This deer had eluded starvation, coyotes, and lions, had survived the long hard winter, and now I had snuffed her out, here on the cusp of spring. All of that brave suffering had been for nothing.
My dogs were in the back of the truck with her. It was just into nightfall—seven o’clock. At first the dogs were excited by the deer, but once we started down the road they calmed some, and by the time we got to the cabin those sweet hounds had moved over next to the deer and were lying with their heads resting on her shoulder and flanks, as if keeping her warm. I saw with some surprise that the deer had her head up and was looking around.
I whistled the dogs out and shone a light on the deer. She had just a little bump on her head, and I left the tailgate open, hoping she would jump out and run back into the woods. It was a clear night with stars, and later I crept out and laid a heavy blanket over her. I kept checking on her through the night.
Gradually her head went lower and lower, though, and her breathing grew more ragged. She began to cough, and in the morning she was dead, stiff, her eyes shaded to a dull and opaque blue.
I pulled her out of the truck and took her behind the barn and cleaned her. I was slightly sickened to discover upon gutting her that her shoulder was shattered hopelessly and that her stomach lining had ruptured, so that all of her intestines and other organs (except for the heart) had slid down into the lower half of her body. It was a terrible mess. And she’d just been holding up her head like nothing was wrong. It was dumb to think she could’ve been all right. I could scarcely believe, looking at her, my childish hopes of the night before—that she might hop down out of the truck and go back off into the woods, and survive, even prosper. I cleaned her and hung her in the barn to age for five days.
The third deer ran through my yard the very next day. I was in the barn trying to work, huddled over a quickly cooling cup of coffee, and I heard the dogs barking the way they do when they see coyotes. They were snarling and barking—Ann howling like a wolf—and I jumped up and ran out into the snow, nearly colliding with this deer, which was bounding through the deep drifts.
A big coyote was right on its tail, and my dogs were chasing the coyote as it chased the deer. We all arrived at the same place at the same time.
The coyote stopped in his tracks when he saw me, but the deer kept going. The coyote whirled and ran in the opposite direction. The dogs chased him a short distance, then turned and trotted back.
I felt like I’d saved that deer, which helped dull the guilt I’d been feeling about the other deer, but it wasn’t an altogether clean trade, because I knew that coyotes had to eat. I had saved the deer but had messed up the coyote.
…
Our lives move deeper and slower—as if they are taking on weight. It’s good weight, most of it, but it alarms us, I think, at the way it feels like that added weight tries to sink us.
It’s like sinking through snow up to your ankles, or deeper. It’s like not being sure, one day, that the ice will hold you—when every day before, it has. It may be my imagination, but it seems like Martha doesn’t want to talk about this—perhaps does not even believe that this accrual of weight is happening. As if she believes that any day now—tomorrow, for instance—things will begin to get lighter and freer again—if she would even admit to this weight-gathering occurring in the first place.
Martha says all things are cyclic, and they are, but this thing—us—is somehow different.
The things outside of us seem never to change, beyond the constancy of the four seasons—birth, life, death, rebirth—but I’m convinced that our lives are different, just a tad above or below these constant cycles. As if we are on some march through the woods toward some final, newer place.
But Martha won’t listen to this kind of talk. She says it’s all one cycle, that nothing’s changing. And still: despite the endlessness of the days, there are fractures and gaps where whole chunks of time will fall away—as if calving away from the core. Things that were assumed to lock-solid, rock-sure, weaken and fall away, leaving only loss, emptiness, and confusion.
And we start anew.
…
The thing that gets the deer in these woods most of the time is the wolves. There’s usually just one pack at a time in this little valley. They keep the deer pruned back real nice, real healthy. None of our deer has ticks or other parasites. Nature’s still working the way it’s supposed to up here.
There are a lot of coyotes, too, but if the wolves find the coyotes in their territory they kill them as well, viewing the coyotes as competitors. We’ve seen a group of four wolves chase a pack of a dozen coyotes across a meadow, routing them.
Coyotes hunt the same prey as wolves but use a different style. The coyotes aren’t as efficient as the wolves—a lot of times they’ll only try to injure a deer, then stay near it for days, waiting for it to succumb—whereas the wolves just pretty much go after what they want and either get it or don’t. And if they get it, they get almost all of it.
