even in death, to the dwarves that heart began, within moments, to warm up the glass house.
After all, one said to another in a voice of grit, in a voice of mercury and quartz, we are miners too, and here is a very beautiful gem, a thing of mineral and blood that will warm us, a gift for the mountain, for his kind do not know how to bring gifts any more. And another replied, poetic, veins of silver in his arms, that heart, carnelian mercury rust and copper-ruby cut, with love in it, most peculiar, must be treasured.
They clacked their teeth and moved their round and ragged little greywacke selves nearer his chest, touching the places it was crushed and bloody with their gold-veined hands, puffing on them a little. They scooped dust and flecks of silica and the tiny, spiraled radiolarian skeletons from the old trench, anointed his forehead, his heart, his belly, his groin, his feet. They gathered the sand from between seams of coal in tunnels below the glass house, and made their hands magma, made their hands lightning that shoots up from the earth’s skin and not down from the sky, and made a sheath of glass.
It was rippled and odd, a lumpy chrysalis, ridged and tapered, but with a clean door along the top and a little latch of copper. When they were finished, Edward lay pristine, unbroken, clean, as if asleep, sealed in that glass bed. He filled it with a faint cinnabar glow.
Then the seven dwarves of Mt. Diablo gathered near, reaching out their hands like men would to a fire. They warmed granite mugs of molten mercury beside the glass and drank. They sat for many hours, murmuring—grind and clack and creak—the mountain’s love songs, as if only fully appreciating them for the first time. Slower love stories, millennia long, of tectonic plates rubbing shoulders, touching necks. Of one, at last, shuddering beneath the other, folding upward with it, creating a new ribbon of rose quartz in all that heat.
xv.
The mother bear led Grace uphill, beside a little seep through sandstone where mimulus flowers grew, up to where the pines were taller, and the chamise made impenetrable thickets. The bear pushed right into one of these thickets, her shoulders breaking a pathway. Grace followed behind, ducking when the sharp branches slapped back toward her, catching at her hair and skin, tearing little cuts in her hands. Animals skittered further into the chamise at the noise—deer mice, rabbits woken from slumber, wrentits who had been roosting deep in the sharpest branches, beaks under warm feathered wings. Dampness from the fine needles of the chamise got on the bear’s fur, glinted. Grace looked up at the stars once and for a moment she couldn’t find North, nor the Big Dipper, that old bear wandering with her cub. Her head spun. She wondered if this was death, she walking the sky with big Ursa, both of them shades, traipsing together through the wet thickets of the stars.
They came to an outcrop of granite boulders. Grace looked up again, found Polaris and the scooping corners of Ursa Major, and let out a breath. Alive, hand instinctively to belly. She found her body did not want to be dead, and she ducked after the bear into a crevice between rocks. It led to a cave and then a tunnel where everything was dark and smelled of cold, of clay and iron. She wondered if this was why the bear led her—to bring her to a cave, to her den, and there, at last, kill her, stash and hoard her bones.
Bones—the word made her weep again, that word and Edward coiling up from the hauled-out mine of her chest. The bear grunted, turned at the sound, a shush of fur and muscle in the dark. She showed her yellow teeth, flashes of star. Then she turned back, a wide hush, and continued into a darkness so black and close and thick it felt like descending into a body.
Grace realized then that they were going down, and underground. Edward, she murmured, an exhale. She reached for the bear, that broad sway of brown hip, and closed her fingers on the fur. She had never moved through such dark. They went down. Slow steps. Walls of dirt, then granite, were so close they snagged at hair, at fur, at wool, at the backs of hands. The only light was the bear’s own, which that furred and ambling creature saw by, her eyes pools in the pitch black, but Grace could not.
When the eyes, pupils huge, can find no scrap of light, they close, eventually, so that the hands and feet and nose can navigate better by feel. Going down into the mountain the sounds were only their feet, their breath—Grace’s ragged with sadness, the bear’s steady, rank, hot. Inside herself Grace stepped foot by foot into her own dark and hollow chest, no Edward, no Edward, and felt herself wobble in the dark. She leaned nearer the bear, but lurched right into the past, into Edward’s hands when he first kissed her under the train trestles with a train passing above.
It was the first time they had been alone together, out of sight, talking. She watched the way he used his hands when he spoke, their veins.
Before the train came, he’d been showing her the little etchings he’d carved up in the trestles with his pocket knife. The etchings were too small to be noticed by an engineer or technician checking the tracks, and just above general eye-height. He showed her how he pulled himself up the second level of trestles, and his arms and back flexed, she saw it, how lithe he was.
“Come up, come see,” he said, dangling his feet from the wooden beam, offering down a hand. “My secret place, never shown anyone.”
