Post mortem

When an animal dies, the first question is always how?

 

Our clue about the presence of the body was the dog, who was behaving strangely.  She wasn’t coming when called and was spending a great deal of time in a certain part of the woods where she doesn’t usually go.  I got the binoculars on her and realised she was chewing on something large.  She growled at us and wouldn’t allow us to retrieve her find.  I managed to get hold of her and remove the item, which proved to be part of the hind leg of a roe deer – still fresh and furred, not yet stinking, with the delicate black hoof still intact.  I took it and a section of thigh bone down to the river and threw it in.

The next morning, my mother shadowed the dog to find the rest of the deer, lying in a quiet grove under Scots pines.  When I arrived, crows and jays flapped away from the scene.  The carcass had been thoroughly scavenged, probably mainly by badgers, with very little flesh remaining.  I had arrived too late to glean any clues about the cause of death.  It certainly wouldn’t have been the Jack Russell.  That question: “how?” remained hanging. 

The rounded pugmarks in the snow, the deer carcass three years ago, completely stripped of flesh before it had the chance to go off, the depression in the moss on a boulder where a large mammal had been resting, the rabbit fur on the tree trunk, the scat in the tree – all of this is fascinating but ultimately inconclusive.  Meanwhile I read about potential lynx reintroductions; as well as direct persecution, one of the factors that is thought to have contributed to the extinction of lynx is the lack of deer prey in the middle ages.  No such problem now.

A large mat of skin (licked clean, fur still attached) lay alongside the body of the deer.  Several ribs, the lower jaw and two legs were missing.  The head, dark eye still glistening like frogspawn, was still attached firmly to the spine.  Clumps of surprisingly grey, long winter fur lay amongst the cold leaf litter and brambles.  The dog was gnawing something behind a boulder.

In three trips I dumped the remains into the river, the only place I could think of where the dog wouldn’t keep coming back for more.  The section of hide smacked flatly on the surface, floating and drifting downstream.  The two legs and head-with-spine sank immediately.  It was a strange thing to have to do, and I did it without any ceremony.

There was then a bitter spell in which the river all but froze over.  Snowstorms came; their cargo melted.  Heavy rain followed, the river rising frequently.  I assumed that the bones of the deer would be swept far away, or perhaps I would find them lodged against the granite stepping stones just downstream. 

One day at the end of March, when the weather had calmed and the river dropped, I found that this was not the case.  The curved spine, still attached to the head, had come to rest in a slow stretch of water on the inside of a bend, against a large stone on the river bed.  The remnants of the skeleton looked sculptural, placed.  It formed a reversed question mark against the yellow sand of the riverbed, with the skull as the period.  The vertebrae were tasselled with riverweed and dead grass.  Minnows darted in its lee and nipped in to feed on the remaining scraps of flesh.  Small silent white islands of froth slid on the surface above. 

I’ve been seeing up to four roe deer every day.  They’re becoming more and more casual, ambling away rather than bouncing with white scuts flying, or even standing and watching me.  In the recent snow, one walked past our front door.  The buck has now lost his velvet, and now the prongs of his horns stand bare against the sky, tinged pinkish with blood, forming a counterpoint to the stems of dead bracken at his feet.  The fur rippling over his shoulders resembles thick brown moss.  He squeezes under the gate and gives a guttural disyllabic bark of alarm.  My presence is still enough to scare them – good.  Perhaps they will retain the sense to save themselves if need be.

Splitting logs in the barn, I startled his companions, trapped in the vegetable garden.  One cleared the fence intended to exclude them; the other got a front leg caught in the wire and dangled painfully, writhing.  I set down the axe and approached, speaking softly, preparing to lift her, relieve the weight and set her free.  Just as I spread my arms to gather her up, she thrashed wildly and broke free, hurling herself vainly against the fence and then dashing past me.  She found a clumsy, crashing way over the bottom fence and then limped across the field, looking back at me.

If I had not been there, enacting a primal scene with my axe, she would not have got caught.  But she may have tangled herself anyway on trying to leave, and then hung there painfully: a slow and ghastly death.  Now she may shake off her limp, or it may prove the end of her.

