Chapter 12: The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh

Footsteps and Falling: Our Final Chapter

📖 A story for grown-up peoples.

Based upon and including sections from the works of A. A. Milne.

Begin with Chapter One
Read Chapter Two
Read Chapter Three
Read Chapter Four
Read Chapter Five
Read Chapter Six
Read Chapter Seven
Read Chapter Eight
Read Chapter Nine
Read Chapter Ten
Read Chapter Eleven

The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Chapter Twelve

But Eeyore is alone.

Eeyore had trudged through the wood until he came to the open place in the middle of the wood, and in the middle of that place was a large tree, and from the top of that tree, a little boy had once hanged. Eeyore stared up at that empty spot, and then he lowered his head and started walking again.

He walked along the tree in absent-minded thought, like a hound who’d trapped his game, but what Eeyore hunted wasn’t there. It had been, and until then, that boy had been Eeyore’s everything. As he walked this place where all dreams had died, Eeyore knew there had been moments when he could have been braver and done something, said something. Christopher Robin talked like he would save the world, but the world wasn’t worth saving. Trouble was, Christopher Robin seemed to know that, too, but went on as if the worth of the world factored none in the working of his plans.

When Eeyore circled the tree, he stopped, surprised to have come upon another set of tracks in the grass. 

‘Humph. I was meant to be alone.’ 

He considered leaving. No one bothered him much in the boggy place, and he could be alone with his thoughts, but Eeyore didn’t much feel like being alone with his thoughts at the moment, nor could he think of anywhere he could go to be alone from them. 

Eeyore decided if there was nowhere else to go, he might as well keep walking, and when he came around the tree, there were now two sets of tracks. 

‘Perhaps, just perhaps, if someone else is out here, walking in thought beneath the big tree, then there’s another who understands as I do, another who bravely faces the truth alone. What is lost is lost and can never be found again.’

Eeyore followed the tracks and soon came upon more.

‘Our numbers are growing,’ said Eeyore, and he walked a little faster. Every time he circled the tree, the number of his brave but solitary compatriots grew, and Eeyore held his head up high, knowing he was part of a movement. He was safely alone and safely part of a drove, together carving a path through the wood like wild mustangs forging new trails in the west.

Soon, their number grew too great to count. ‘Christopher Robin’s friends must have come around to the right way of thinking, which is to say my way of thinking, This set must be Rabbit’s and that set, Pooh’s.’

Eeyore stood still in a crowd of footprints. Slowly, his head lowered. 

Slowly, his head drooped. 

‘Not that it matters. It won’t change nothing. Christopher Robin’s still gone, and there’s not much point in being anywhere where he is not.’

The tracks had worn deep places in the earth. Whoever these others were, they were digging a rut, and Eeyore remembered what Pooh had said about Owl. Not every thought you follow is the best thought to follow... to the end.

‘All thoughts find their way to an end, eventually,’ Eeyore said. ‘Some dawdle and some dash, but they all finish, every one.’

He stared up the tree past the limbs and through the leaves to the patches of sky that shown through. The light of each star seemed to end with him, consumed in the act of viewing, and yet all his friends could be looking upon that same star. That light shown on other forests and other lands, it shown on other worlds, and would keep on shining long after he was gone.

A cloud moved across the patch of open sky, and the star disappeared. ‘Everything comes to and end,’ he said.

He put one hoof in a footprint and another in the next and followed them like a bird chasing hints of a changing season. The rut deepened, and the earthen walls around him grew. The tree creaked with each passing gust of wind. Its trunk shuddered with splintering shrieks like a banshee forewarning those soon to be grieved.

The End

…of a story is where bitter words die.

And these sad thoughts tug, to Pooh Bear’s surprise, on the fluff of his heart where loneliness lies. He settles in a ditch and there he reclines among roots which pop like broken tree spines, bringing the end and closing the rhyme.

#

Hum-Hum

Hum-Hum

Hum-Hum

‘There you are, Pooh.’

Pooh looks up. ‘There you are, Eeyore, but why are you here where I’ve found you? You’re meant to be lost.’

‘Lost in thought, I suppose.’

‘I was following tracks,’ says Pooh, ‘but I grew terribly tired. So, I said to myself that I might sit and rest for a moment, and that is what I did.’

