Leo

It would take two weeks of travel to cross the horizon and reach the mountains of your birth. The first week, you and Clara take the hike leisurely, stopping to admire any foreign flower, diverting to wade up every brook, pausing to appreciate each strange rock formation or hidden grove. You remember now what you couldn’t before, the satisfaction of forging into the unknown, the awe of discovering the new, the beauty of the climb… even while you’re still in the clouds. Looking to your side, you can see in the way Clara’s eyes light up that she feels it too. Father and daughter make their way through the world, and there is so much they want to see together.

But into the second week the mountains appear on the horizon: grand granite cliffs dusted with a sprinkling of snow that gleams in the sunlight like a beacon; and swiftly the mood changes. Clara seems to feel the pull of those mountains as strongly as you do, their captivating beauty drawing your eyelines ever forward, ever onwards, and in unspoken agreement the two of you hasten your steps.

It would be the thirteenth day that you would begin the ascent, that woodland would thin and streams as fresh as air would bubble down your way. It would be the fourteenth that soil would yield to rock, and then rock to snow, glowing faintly as the ice wept freely in the sun. On the fifteenth the two of you would awake to the gleaming snow ablaze in the fire of dawn, and you would know that you had made it.

And finally, on the sixteenth day, it would be Clara that, bounding ahead over the morning-pink snow, would round the bluff first, breath sharp and eyes alert, and freeze in her tracks.

“D… Dad…?” she’d call.

“I know,” you’d smile, coming to stand next to her in time to see a pair of aging lynxes stumble in their tracks, then race towards you. “Clara, I’d like you to meet your grandparents.”

“Oi, listen up, mates!” squawks the Pigeon, making an admirable, if ultimately futile, attempt at the thick accent of the sender. “Now I know you Bruces are all eating up this furphy for brekky, but I am here to put an end once an’ fer all to all these rumours. That bogan lynx isn’t worth your time or your feed. Now I know it sounds like I’m going off on one, an’ I know his new ice cave idea sounds proper crackers an’ that; an’ yeah, who wouldn’t want to buy some snow during the Summer? But I am being one hundo percent fair dinkum when I say the idea to store an’ sell cold items was mine from the get-go, reckon? An’ sure, I wasn’t using a cave to do it, an’ yeah, I wasn’t offering to let animals come in to cool off. An’ alright, making portable ice bags is sorta goon, I’ll give him that. But I am telling ya deadset, the core concept was my idea!

“And while I’ve got ya ear, care to have a browse of me latest and greatest product in cooling off… a cold one! Nothing better I tell ya, an’ you won’t be finding them being sold by that scheming, conniving, treacherous, little c– Oh, g’day Roosy. What? Me!? Nah, mate, I’ve never even seen this bird before. No idea he was a Pigeon. Go on, rack off. Shoo!”

From atop his vantage point on the branch of a tree, the creature sinks back onto his haunches, eyeing the choice arrayed before him. To his left looms the Forest, blossoms of reds and golds waving in the Autumnal wind, the place of freedoms and stories beckoning his idealism in. To his right squats the Suburbs, grey rivers of functionality chugging past islands of substance, a world of the real and material.

The swirling wind buffets his thick coat as he ponders the decision. Into his mind slips the most recent message delivered from Clara, promising she’ll try to return one more time before the Winter sets in and the trek from the mountains becomes too treacherous. He smiles at the memory of the time he visited her there most recently, finding her well and truly settled into the new home she had chosen for herself. It is a shame they cannot see each other more frequently, but he knows that she has her life there, and she knows his is here. Having separate lives does not diminish the part of their hearts that would forever be a place for the other. And when she does return… oh the mischief that Clara and he would get up to.

A sound rings from the Forest, while a figure appears in the Suburbs. Renard returns to his feet, smiling. As if it were ever a choice he had to make. He would help both, like he’d always been taught to. Into the Forest first to investigate the origin of the noise, then back to the Suburbs to offer his assistance to the animal. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive. Not to a proud member of Lorah’s Cows.

Even eight years on, people often ask Renard what made him want to be a Cow from such a young age. He smiles at them politely and tells them something satisfyingly inspiring about Boy or Lorah or the Winter or that the City needed them. But within that smile lies something mischievous, the beginning of an inside joke that none of them would ever understand. Because the truth is that it isn’t Boy’s stern seminars or Lorah’s supportive speeches that keep him doing what he does. It is one irrefutable fact that his dad taught him long ago: you cannot just not do what you do not cannot not do.

So he does it.