Wild Spot

People don't seem to understand my fascination with dead animals and their  bones. To lighten up the mood, I often say, Well, I like animals when they're alive, but it's hard to pet a wild deer or bird. I am hunched over the remains of a dead deer. It has been dead for months, I'm sure. I love this change in my wild spot's landscape. This area, in August, was covered in foliage, weeds, and high stalks of bamboo-like weeds. From up near the mouth of the cave, I was unable to see this forest floor that I am walking on now. But fall is here and its various falls have happened, allowing the forest floor to be seen and easier to explore. But this deer. It has been dead for quite a while. Long past stench. Long past maggots. I pick up its skull and there is only a little bit of flesh still clinging to the light-weight bone, but not too much. A hoof, still covered in fur as if it refused nature, is riddled with orange ticks, little circles with legs. I can't seem to scavenge many of the other bones that belonged to this deer. What stands out most is the skull and this preserved hoof. I wonder how this deer died. 

It is deer season now, for those who hunt with bows. The Monday after Thanksgiving is a holiday for Pennsylvania. The first day of deer season for those hunters who hunt with rifles and shotguns. On that Monday, there will be more people out hunting in Penn's Woods than there are people in the state of New Mexico. Not only is it deer season in the woods, but it is deer season on the roads, as well. All those hunters meandering through the woods, getting down on their haunches, poking their rifles through thick leaves, covering their human-smell with anise oil, scare the deer into the crowded streets where they meet their demise by rubber, metal, and glass rather than the projectile-quick bullet of lead alloy, as small as the eye it will inevitably close.

So, there are a lot of animal carcasses in Pennsylvania. Not just because of hunters. Some animals just need to cross the street. Some are attracted to the lights. Some smell human. And some want to lick the hot, sweet asphalt as it cools in the midnight hours. When driving home from my camp near Brookville [in the Allegheny National Forest], I tease my family saying, I saw more dead animals on the road than I did out in the wilderness! 

So here I am now, stroking the contours of deer's skull. A skull that was carried by a body that bounded through the forest in fear many times. Probably died in that same fear. But in this area where I am at now, with this deer carcass, is an area I have mentioned before. It's an area at the deep  base of the cave where deer sleep. For in the summer time, it is well-covered and there is a lot of foliage. When I venture into this area in the summer time, I see a lot of bent grass where the bodies of deer would lie in the daytime. When I would first enter this area, I would hear the deer raise their bodies from the ground and bound away, their little white tails like flags getting smaller and smaller in the distance.

I'm looking around. I want to find something romantic. I want to find something funeralesque for this deer. I want to liken the deer to elephants who actually cry and have grave sites for the members of their family. A bamboo weed shoots up from the ground near where the skull lies on the ground. The bamboo shoots here are no longer a rich green like they were in the summer, but a little bit more dull: a gray/green. Attached, though, to this particular shoot is a piece of wood that has grown around the shoot to the point where the shoot looks squeezed by the wood that embraces it. I see this a lot in the forests. When wood embraces or becomes attached to something that is not itself. You can find it in backyards...where clotheslines or fences grow into the bark of trees. But this isn't a growing into. It's a growing around. The wood is embracing the shoot. It's interesting to liken trees to weeds because it always seemed to me that trees lasted longer. But in order for this phenomenon to take place, the weed had to stay alive and in this spot for a long time, along with the piece of wood that wraps itself around it. This reminds me of a poem my boyfriend read to me once.

The Way They Held Each Other by Mira

A woman and her young daughter were destitute

and traveling to another country
where they hoped to find
a new life.

Three men stole them while they were camping.

They were brought to a city
and sold as slaves; each to a different
owner.

They were given one minute more together,
before their fates became unknown.

My soul clings to God like that,
the way they held
each other.

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