#91

Walking along the railroad tracks I came upon the smashed, dismembered body of a deer. One does sometimes.

At first glance I thought it was a big coyote, dead on the tracks from poison or a fight. I thought so because of the size of the ear in relation to the body, which had its back to me and was laid on its side, but was fooled; the animal's lower half was fully torn away. As I drew closer I saw the shape of the ear was wrong, then as I took a quick look up the tracks I saw a crow perched on a big, dully glistening liver next to a hoofed forelimb, big thick torn tendons sticking out like twists of rawhide. 

It was a cold morning; not frigid, but cold enough for there to be a rime all over the ground and sidewalks and tree trunks, cold enough to give grass that pale armor that crunches and whispers underfoot. In addition, it was one of those winter days that manages to be damp, with a very fine snow drifting invisibly, adding itself to the frozen slush puddles on the sidewalk, frosting leaves and metal rails, and melting into the fur of dead animals and freezing soft.

There was something nearly supernatural about the scene, and terribly comical. The deer could not have been more than two hours dead, but it was only half an hour or perhaps forty minutes after dawn, so the crows had only managed to put a cluster of holes into the liver like someone had taken a dull icepick to it, all on the widest curve of the right lobe. Otherwise, the flesh and strewn organs had steamed, unmolested in the dark, until the cold hardened them and began to put a dull transparent sheen over them. There was no odor save the tacky smell of bloody bone, which was not strong unless you leaned in close.

A wadded up, bizarrely folded chunk of flesh and skin and gristle lay a few feet behind the body, closer than the liver. I examined it for several minutes, walking away and coming back to refresh my perspective, and I still cannot say whether it was part of its snout of the meaty part of a hip joint. The snout is a strong contender, since it wasn't on his head. His tongue, sticking out between bloodied, strange flat teeth beneath was scraped along a rail slat as though in his final agony he had dragged it along its surface as to taste one last thing one last time, so hard he had somehow scraped away his nose.

This is nonsense, for it was evident that the animal died on impact or possibly even a split second before. Both his antlers were gone, the one that would have been facing up to the sky just a red hole with a jagged bit of white sticking out partway. His eyes, perfectly intact, had clouded and frosted over. The rear part of his body was torn away just before the paunch, viscera and carnage brutally honest about themselves but not messy, and could not be found, though I did find three legs. Not the fourth. His stumps stuck out sadly in front of him. The tendons sticking out of those were not like rawhide, not stiff: they lay limp like boiled, heavily sauced pasta.

The legs were scattered, but all within ten or fifteen feet of the body, all just the lower parts. It was curious how particularly dead the hooves looked. They, at any rate, should have looked no different, but the hooves looked deader than the eyes and the spilled guts and the ice forming in the fur.

Anyway the truly crazy parts about the whole thing and this human world we've built are these:

One, if someone had happened along, I would have had no way of proving conclusively that I hadn't chucked a grenade at the deer just to watch the guts fly, then hung around to watch my handiwork freeze into some kind of grisly sculpture. That's how thoroughly a train can mess up an organism. It looked like the deer had swallowed a bomb.

Two, a little ways down the track, I found a possum, sliced in half, exactly as fresh, clearly killed by the same train, practically at the same moment. These creatures died together, uncomprehending, unable to protect themselves.

Life is full of surprising chances.


--JL