My heart swelled with affection. Then I wondered whether a stream is the water in it, or the bed in which the water travels. The bed is a place and is always there, but it has no life or function without the water. But the water is transient, here now but miles away by tomorrow … I have no answer except that what I love is the whole, both the thing that stays and the thing that goes, which ultimately cannot be understood except as a unity.
After a time, I continued uphill, and in another hundred yards I came to an inexplicable and ghastly sight: an area of disturbed and trampled snow, with red stains and spatters toward the middle and a horrific pile at the center. I recoiled but couldn’t help moving closer to study it. Lumpy, tangled ropes of viscera, branching veins, yellow and purple and red-brown globs. A mound about a foot deep, two or three feet across. Guts and organs. Frost only just forming on the surface fluids.
I fell back away from it, two steps, five. Then I saw the tread marks of boots heading up the hill.
Someone had poached a deer on my land and field-dressed it and made off with the carcass. And I knew it must have been one of the Goslants.
I came down the hill feeling shaky, angry, sick, violated, utterly out of my depth again. I had posted the land! I had relished the idea of creating a little refuge for deer in this season of wholesale murder.
I wondered whether I should tell the Brassards about it, but given Diz’s hatred of the Goslants, I was afraid that would set off repercussions that might lead to trouble. Also, I worried about getting into some kind of range war with these people, whom I’d never met but had glimpsed and found frightening on so many levels.
At the same time, I couldn’t have people coming onto my property and doing whatever they pleased, taking anything they wanted. Brassard said the Goslants weren’t too worried about borders when it came to cutting trees, either. Then I wondered whether they had visited my campsite in my absence, scouted me out, maybe even come stealthily at night. It was deeply unsettling, an unfamiliar sense of violation.
I asked Will about it while milking that night. He paused for a moment, frowning, before he went back to his task. “Poaching? Hm. It could be more complex than that. If a hunter wounds a deer, he really should follow it and finish it off, even if it strays onto posted property. Actually, I don’t know if that’s what the law says, but it makes moral sense, don’t you think?”
I could understand that perspective. But that night, the image of the pile of guts, a living deer turned inside out, was hard to shake. It kept returning to my mind’s eye as I tried to sleep. And thinking it over, I couldn’t recall seeing any blood trail leading to the scene. Surely I’d have seen droplets or spatters on the way or on the periphery of the butchering site. On the other hand, I hadn’t been looking for them. And probably the blood would have melted down out of immediate view. I gnawed at this question until my thoughts faded into vivisectionist dreams.
The next morning, after milking and cleanup, I decided I had to know. Had they legitimately pursued an injured deer and put it out of its misery on my land, or had they brazenly poached? I covered myself in orange and hiked uphill again, following my own footsteps. The air rang with occasional distant gunshots.
I didn’t get as far as the bloody pile. I didn’t do any crime scene forensics, because before I got there I encountered something in some ways worse. When I came into my clearing, I found more boot tracks, new ones, tracks that were definitely not there the day before. I’d stood on my snow-rounded tent platform, and now so had this unwelcome visitor. This same person had prowled around my kitchen setup and had pissed in the snow nearby. And then had headed back uphill, toward the guts and toward my border with the Goslants’ land. I didn’t follow the trail.
So I talked to Brassard about it. It was midmorning by then and he was trimming hooves. With the cows indoors now, he’d taken extra time to check the health of each one and had found a few needing a trim. I wasn’t up for dealing with Diz and was glad to find she’d gone to town on errands.
Brassard was hunkered down with a cow whose ear tag read 78. He had tethered her in a stall and hoisted her back leg up onto a plywood box he’d hammered together. Apparently, the hind hooves are hardest to trim—the cow can deliver a kick that requires a visit to the emergency ward—but Brassard was sort of a “cow whisperer.” He had cared for those cows throughout their lives, had trimmed them before, so his propping up one hind leg and carving away didn’t bother them that much.
The upturned hoof looked like a black, dirt- and manure-crusted lobster claw. It was as hard as a leather shoe sole, but with quick, forceful strokes of his straight-razor sharp, old-fashioned hoof knife, Brassard easily peeled off strips of the stuff.
“Got six or eight grow too much hoof even over summer,” he told me. “Grow too long in the toe and rock the ankle back, that’s bad, but the heel’s more important. Don’t get the heel right, you put her lame in no time, especially comin indoors and on concrete all day.” He drew the knife again, expertly, and checked the cut. “Nowadays, most use an angle grinder. But I got pretty good doin it this way as a kid, never saw the need.”
I started by asking about
