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Leo went out the morning of my ninth birthday and returned in the evening with a boar he’d skewered out in the forest. It took three of them to carry the beast, and while my mother carefully sliced down the length of his abdomen, I sat with my feet in the surf and cried. My mother found me there hours later, washed the mess from her hands in the ocean, and told me to stop crying over our food.

The next morning she woke me before dawn and sent me out with Leo. It was a long walk to the forest — past the beach and through the wide field of tall, sharp, itching grass; across a river; and up the steep hillside until my legs and lungs both burned — and I wept until Leo crouched down beside me in the trees and put his hand on my shoulder and told me that my crying was going to scare away the game.

“Everything dies,” he said, his voice stiff but not unkind. “Everything that’s created — the trees, the flowers, you, and me — will eventually be destroyed. This is the only certain thing life gives us.”

“It didn’t die. You killed it,” I wailed, and he hushed me and pulled me into him and stroked my hair until I calmed.

“The boar kills birds for food, and mice, and other animals. If you must be sad, be sad. But, this is just the way it is. If you cry so loudly that we go home with nothing, then tonight you can see an entire village go hungry.”

I sniffed and wiped my running nose on the back of my wrist. The others in the group stood quietly, shifting their weight between their feet, until Leo squeezed my shoulder and stood again.

My mother sent me with him every morning. Leo taught me how to set a trap, and use a knife, and fashion one from bone. He taught me how to tell direction from the stars, and how to kill an animal before it knew, and how to make a bed from the soft moss of the forest floor.

I was thirteen the morning that Leo woke me on the beach for the last time. The group of us walked silently through the itching grass and across the river, and the ground began to shake just as we started the climb up to the trees.

I fell as the earth slipped beneath my feet. I could hear the others yelling as I tried to pull myself back up to no success. I grasped in the darkness but found no anchor to take hold of, so I curled in on myself and held my knees and listened to the rumble of the world.

When the stillness came, I stood, my legs shaking in place of the earth, and called Leo’s name until I found him down the path. I took his hand and tugged him toward the river, toward our home, but he kept me back. Without waiting for the others, he began to pull me up the hill.

I wailed and shouted, but he was bigger and stronger than I was, and he took me by the shoulders and shook me. “We can’t go back. There is nothing to go back to.”

I let him pull me up the hill. The trail had jumbled itself and fallen away in places, and we had to climb up and over fallen tree trunks. By the time we reached the forest, every part of me ached. I found myself crying, just as I had that first morning. But Leo didn’t stop me. Instead he turned me around.

Even far away, the waves looked big enough to swallow the world. The ocean had already swelled up over the beach and was rushing past the grassy field toward the river.

Leo took my hand and pulled me into the forest. We walked a long time until we reached a clearing and he sat and pulled me into him, and neither of us spoke.

“It’s all gone,” I said quietly, after a while. Leo grunted, and nodded, his elbows on his knees.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s all gone.”

Again we fell into silence. The sun rose and warmed the clearing, and the earth shook, but not as strongly. Animals rustled, cracking fallen branches beyond the curtain of trees, and I saw Leo cry for the first and only time.

When the sun sank again, Leo went to gather wood for a fire and I cleared moss to have a place to put it. Warming my hands, I leaned my head on his shoulder as my stomach churned and rumbled.

“One day, will the ocean be destroyed?”

Leo let out a long, slow breath. “One day, the whole earth will be destroyed. The ocean, the mountains, the forests. I doubt that you or I will be alive, then. But yes. The ocean was created, and one day it will be destroyed. This is just the way it is.”