Bliss

BLISS / THE COWBOY / HE/HIM

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A down-to-earth cowboy with a kind heart and a lonesome life.

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Bliss is grateful, at his core. He's grateful for a lot of things: the wind whipping over the plains to cool his hide, the foxes that flee at the sound of his growl, the bellsmith that sells him perfect little brass bells for his herd. He grew up with so little, and now he's got an entire herd under his belt-- why wouldn't he be grateful?

The great green pastures are only lush for a few months of the year, and he keeps the herd up there for as long as they can manage. He needs little more than a lean-to for himself, to protect him and his steed from that dense mountain rain. It doesn't have to be perfect. Cleaning the rust from his armor is a meditative exercise; he'd rather not skip it. Bonnibel is a different story, but as long as the water doesn't seep into her inner workings, she's happy.

Even so, something in the pastoral hideaway always sets Bliss on edge. In the shadow of the mountains, he's got room and time to think. He thinks about the storms and sunny days alike. About the face of his mother. About all the familiar faces he'll see when he heads into town, and how he'll head right back out to the mountains followed by none of them.

It isn't completely peaceful. He sometimes wishes he could find a good herding Hainu to deal with problems like this, when one of the kids gets too big for its britches and starts toddling off into the brush at the edge of the pasture. He stands up, gently jumping down from the boulder he was resting atop, stretching like a cat as he bounds over the field towards the kid. It's one of the older ones-- it should be old enough to know better, what with the howls Bliss and the herd hears every other night.

"Come on now, get." He chides the kid, gently shuffling it back towards the rest of the herd. "You'll get to see something new soon." They're going to head down out of the mountains in a few days' time. The last rainfall of the season hit a few days ago, and Bliss likes to leave before he can see the grass wither. He likes keeping the image of this place carefully preserved in his head; a valley of plenty, a paradise.

The journey down to the desert town isn't difficult, but it is wearisome. Bliss and Bonnibel guide the herd down through the narrow mountain passes, snaking their way down into the valley. That isn't the tiring part: these are mountain goats, and they almost know the crags better than Bliss does. Their unfaltering hooves clack their way down the slopes, and it is always sundown by the time they reach the desert valley for the first time.

A meteorologist-- or perhaps a geographist-- showed Bliss a map of the area once, trying to point out how the mountains blocked the rain, kept it all penned in on one side. He didn't completely understand all that scientific jargon, but he did understand the unfairness of it all, the bleak desperation of the desert valley just a few eons' worth of rock away from a verdant idyll.

And that is the emotion pervading the trip from the mountains to the scrub to the town: desperation, written in every heavy footfall. It's quiet, but it's there. The silent pressure on all of them to get across the blasted expanse before they run out of water is at once heavy and insubstantial. But Bliss knows he can make this journey, he's done it a hundred times, so that pressure has nothing to do with that terrible desperation. What is he desperate for? He doesn't know.

The herd's bleating will awaken him twice before the sun is up, and the wind over the plains will blow his hat into the brush, sending him charging after it. The night will be too cold, and his shawl will be too thin, and one or two of the bucks will have wandered off. The fire will run low, low, almost imperceptible, worn to nothing.

This is the life that he chose.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feMwFuihX2o