“You haven’t been here long enough to show too many people,” teased Grace. “If you’re trying to flatter me, well…” She gave him a sidelong look, then hoisted herself up the beams, ignoring his hand, swinging her legs over, her skirt lifting and her thighs bare for a moment.
Strong and nut-dark they were, thought Edward, swallowing at her smell so near him now, perched on his beam—rose and olive oil and sweat and sagebrush.
“Long enough to know a special one, when I see her,” he said, looking at her sidelong now, then turning back to his etchings and peering hard at them, a flush rising up his neck, past a freckle and his pulse at his throat.
Yes, she thought to herself, yes, me too, only you have come here like a migrating bird, while I have been here always, a seed dropped from the sky and waiting for you. She looked where he looked, then: an acorn, finely detailed, an oak tree with a gnarled man’s face in it, a bird like an osprey, a tower, as from a children’s book of tales, a woman reaching up toward a moon, naked with round breasts and a triangle of dark between her legs. All of the carvings were painted over with a thin layer of white first, so that their grooves stood out in the contrast. Edward blushed, edging his shoulder over the etching of the woman, glancing at Grace, who was raising her eyebrows, smiling a little.
“Pieces of home,” he muttered, shy of them now.
“A migrating bird, bringing some of its Welsh nest,” said Grace. “Have a fine lady back home? Why’d you leave her?”
“Ah, no, no lady. Only here…” He tapped his head, grinned.
“They are beautiful,” said Grace, flushing now, reaching out her fingers to touch them, trying to imagine a place called Wales, so green, and the huge arms of their oaks—were they so different than these, here?—their soft hills full of coal too. “Why here?” She gestured at the train trestles, some fifty feet tall and spanning two hundred yards of scrubby valley. “Noisy place, and god how it must shake when you’re trying to carve things.”
“That’s why,” said Edward. “To be shaken awake into my bones.” He touched his forearms, his legs. “Underground, I pretend I’m not this. If I have a body down there, that body panics, wants light and air. Here, I get shaken back in again.” He smiled at her, dark crossing into his eyes. She shivered, wondering what it was like down there, where the men went and came out with mountain coal and fear on them. “And it makes me feel it, the power of what we haul out. Engines shuddering with coal. I think it scares me, how strong it is, the stuff we mine.”
Grace only stared at him, light illuminating the tops of his eyelashes, his smiling nose, his hands resting on the beams and the upright posts carved with his figures—oak, acorn, woman, moon—and thought, who is this man with his pocket knife and his paint tin and coal in his hair, and how am I here in the train trestles, talking to him? As she stared, a train rumbled and blew its horn, and she gasped, getting ready to jump down.
“Wait,” said Edward, touching her hand. Her skin hummed where his fingers were. “It’s okay, just loud.”
When the train passed it was thunder and storm and the whole wooden structure shook. Their hair moved and, gasping, they caught eyes, laughed, did not look down. In that deafening vibration, coal-fueled, they could not hear their own minds speaking. Grace leaned nearer, then lurched as the trestles shook, the train shuddering overhead. She found herself with Edward’s hands at her waist, and then her mouth on his mouth, somehow locked and warm there even as their bodies jittered. When the trestles came to stillness again, his mouth was at her neck, and her hands were tracing his spine.
Later, though not so much—a month, maybe two—he said, propped up on an elbow and looking at her where they lay, naked in a twist of blue picnic blanket, “you bring me back to it, now, this.” He patted his arms, his legs, his chest. Grace kissed him softly for that, at the side of each lip. A black phoebe darted overhead, hawking for insects, and she murmured something about bringing him back to it again now, if he’d like, with a small smile. He’d tickled her, called her a saucy thing, like all the women gossips said, then kissed her breasts as she laughed, which made her laughter soften. Then he looked at her, serious, and said, “that’s not what I meant, though, Grace. You bring me back here, too. Even more important.” He tapped his ribs, over his heart, then hers.
Here, Grace was whispering, tapping her chest, walking through the cold dark mountain tunnels with her other hand on the haunch of a grizzly bear. Here, she whispered over and over, moving blind in that heavy dark, tapping her heart through her ribs like tapping it would fill up that hollow again.
The bear turned back toward her a second time. She had little patience for these mutterings, a human’s hysteria, and this woman clearly had no ear for the language of bears, for she had told her, many times now, your mate is down there where we are going, hush now little woman. You will see him again, hush. Now she turned and nipped at Grace’s calf to quiet her whimpers, for the sound was stirring up an echo along the tunnels, a hiss of coal dust, a chink-tink of mica ringing, like bells. It was better to arrive at the beginning of the world in silence. The bear knew this, though she did not know how she did, or why it was so.
The bite broke the skin on Grace’s leg, through her stockings. She gasped with shock and bled a little, but she went silent, and for the first time in twenty-four hours noticed the sensations of her body, the normal ones like breath and the stinging from the bite and her aching legs and her sore throat from screaming, the pounding in her head from all of those tears.