Eeyore admits he’s tired, too. 

‘Were you looking for something?’ asks Pooh.

‘I was hunting the end,’ Eeyore says.

‘Is it this way?’

‘I had a suspicion it was and that I was close to catching it up,’ says Eeyore.

‘Will it get away from you if you sit awhile with me and rest?’

‘I don’t suppose it will.’ Eeyore settles next to Pooh in the deep bed made by the rut.

‘There’s a great many of us, now, aren’t there?’ asked Pooh.

‘A great many,’ says Eeyore. ‘Why are you circling the tree, Pooh? You had your party. Christopher Robin tussled your hair.’

‘I got lost along the way, I suppose.’

‘Have you seen the others?’ asks Eeyore.

‘No, have you?’ asks Pooh.

Eeyore shook his head.

‘Well,’ says Pooh, ‘if we’re all circling this tree, then if you and I stop and rest, the others should find us.’

Eeyore thinks this a very good idea for a bear of very little brain. They sit, and the tree sways.

Hum-Hum.

Hum-Hum.

Hum-Hum.

'She was asleep, but when she woke up, she smiled at me and squeezed my hand. I want her to wake up again. I want her to smile and squeeze my hand.'

‘What’s that, Pooh?’ asks Eeyore.

‘Oh, I was just remembering.’

‘Remembering what, Pooh?’

'Not all endings are the same,' says Pooh. 'Sometimes we leave all at once, and sometimes it’s piece-by-piece.'

A great branch breaks with a boom and crashes into the field.

‘Not everyone can un-quickly as quickly as Owl,’ says Eeyore, ‘and some of us don’t.’

Hum-Hum.

Hum-Hum.

Hum-Hum.

'Christopher Robin didn’t want other worlds,' says Pooh. ‘He wasn’t ready.'

‘What worlds are those when this is the only world we’ve got?’ asks Eeyore.

'All of life is counting backwards from ten,' says Pooh. 'Then, ready or not, there you go.'

‘Where would we go and how would we know whether it’s time or only feels like it’s time?’

‘When you’re gone, I suppose,’ says Pooh.

‘It’s time to go when I’m gone?’ asks Eeyore. 

‘And you’ll know where you’re going when you’re there,’ says Pooh, thinking of Christopher Robin in his bedroom, dancing, when the ground beneath them danced too. Towering over them all was Christopher Robin, lively and quick. His mother said it’s bedtime, but he said he never sleeps. Yes, he said, he never sleeps, and Pooh never sleeps because he’s made of fluff, and Christopher Robin wanted to be made of fluff, because Pooh, he said, will never die.

And Christopher Robin would never die. He said he’d never die.

Hum-Hum.

Hum-Hum.

Hum-Hum.

The wind blows, and the great tree moans like the bellowing of hell and all those in its grasp. Then, just as Pooh suspected, they hear footsteps. What sounds like footsteps. In the ditch, one sound sounds so much like another. 

Footsteps.

Roots losing their grip on the soil.

All the same.

‘I wonder who it is and if they brought honey,’ says Pooh.

‘Or thistles,’ says Eeyore.

They see a shadow move about the tree–or shadows move as the tree sways. It’s all the same. 

The shadow takes on a familiar form, and the stars above come out from behind their veil, like a mother’s face appearing in the place she’s disappeared. The birds sing, and the world turns like an old man reaching again for the coffee he’d drunk down to dregs.

‘Walk with me home?’ asks Pooh.

‘If you think you’d get lost along the way,’ says Eeyore.

‘The North Pole tends to be where I find it,’ says Pooh. ‘Everywhere else is far too stubborn.’

They stand as bark rains down around them.

‘Don’t blame me if it rains,’ says Eeyore.

Pooh stands on Eeyore’s back and climbs out of the rut. Then, with a grunt, he helps Eeyore out, too.

Another branch crashes to the earth.

‘It must be Autumn,’ says Pooh. ‘The leaves are falling.’

‘So will we all, eventually,’ says Eeyore. ‘Ready to go home, Pooh?’

‘Ready or not, here we go.’

And as they walk in the wood in the cool of the morning, a great boom echoes around them like a memory of lost time.

The End

---

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