http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/panda-tree-china/

Beyond the mist lay a whole world. Haoqi had not seen this world, of course. But he knew it existed.

As far as Haoqi knew, no panda had ever seen the world beyond the mountains. But the birds saw it all the time. And when they returned in the summer to the lush green of the peaks, they brought tales of that other world. It sounded grand. Or maybe it just sounded different. And different was, if nothing else, interesting. But only to Haoqi.

Each year, before the birds returned from their sojourns away from the mountains, the pandas had a council. It was informal, pandas being notoriously casual in their governance. Most of the meeting was spent eating bamboo and discussing how much bamboo they would eat in the summer. But they did eventually discuss the matters of the day. And with so many pandas in one place, it was only prudent to set a few eyes nearby to watch for trouble.

Haoqi had drawn one of the short strips of dry bamboo this year. Grumbling his acceptance, he’d crinkled the bamboo into an angular ball and tossed it aside. After filling his stomach at the opening feast, Haoqi climbed a sturdy tree a five minute walk from the edge of the bamboo clearing where the meeting was held each year.

As expected, the meeting took a long time. This was not Haoqi’s first time in the tree acting as guard for the council. He knew some of the tricks for passing the time. Chief among them was to think of things besides bamboo.

Yet try as he might, he wasn’t able to imagine the strange things about which the birds spoke. They spoke of rivers with no boundaries. Water as far as the eye could see. They spoke of land that was not mountains, with its rises and dips and uneven footing. The land they described had no rises, no dips, and the footing was the same in each spot across the length and breadth of it. Grass was not patchy, found in the space between rocks and shade. Instead, it was everywhere, in every direction.

Haoqi could not picture any of it. He found this failure perplexing, as none of the components of the other world sounded different. Water must look like water in both places, or the birds would have noted a difference. Haoqi knew what water looked like. He drank from streams and rivers every day. Yet when tasked with picturing only water, without the rocks over which it runs, without the grass and dirt banks, without tree trunks and low-lying foliage in the periphery, Haoqi utterly failed. It just didn’t seem pragmatic. Where did the bamboo even grow?

He met with similar difficulty when attempting to picture the land that was not mountains. Land WAS mountains. Pandas used the words interchangeably. The other pandas often wrote off this part of the birds’ stories as pure fancy. It was too alien to their sensibilities. Haoqi did no such thing, and he felt a certain pride in himself for understanding the birds’ explanation in principle. It didn’t pay to be too hard on himself for not fully understanding the mechanics of land that was not mountains.

The other pandas kept that sort of thought firmly at bay. Each year, they held their council to discuss, between bamboo feasts, whether they would send someone with the birds at summer’s end. Life on the mountain was good, but it was not perfect. Winters were harsh. Perhaps life could be better if this other world that called to the birds might also, one day, call to the pandas.

Haoqi banished that thought from his mind with a shake of his head. Then he panicked as he felt his body waver – he’d forgotten he was up a tree. Quickly, he threw out a paw to steady himself. His claws dug into the branch and, with a grunt, he narrowly avoided disaster.

It was the only moment of excitement he’d felt on his watch duty. And lately, Haoqi wanted to know if there was something more to being a panda than eating bamboo and occasionally climbing a tree to watch for wolves. There must be, he reasoned, because there was more to the land than just mountains. More to water than just rivers, more to grass that living in the shadow of trees.

What other wonders were held by the world beyond the mountains? Haoqi could picture the birds soaring over the trees, coming from the south and the east. In a few weeks, the first returnees would arrive with tales old and new.

And when they did, they would offer to guide the pandas to that other world at summer’s end. This was the point of the panda council. They would need an answer for the birds’ offer, and the pandas made no choice but as a group.

Haoqi knew what the answer would be. He knew he would find himself in this tree again, next year or the year after or the year after that, pondering the same questions. The pandas would not go with the birds because land could not be anything but mountains. Because water came in rivers. Because grass only grew below trees, never on its own.

Maybe pandas could only be one thing, but Haoqi didn’t think so. They could eat bamboo and climb trees. They could hold councils and assign a perimeter watch. Why couldn’t they also travel, and explore, and discover? Why couldn’t pandas be something other than what was expected?

These were important questions. He would ask when he got down from this tree. And, perhaps, after a quick bamboo snack. It didn’t do to supply profound questions on an empty stomach.