Maybe it was that ursine saliva, or maybe the perfect dark made Grace’s mind throw open a forgotten window, but right then, an image fell clear into her head from the bear’s: Edward in a strange spindled glass shell big as a house, in the dark of a mountain cavern, the walls jagged with schist and shale. Edward in a coffin of glass, cocoon shaped. Edward so still in glass in the heart of a mountain, and seven small burly men, maybe just little heaps of rock shaped like men, clustered near him, as if he were a hearth.
The bear had that image floating in her mind because a bear’s mind is a mirror, inside the musky tunnels of the earth; a bear gestates in her mother’s womb in a cave or a burrow in the earth, dark and still, and is born with the spring, after all. So when she goes into the underground again, well, whatever is echoing in the mountain glints off that mirror-mind, falls into it, a seed dropped by a bird into a pond.
Oh my god, Edward, breathed Grace, Oh my god, weeping, but soft, holding tighter to the bear, walking in the black for a whole handful of moments without thinking of anything at all except that image of Edward, glinting.
xvi.
A woman came running in through the low glass arch, running to the glass chrysalis where her husband lay, still. The seven dwarves of serpentine and sandstone, of travertine, cinnabar and gold, could barely see her at first for the quickness and heat of her movements. She unlatched the copper and lifted the glass, crying. There, his nose, there, his lips broad and still, even his suspenders and his workpants and his blonde hair full of coal dust and a freckle, there, on his neck, which she always kissed. She did now, moaning at how cold he felt. How cold, how cold, she chanted.
A woman, warm as coals, in the heart of the mountain where Coyote made the world, where Coyote lost his daughter, where Coyote learned the sorrows of humans, she scraped her knees on the tufa of an old oceanic trench, begging the seven dwarves for her husband back again. He is not yours, he is not a thing of stone, he does not want to rest here forever, I know him, I know this. He hates it here where the coal was. Her knees bled, red, and the seven dwarves came nearer, staring, putting their hands to those wet iron ribbons. They looked at their fingers, red. Two creatures of blood and dreaming, come to them in the span of one turning earth, two creatures whose blood had the other’s name inside of it.
So strange, so strange they chanted.
Long ago—it was so long ago, now—the seven dwarves of Mt. Diablo had touched limestone, touched gold and basalt, and their touch had made seeds and pollen and ova and stamens and eggs fall like dust, unfurl out of an old mountain and into the sun and air and dirt.
All over the world, the world began this way. That’s what the dwarves will tell you, that’s what Coyote or Raven or Turtle will say. It started from thousands of mountains, thousands of ocean bottoms, bloomed like new mariposa lilies from the slopes. Every time a mariposa lily comes up, that white and red mouth of nectar, it begins again, but only once does it begin from the hands of mountains, and seas.
The dwarves put their stony hands against the back of the woman who bent again over her husband in the glass coffin, kissing each corner of his face like a compass, like this would point the way home to him, back to her, breathing and unbroken. They felt in their hands of folded rock that she was also a world, about to begin, a coil of light in her belly like the stars that they touched when they touched rare and deeply buried seams of gold. They thought then of the beginning of the world, of the time when their hands had made pollen, and for a moment they felt their own longing, and not only the longing songs of the mountain.
In that den of spired glass, a human woman, a sandstone-quartz-boned dwarf, and a grizzly bear, could speak one tongue, because at the beginning of the world, all things were made of the same thing, humans only so much pollen and iron dust and bear fur.
You take our buried sun for your fires, it’s only fair, it’s only even and of a balance that we take yours, just one heart of carnelian and love and fire, for all the cartloads, and not a word of love for us. They chimed and grated, granite-tongued.
He’s a man, he’s not a lump of coal, he is mine, he is mine, my Edward, you killed him, you—and she lunged at the hard skinned men with her soft hands, tore her knuckles at their chests until the dwarves were streaked with her blood.
The grizzly bear stepped out of the shadows, then, where she had been smelling at this place, smelling its sulfur and clay, its silica, its buried Time.
He is no one’s, she growled at Grace, and took the woman by the scruff a third time. He is his own, as you are yours, and I am mine. He is also the mountain’s, as am I, as are you. The bear on her heavy paws with her swaying hips and her fur thick and full of musk, she lurched right up to the glass coffin then, she reared on her hind legs, she lifted Edward, limp, dangling in her mouth from his suspenders. Grace screamed, thinking after all this that the bear would eat him. Her scream made coal dust drift onto the glass spires above them all. It made the mica eardrums of the dwarves vibrate and ring, a mountain song of love and sorrow that made them shiver.