I stand at the riverbank most days.  As the remains of the dead deer are washed by the water, and the minnows polish it whiter, the living ones grow bolder, oblivious to the fate of their sister, more and more habituated to harmless humans, heedless that some sort of death is waiting for them, too.

Yellow

As I pick up my sons from school, something remarkable is taking place in a strip of shrubs planted between a busy road and a building site, where the new school is to be.  The home-time procession of hand-holding humans appears not to notice the wonder just above its heads – signifier of swelling life and the rush of spring.  The fluid, opulent song of a blackbird, purling through the swish of traffic and the voices of children.  For me, that song is an aural hyperlink to elation.  For most others, just another part of the background.

I encouraged my youngest boy to hear this song on his street and notice the jet-black bird with the orange-yellow bill that was producing this lovely sound.  He walked quickly towards the blackbird and turned around to smile at me.  It was a pure smile, not one designed to please.

This morning, frost had greyed the grass.  The rising sun illuminated a fresh knot of daffodils, provoking their yellowness.  They all faced downhill, trembling, an expectant brass section.  A pied woodpecker drummed; woodpigeons woozily re-emphasised their five syllables, growing in volume now that the long winter showed signs of surrender.

I had a to-do list growing by the moment, a mounting feeling of stress, and not long before having to set off for work.  The laptop sat blackly, waiting.  I walked out. 

I paused to enjoy a blackbird singing.  He stopped while I watched him, keeping his bill (as vivid as a sliver of ripe mango) firmly closed, shifting on his perch, waiting for me to go.  We tend to think of a male blackbird’s bill as yellow, but now, in spring, it’s really on the verge of orange, matching the crimped crepe coronas of the daffodils.  As soon as I left his line of sight he started up again, his rich chuckling tones coiling around me like syrup.

My path through the woods is growing in its significance.  I cut it last summer at the cost of many sneezes, ticks and horsefly bites.  It’s now serving me well.  Its winding route causes me to choose my footfall carefully, to step slowly.  Church-like in snow, on these calm sunny mornings the south-facing clearing gathers the sun and a secluded pocket of warmth and light is mine. 

Perhaps the best lesson my path can teach me is to take my time.  Yes, work will still be there.  I will probably not be late.  This path is now.  The green spears of these new bluebell leaves squeak under my boots.  Stop.  At my feet, one bluebell is bursting from a purple casing that prefigures the flower it will become.  Look at the greenish lichen and the purple birch twigs against cirrus.  Note the raindrops caught in the thorns.  Hear the river against the stones, bullfinches piping – and nothing else.

My path ends at the wall, where a fallen stone gives me and the deer an easy crossing into the field.  Pause again to take in the way the remaining frost follows the receding outline of the shadow from the blackthorns.  Take yet another photograph that will underwhelm me later, but which may remind me of what happened next.

All of these pauses add up.  These lacunae are the best of it.  The rushing and chores and the hollow feeling on waking – they’re all chaff.  I know this, yet still I mostly rush from one thing to another.  Each day should be one long pause, on the cusp of the moment when the heavy-headed bird swings across the last of the frost, flashing panels of white in its wing.  In another pause, the sort that form the actual punctuation of my life, the bird remains visible among the thorns just long enough for me to fully realise it.  Then it is gone.

This is one reward for leaving the laptop closed and walking out into a March morning.  A moment when a chunky pinkish bird flies in front of me, pushing a swathe through crowding cares and perches - just long enough.  One with slatted white and black wings like Venetian blinds and a bill that could crush my finger.

Yesterday, it was honeybees on hellebores.  Today, a hawfinch.  Then, as an addendum, the sulphur dot at the bottom of the day’s exclamation mark, the first butterfly of my spring – a brimstone testing its unique hue of green-charged yellow against the primroses as it wavers back and forth. 

On the bank near the school where the blackbird sings, spring has entered its yellow phase: a massed display of daffodils, primroses and celandines, comparing their different shades.  Gold, brass, brimstone and butter.  These yellows speak of sun, of Easter, of the impulses of the emerging insects, of clear skies, fresh breezes and the seeds and succulence to come.  Is there any more innocent, hopeful colour?

Later in the year, when the days reduce again, the park is empty and leaves are severing from the trees, it will be hard to recall the profusely yellow bank and the blackbird’s song.  But I’m going to try.