The great circle of life

It's the season of the fawns. Three of the cute little tykes have been gambolling oer the lawn, stretching their little legs, testing the strength of their little haunches. Their mothers move in somewhat more stately fashion.

All very picturesque and life affirming, until one of the mothers ceases to move in stately fashion and comes to just lie there with one unseeing eye staring up at the sky, proclaiming a very inconvenient truth, dead in the middle of the path behind the pond, flies gambolling around that one accusatory eye.

She was still alive the other day, that visible eye occasionally blinking, her breath shallow. She didn't seem to be suffering, unlike that other one with the hurt hoof a few years ago that somehow got himself all tangled up in the wild rose bush where he struggled and struggled. Thankfully this one died on her own, so I was spared the very unpleasant necessity of putting her out of her misery.

But she couldn't stay where she was. So I went out this morning with the tractor and dragged her to a less conspicuous spot. She's pretty well off the path through the old horse pasture, down near where the local kids dragged those rectangular clay drainage pipes and set them up as supports for benches around a firepit a few years ago. Nobody used that firepit this spring; and they certainly won't be using it this fall.

Early on, way back in 1979 or so, Mom got an introduction to the whims of the country just after she and Pop moved into Colwell's old house. Colwell's dog found a deer carcass in the woods and had a grand old time dragging ribs and long bones and big pieces of hide around the lawns. Unlike Pop, Mom was not amused. She wanted me to go down in the marsh and bury the carcass; but by the time the dog got to dragging pieces around there really wasn't much of a carcass to bury.

The good news is that there aren't any big dogs around to tear this new carcass apart and drag pieces of it all over the place; the bad news is that if something doesn't tear it apart it's going to raise quite a stink. I won't be walking the lower loop of the path through the old horse pasture until the cold of winter sets in. Other walkers will just have to take their chances.