Instead the bear laid him gently on the lip of oceanic crust. She licked his face clean of dirt. Grace crouched near, weeping. The bear, suddenly weary beyond all weariness, having seen her own kind shot and skinned, shot and left to rot, until there was only her, only her and the little cub a coil of bearlight in her womb, the last bit of grizzly bear pollen left from all the ancient lineages of California’s grizzly bears, Ursus arctos californicus, she laid herself out long in Edward’s place inside the glass. She was not much bigger than a full-grown man, with all of her fur bunched and pressed close around her body. She looked at Grace with a woman’s eyes, then closed them, and opened them again a bear’s, looking at the dwarves.
I will be your coal. I will sleep here, and my heart will beat hotter than a dead one can glow, however loved. I will pay their debt, my human cousins, my little sister. They do not yet know how to love a mountain, and a stone. It’s not my world any more, but hers. She nodded at Grace. I will sleep, as only a bear knows how, until it is mine again, until it is ours.
On the ground Grace had gathered Edward, head lolling, arms limp, up against her chest. He smelled of dust and stillness, of something earthen and cold to which his body was already beginning to return, but she also found that warm skin smell, that faint sweat, same as the last morning she woke beside him, and reached to hold his thumb. She could not look at the bear; she did not have the energy. The bear did not look at her again, but rather closed her eyes, and did not open them.
The seven dwarves understood this kind of trade, a carnelian heart, beloved, for a ruby, bearlit. They scraped up fistfuls of ancient cold magma from the lips of that oceanic crust which once had spread and spread, birthing new tectonic plates, unfurling molten under the skin of the sea. They patted their hands along Edward’s body, which Grace reluctantly loosed her hold of—under his nose, at his forehead and heart and feet and palms. With hot hands, they then shaped a sled of thick glass out of a piece of the wall.
When he touches air, and sun, he will be whole again, alive like humans are. But if you look back, he will slip down to us again, following the way of gravity. He will stay here, our carnelian heart, where he belongs. Careful, child, how you tread. Reversing life does not always make it as whole as it was before. Their voices: bells and scraping schist.
Grace was barely listening. She was pulling Edward’s body into the glass sled, she was kissing each serpentine head, each sandstone cheek, she was praising the light of bears, and kissing those broad sleeping paws, she was pulling and pulling that sled with Edward inside, heavier than anything she had ever borne, or ever would again, pulling her head forward despite the magnetism his face held, the desire to turn, to kiss his forehead again, whisper Edward we are going home, Edward you are only sleeping. Edward.
xvii.
The seeds of the mariposa lilies may sprout, and sprout again, or lay dormant but alive, waiting for rain, but a man may only sprout once, in the womb of his mother. And a human lover, or father, or friend, does not in the end have the strength in her hands, in his heart, to keep a steady gaze ahead and not, at last, cave backward where the heart is craning.
Through all that darkness in the center of Mt. Diablo, darker than any night, dark as only the inside of a mind may be dark, Grace’s heart craned, and her hands screamed, but she went forward, and up.
When the first slit of light touched Edward’s face, Grace smelled at last the sagebrush, the damp morning. Her arms and back were all burn and bruise from hauling and looking ahead, and looking ahead desperately into a memory of him so as not to look behind: his face while she stood drinking water by the manzanitas some summer day out of time, his face with late sun on it, so tender she had to look away, and then press her nose to his chest instead, thinking I hold here a mystery, I anchor my heart in mystery, and I am not afraid, for eyes are blue as August sky and how can a man have sky in him, and touch me with it, if he is not mystery?
When the light slivered in, blue, and the air with it, touching Edward, he began to stir, and sigh, and rustle. He breathed out her name. She turned back to him immediately and inexorably and without thinking, at the same moment as she took a further step out of the mountain and into the sun. For a second she saw that blue, those eyes open and haunted and tender all at once behind her in the half-light of the tunnel, her name in his teeth. But the glass in her hands pulsed, lightning made. It singed so that she had to let go.
She turned, and saw him and the glass sled lurch down, and her scream echoed down after him, down the long steep tunnel back and back to the seven dwarves and their glass house at the beginning of the world, leaving Grace alone, unmoored, in the light of day.
xvii.
In the light of day, Grace’s belly had grown big and taut, nine months round. In the light of day, it was not nine months that had passed, but nine hundred years, and the ocean was high to the thighs of Mt. Diablo, as it had been once, long ago, when Coyote made the world.
For the coal, after all and in the end, could not be returned to its home again, once it had been taken out, and burned.
I live but a few miles away from My Diablo... thank you for bringing the Soul of this mountain ever more alive for me. And the bears, oh the bears. Bless you Sylvia. Your story brought much needed tears to my eyes and a strange, carnelian glow of hope to my own heart ❤️🙏🏽
✨beautiful✨