A guest post by Peter Friederici
The deer out along the tracks has almost entirely vanished. About three months ago it was fresh—if that’s the term for something that smelled like death. Recent death, the kind of odor to provoke a brief shocked worry that I might stumble on one of the transients who come out here to drink or sleep it off. But no, there lay the deer on the gravel hard by the rails, neck tilted at an awkward angle, limbs askew.
How it came to be there is its own question, unanswerable anymore: Hit by a train? Nailed by a runaway dog? A mountain lion? If I were a dedicated naturalist I suppose I’d have gone down the embankment to check, conducted my own scattershot backwoods autopsy. But the smell gagged me, and I ran on.
Now it’s almost gone. What marks the spot is no more than a bit of blackened hide and a bleached sprawl of bone that must have been part of a pelvis. No more than that. Not bad for three months, all that blood and bone and flesh recycled into some new form: raven, rock squirrel, scrub jay, the disintegrating proteins reformulated efficiently into new sinew and spring and flight as if to mark the change of seasons, the tilt into spring.
I’m reminded of a time many years ago when I came upon a dead deer on a Lake Michigan beach. It was another naturalist mystery: How did a seemingly healthy buck like that come to drown? There was no answer for that, just the smooth corpse washed over by storm-driven sand right next to the place where the creek ran out into the lake, legs splayed as if in one last leap, the eye turned a ghastly opaque white.
This was in the suburbs, so the animal-control officer came by sometime in the next day or two and buried the buck on the spot. Public health hazard, you know. Besides the few photos I took I didn’t think too much more about it.
Until a couple of months later when I showed one of the photos to my friend Doug, who was a gifted artist.
“I’d like to sketch that thing,” he said.
My memory was fresh enough that it wasn’t hard to find the spot. The grave was shallow. All Doug wanted was the head. The wet thwack of a shovel driven hard through the bone and gristle that still connected skull and body is a sound that remains with me to this day.
Fortunately it was Doug who took on the unenviable task of boiling up the remains in an old pot for hour upon hour. He said it stank up the whole garage. But the drawing was worth it—a memento mori, stark bone and antlers in black and white. Our school’s literary magazine published it. I must still have a copy somewhere in the garage, among the copious boxes that bespeak a storage-and-recycling system far less graceful than nature’s.
And I still have the skull, too, for despite his having done the lion’s share of the gross scutwork, Doug gave it back to me. I painted the bone with preservative, and it sits in a strange limbo on a shelf in my mom’s basement, removed from time. For the rest of the deer long ago must have returned to the flux of life and death, the constant flow of proteins and fats and carbohydrates passed on from one organism to another, the steady stream of breathing and eating and living and dying that we too take part in every day.
No, scratch that. It’s not a stream, it’s a torrent. And what Doug was trying to do with his drawing, what I was trying to do then with a photo or am attempting now with words, is to stick a finger in that surge of becoming and unbecoming, not out of a hopeless desire to staunch the flow but rather to leave an impression visible downstream. The act of creativity is stones tossed into the flow of time. We hope always that the ripples will linger long enough to grant someone else a flash of recognition, of insight, a joyous shudder maybe at recalling what it was to be young and invincible and face to face with death for the first time.
Peter Friederici is a writer and a former itinerant field biologist and tour guide. He teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University in between bouts of camping, gardening, and fixing up an old house.