In the traditions of the northern people, the bear is not merely an animal but a sovereign — the keeper of the threshold between the wilderness and the world of human beings, the one who decides what may pass and what must turn back, his broad face the last thing seen by those who wander too far into the places that belong to something older than memory. They called him Koda — meaning friend and ally — but also something untranslatable, a word that contains simultaneously the ideas of protector, boundary, sacred warning and unconditional love, because in the old understanding these were never separate things. His eyes burned amber and red at their centers, not with anger but with the particular intensity of something that has watched over a place for so long that it has become indistinguishable from the place itself — the blue of the glacier in his face, the green of the ancient forest in his markings, the pink of the aurora borealis burning behind him in the winter sky. Those who approached him with humility and honest hearts he would regard for a long, measuring moment before stepping aside, and those who passed reported feeling afterwards as if they had been somehow cleaned — emptied of smallness, reminded of what they actually were beneath all the noise and worry. And on the coldest nights, when the aurora danced its colors across the sky and the forest held its breath, the people would see his face in the lights above them and know that the threshold was held, the boundary was kept, and that whatever darkness prowled beyond it would not pass tonight.