Many relations united might have a chance to repel an enemy by launching prolonged counter-attack. Sometimes, cutoff from escape and facing an obvious foe, we forged such a defense. The costs were always dreadful, but the opposite strategy, attempting to run away, meant we would all die.

I was lucky then, much faster and stronger than now. Age advances swiftly on members of our race. I probably wouldn't have the success of those younger times. I recall them fondly. Memories are a real treasure, those that remain. They package smells and touches I can't have anymore. After those few youthful battles, I still remember -- with some effort -- running from relation to relation, pressing my face against them and they in turn pressing their cheeks against mine, quick rubs whose joy I passed along to a hundred others, our group was so numerous.

The climate we endured then! I can refer only to my present awareness of what endurance is, since the concept was unknowable before the change. The destiny of each relation was immutable and identical. We didn't have many means of altering our world. But we didn't endure it. Simply put, we lived enthusiastically. Without industry, without activity, we perished. Activity was our only pleasure. I can't seem to distinguish anything I did as more desirable than any another, though in that life perhaps I thought so.

Exact feelings of pleasure and pain are impossible to conjure up now. Only a sense of contentment or unease stir when I recall this or that. The memories of that life evoke a sort of purposeful vigor. Everything else is gone. Although I recollect that something may have felt good or bad, I can't remember what the original feeling really was. Even extreme fear is difficult to recall as a sensation. A more abiding recollection is the sense of loss. But, of course, that isn't a memory. Perhaps memory is only a way of priming some present emotion, memories of past joys making current joy the more joyous, and so on. But without present feelings, what then?

I've drifted off. Where was I? Oh, yes, those were the days.

Action was the heart of our existence. We were never idle. Older relations punished idleness and daydreaming. Living couldn't be accomplished by inventing and acting on any picture other than the scene before us. The result would have been fatal because many enemies waited for an incautious move. Relations pulled away from dreamers. If any visitors from another group tried to penetrate ours, imagining us to be kin or subjects for their leadership, or if our own children acted inattentive or listless, the resulting thrashing drove the imaginers away, recruited the youngster to a keener appreciation of danger, or worse.

Imagination was intolerable. Action was everything. We surveyed. We examined. We prodded. We tasted. We analyzed. Our minds were sharp. I was certainly sharper then, a keen knower of everything around that we might use or which might use us. I had nothing of myself to waste as I do now on these silly, rambling memories and speculations. With my former world destroyed, I pass time by inventing a fantasy replacement using scenes recalled from my previous existence.

I can picture the fortunes of that life. It bubbled with communal spirit. White, odorless time gravely affected us as weather never does anymore within my current horizon. Cold came against us like any opponent's head, with its own kind of hissing and teeth. We responded just as we would against any enemy, as a group. While we had no way of biting back the cold, we could keep it outside, drawing close and heaping ourselves together. As outer citizens chilled, they burrowed inside the crowded mass and were replaced by interior members who'd been warmed by the sheltering clan.

Home finders among us -- I was one -- helped avoid the worst. I would scout ahead, thrilled by the quest. Danger seldom caught me by surprise. I passed my discovery of shelter to the closest of kin. They passed my news along, faces pressed cheek-to-cheek in mounting excitement as relations hurried behind me with chattering elation into a freshly discovered castle keep.

A shelter couldn't be an enemy, and yet I uncovered one that was.

A great wooden structure harbored us during the shortest time of white light. I unearthed it while venturing near a gravel-bedded stream we used to quench thirst. A protective, green cover led to the water's edge. In that boundary, I chanced on a solidly constructed bunker. A wall on one side, shielded from view, presented a perfectly round entrance closed by some dark, dried and flattened skin. I pushed through it. The floor, walls and top were composed of wooden slats. Slits illuminated the dim space. The taste on the inside rang through me, reminding me of a nurturing place my group once used, though it had been far more vast. I felt around in accelerating agitation. Gladly, I couldn't sense blood or flesh of any kind. I couldn't detect any evidence of an enemy's work, although I had much less experience then with the creatures who currently visit me. I returned to my relations, hidden nearby, and signalled our good fortune. We streamed through the wooden wall and assembled within the new chamber. Sentries occasionally nosed outside for any sign of threat, but none appeared. As the white brightness intensified outside, we slept -- our custom during the risky time of light.

I lay alongside my relations as the slits dimmed. Perhaps because I was reassured by so many of us assembled within such solid walls, I ignored vibrations I sensed through the floor underneath us. In the last moment, I jumped up to alert everyone. The opening through which we had entered darkened. The chamber went black. All of us scrambled about blindly, unable to spy any exit. In our confusion, we fought each other, each an apparent enemy in the confining, blind space. Within minutes, a rank suspicion of blood and saliva mixed with the sour smell of fearful breathing. The floor pressed sharply against me. Relations, who must have tried to clamber up the walls, fell in the violent shaking that propelled me against one side, then against a second and third, tumbling over bodies wild with alarm.

