There’s a bear in the Truro woods. People have seen it - three or four,  or two, or one. I think of the thickness of the serious woods around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;  I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,  the cranberry bogs. And the sky with its new moon, its familiar star-trails,  burns down like a brand-new heaver,  while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly through the woods for years, learning to stay away from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:  it can’t be true, it must be somebody’s runaway dog. But the seed has been planted, and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin its leaf-green breathing?