Lost Doe
It happened again. I took a shot, thought it was good, and found no blood. I had taken my time and not shot the first doe I saw. There is always a smaller doe that is bolder than the others that comes first to browse around the feeder. Then her shy sister, then today the big one, she stood up on her hind legs and lifted her nose above the branches, pointed it straight up to the sky. She didn't like what she smelled and she backed out through the cedar. That left the two smaller ones. After twenty minutes I began to question my judgment of size at 80 yards, were they really so small? Then she returned. When she stepped out, she stood a couple hands higher, silver and gray with the sunset shining off her back. I was glad I waited.
She paused at odd angles and stayed behind a low branch. By the time she paused broadside in the clear, my neck was cramping from keeping my eye on the scope and I was trembling. I tried to exhale the adrenaline but when I finally squeezed the trigger, it was full of fear. One tries to keep the eyes open when the gun explodes, only looking up after it has rocked back in fire and smoke. The longer you can look into that moment, the less time there is for the barrel to drift unattended or be yanked up by an uncontrolled breath, or flinching or any one of a hundred demons who pull on the gun when you look away. Ideally, you exhale and squeeze between heartbeats and never blink. This was not that kind of shot.
She didn't fall or stagger or jump straight up, but ran straight ahead. I marked where she had been and forty minutes later, in fading light, I stood there and saw no spray or drops or bits of fur that might have been blown off an exit wound. I cut for sign in expanding arcs, then began to wander in the disorienting cedar thicket behind the feeder. This is the most painful part, looking without the first clue, straining to remember what a drop of blood on grass looks like and posting that in my working memory as I scan, stoop, look up, and crawl on all fours in likely places. Hunting from a well maintained feeder is cheating, no doubt about it, but it sure can be hard.
It was too hard and I quit. I walked back to the house. Larry and Catherine wouldn't judge me for missing, and I had brought dinner for them and it was late. I could go out and look later with a full stomach, if that's what I wanted to do. It wasn't. We had a nice dinner then whisky by the fire.
The next morning, I was hauling a doe up to the gambol on the north side of the property when I saw Caracaras circling, behaving exactly like vultures. I had only seen my first Caracara in Texas a year ago and it shocked me, the enormous, exotic raptor looked like something escaped from a zoo. Here were a dozen of them, circling, suddenly banall, if a little intimidating. The place they circled seemed close, so I parked and walked through brush and I found her on her side, at the end of a clear, wide blood trail. It looked like she lay down behind a brush pile, bled profusely, got up to make one more go of it, then fell in the shade of a juniper, a red hole in her upper chest. She was already hollowed out, her lower abdomen opened up and the air circulating under her ribs, eyes gray but shining. This would be what that lone coyote was screaming about in the dark this morning as I sat in the stand. There was a long line of life waiting to take what she was no longer using. I don't know how bad it is. I don't know how bad it is if something or someone dies a death that is more painful than necessary, or experienced in fear, or in vain, or when their death fails to fit into the role someone had planned for it. When someone expires in an ICU, face down, intubated, sequestered from anyone who ever loved them, prevented from vocalizing, throat-raped by a plastic tube, its unfortunate. It would be better if they could be happy and comfortable, but those are moments of life. Death is death. If you could, would you excize a pleasant moment from the past and sew it on at the end to be the last moment? Why?
It's not natural for things to get better the closer one is to death but we like a story to end on a high note. Does this improve the story? Stories that place death in context tend to be elaborate and grandiose. A castle of imagination for the questions to move into and get lost in. When my daughter was five, she asked me if she would die, if I would die, if Mom would die. I had clumsy stories to tell her, but none were better than her wondering. Fortunately, nothing I could say could ever really be an answer.
When I take that other doe the next morning, her sister returns to the feeder to look for her while I wait to start tracking. I run those simulations in my mind, where that one person dies. I would wander around with dead eyes. Maybe I would end my life. I would go to her room and smell her clothes. Past that, I don't know. Maybe a new me would grow out of the burnt stalk. Sometimes people are like weeds that die down to the roots and then grow back. They seem younger than their years but the unedited version, the part that remembers, is underground, an incomplete death. The next death down, the roots are gone, what is left is the mycorrhizae, fungal hairs that connect plants to soil and to each other. You can’t regrow the same plant from these, but things still grow, things like the thing that is dead. In fact, they grow on that thing. The mycelium will intercede like St Peter and pass karma from old roots to new seedlings, it will be the same energy but stripped of answers to all questions.