Yelling, then piercing screams, filled the blackness as some of us assaulted others, fearfully lashing out against an indiscernible, overwhelming power. In our terrifying confinement, we fought recklessly. The shaking continued to slam us into walls, floor, ceiling, and one another, perpetuating the mad frenzy. Who could tell friend from fiend? In that disorienting void, we were possessed by the singular threat of death. We rushed anywhere to flee or fight it, but fled and fought no one except each other. We exhausted ourselves with running and attacking. What else could we do but act as we'd always done?

As suddenly as the violence began, it ended. The slits once more illuminated our bunker, now our prison and death row. Bleeding bodies lay in the center. Relations retreated in divided groups to the corners of our wooden space. They cowered there in fear of an unknowable future and the certainty of what they had done and might do again to each other.

The smells changed. Wood and fur retreated behind flesh and oil, but not our flesh; not even like flesh we occasionally discovered, strewn on the dirt. We shrank from a stench of dying, like that rising from things already dead which we sometimes saw, crushed on black rock plains, the vibrating, flat fields with bitter, white markings we avoided throughout the light time. Sometimes enemies could be seen there, dead or dying of gashes made by even larger enemies.

Then a sharp smell assailed me. It seeped in through our fortress walls. The scent stung me. It cut inside my nose and mouth. My eyes burned, my insides. All the eyelight I saw with in the dark time went out of me.

I recovered in my current location, a walled expanse of wood-tastes, supplied with musky food the creatures bring me. They move in and out of my new enclosure surely and abruptly. This place is strange, but perhaps it's familiar to those of the outer world: The tower of white and the fur-topped, flat-faced monster that always travels on it. The monster peers in through the gaps in the walls with enormous eyes, never approaching closer since I snapped at it.

I can't make sense of the space outside the hard ribbed walls. The holes are too small for me to penetrate. My teeth and nails are too weak to force my way out. My eyes are no good anymore. I can't see far, though when young, I could spot flying enemies in the blue limit. I can vaguely make out alien beasts that pass nearby.

The creatures who enter know how to come inside without leaving a hole through which I might escape. They usually arrive in pairs, each with its five legs forward, flying feet-first out of the white tower. They land on my house. They kick and bend things on the wall. A portion opens. They fly away and back, carrying things for me to eat by pinning edible gifts between their legs and body. They drop the food on the floor of my house, retreat outside to press the wall shut, and disappear.

I've learned not to interfere. They make arbitrary movements, never feed themselves, never carry off stores of things I've collected, and never attack, at least not since I began to leave them alone. I can't figure out their intentions. At first, I lunged at them and tore the leg of one, drawing blood. A deafening bark stunned my senses. The creature jerked and lunged with a force unaccountable in my experience. It didn't try to kill me but only knocked me sideways. Two of them continue to bring me things to eat, so I leave well enough alone. Sometimes the flat-face, by the power of sound, seems to alter the shape of the tower it rides in order to lower itself near me. The face will remain, eyes staring, while the mouth part makes odd clicks and moans. As yet, these strange noises haven't transformed me into any other shape as they do the tower.

I sleep and wake and sleep again but have no way of knowing if time has passed. Without changes in light that would usually signal the time of work and of rest, I have no knowing of short or long sleep. Not one thing remains of other relations. I haven't seen them for many sleepings. No relation has grown and withered. No little ones slide out of their mother and replace her as they grow to squirt out more relations. No marking from any of them persists. I have called and called, but no relation answers me. No scent arrives. No change of air comes.

No enemies threaten, but now and then I hear bangs and growling. The flying creatures visit with mealy food which is sufficient, if unchanging. I eat. More food arrives. I eat again. What I mark my area with to make it my own disappears through holes in the floor. I have no business. I can only pace. My house is wide and longer than many relations could occupy. I wander around, running to an opposite corner when the creatures invade or flat-face approaches.

What memory can I try to summon? Are there wanderings and food unrecalled? Relations? Enemies? What world can I imagine that I haven't already composed out of myriad rubs and hunts and foragings? The sameness in my house doesn't stir anything in me. My memories are wearing out. I feel nothing, except perhaps a dulling fatigue. I can't remember how I felt before. Anyway, remembering alters nothing. Nothing changes. Nothing I do promises to foreshorten or brighten my destiny. Nothing I do alters anything.

My memories are fading. What did I ever do, really? Why should I do anything? I'm the sole inhabitant of a world I'm forgetting. Sleep after sleep, I wake up. I endure but don't know why. I don't know what to make of myself. Questions of how and why and what for torment me.

Flat-face has eyes that look at me, that seem aware. Can it know feelings like members of our race? Something moves it. I'll try to overcome caution. I'll stare back. Or maybe I can arrange pieces of food in patterns that spark communication. I'll approach the visitors slowly. I'll make them respond. Even if they try to eat me, I can't endure these unanswered questions.