There is a Cherokee legend about a clan called the Ani Tsaguhi,

who were very poor and never had enough to eat.  A young boy

began to go into the woods each day, finding berries and other

things to eat, staying longer each day, until one day he decided

to not return home but stay in the woods, where he became a bear.

How each winter the first snow

Makes of the air a tangible thing,

Touchable and touching in the way

It both stirs and settles, covers and

Reveals, reshaping the emptiness

Of the thin trees into fullness again,

Recovering some of the bare distance

That keeps receding toward the solstice,

The horizon you'd forgotten was there,

The Earth tilting into cold and the dreams

Of bears in the caves of their long sleep,

And mine, the snow a thousand years deep.