Snow still covers the ground and the thermometer hasn’t thawed since Thursday. Yet we know—at least intellectually—that the days are numbered for the season of death. The most recent blast of ice and snow likely won’t be the last, but March has come, we have gained three hours of sunlight, and any day now angles of geese will fill the sky, pushing winter back to its proper place at the North Pole.
And yet, winter has taken its perennial toll in death. Trees have been stark and brittle for months. The soil that in two months will produce the first lettuce leaves are hard as brick. Even the lovely amber and pink of native grasses has faded, heads stripped by wind and stems shattered and drab. And on the hillside east of the house lie the remains of a frozen deer.
What took her life, I could not ascertain. I saw no arrow or bullet hole, which I have sometimes found. She looked healthy enough to be alive when I found her sheltered south of a cedar tree a hundred feet from the house, a protected slope of native grass where deer often sleep. I expected her to spring from her bed and disappear, but she did not. When I came close, the glaze across her eye proved that this was her final rest. Like sisters of a dozen generations, she had come home to die.
A hundred feet from the house is too close for decaying flesh. I picked up a frozen leg and began to pull. I tugged her to the next cedar before concluding that she was too heavy to drag. I went for the tractor, picked her up with the snow scoop and hauled her to the hillside two hundred yards away.
The first night, coyotes came. I heard the happy commotion from our bed. By morning her belly was opened and choicest parts were gone. Then came the day shift, a murder of crows, two dozen or more, their raucous caws conveying their glee. Two weeks have passed, and now, should I wish, I could move what remains of her carcass with ease. The dining table is a carpet of hair, but little is left of the body but skin and bones.
When the weather warms and what remains begins to rot, vultures will dine, and then insects and worms. When winter comes again, mice who live in the nearby brush pile will gnaw the scattered bones. And someday, what nothing above ground eats will enrich the soil. Sad and shocking as death always is, it is an essential part of life. And in this never-ending cycle, the season of death plays a vital role.
–Jerry
To read more of Jerry’s observations check out his book, Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-Memoir from the Missouri River Bluff.
