Slow day at work. Here, have some words.
Is there enough interest in this stuff for me to make some kind of effort to do one of these things per month, say for a year?
Sketches of October
It is dark and late enough to be considered early when they cross in front of me, the blacktailed buck and doe. Efficient muscle moving beneath thin skin, black and moist of eye and muzzle, grey in my headlights, their small hooves clatter on asphalt as I slow almost to a halt for them. She is smaller and the fleeter of the two, and is quickly gone from my eyes. He stands a moment half-way up the embankment, almost eye to eye with me, four-point antlers smoothed and sharp-tined, his throat heavy with October's rut. I am almost close enough to touch him. Those huge black eyes meeting mine with the vulnerable, alien beauty of the wild.
*
I am a scavenger: I pick up roadkills which aren't too badly damaged to use for skins and sometimes meat. There are always injuries you cannot see, and I take their discovery as a kind of meditation, of respect, returning what I consider to be the necessary human intimacy of killing to what is often a thoughtless act. There it is, clean and untouched coarse brown coat, white deer-belly, perhaps one of the long and graceful legs is broken. Sometimes the animal is almost perfect but for the fact that she is dead, and then you open her, you see the impact, the moist tissues connecting skin to body bruised vivid red sometimes all the way across her flank or shoulder. You can still save the meat, but it is so much harder to clean, these impact sites.
She, being dead, doesn't care, of course, but we humans, we will add symbolism, being the kind of animal we are. And I think, sometimes, of things beneath the surface that you cannot see. If you were to cut open my metaphorical heart, what would be the extent of that hidden injury? What could be salvaged?
*
It has been a mild October, gentle, warm, clear weather, air to glory in, wrap around yourself like soft fabric or love. Some of the mornings have the coldness that speaks of the coming rainy season, and I've made a few fires. But this morning it's warm and clear when I walk through the trees with my three dogs and tiny new puppy, utterly blue-skied and splendid. You wouldn't mistake it for spring, though; we're well past equinox and October is palpable in the air with threat and promise. It can be tasted, smelled. The maples are flaring golden now, more so than they did yesterday: it was cold last night, and that cold must have kissed them just enough to move them that much closer. In the redwood forest, though, deciduous trees are only occasional punctuation. Mostly, October is about waiting dryness, the mosses and fungus still and patient for the quiet rains to wake them.
The tan oaks are done mostly with their dying, which has taken about three years now; I suspect that many of them will fall in the coming storms. My puppy, who has not learned to walk with a leash, sits back comically in a bed of shed redwood branches and brittle, dead tan oak leaves, staring at me expectantly with wide and vivid blue-merle eyes, briefly denying the pressure of his sparkling collar. He is soft and pale of coat, utterly tame and tender. Up above him, the golden maple leaves haven't yet begun to fall.
*
Standing at the small abandoned reservoir which is my near-daily walk, the sky is white, sun covered with fog, and it is chill. A pair of ravens call to one another in their hoarse voices, and in the muffled quiet of morning the sound carries and reverberates across the water. There is no other sound, it seems, but my breath. They skim lightly above me, great, black, glossy birds. A few moments later, a small flock of some plump, pigeon-size bird I do not recognize moves in a long line carelessly, silently, across the pale sky.
*
You never expect a bobcat, but there she was, wild female, long-legged and brown, her thick fur lightly spotted, her tail short and black. Crossing the small road, she sat on the verge and groomed herself, as housecats do, washing herself, tonguing her oversized paws, showing her luxurious cheeks and a flash of creamy chest. Sweet-faced, pink-nosed, gold of eye, so like a tame cat and yet so utterly unalike that it startles, I watched her until she was done. She rose casually, again on those oddly long legs, yawned and moved away into the trees and beneath the overgrown fence beyond.
How do they live, these wild things? I can envision her careful stalk, effortless movement, no room for error in the preservation of hard-kept and irreplaceable life. Meat is hard to come by, and I can only imagine a cat's satisfaction at a successful hunt in this aging season, the rare warm-blooded, life-giving kill. They live and die so easily, the wild ones, with such suffering, with such unaffected grace. I can glimpse these truths, but can't really know, though: I'm too different a kind of animal, too tame. The fact of her presence is enough, touching the fortunate eye which stumbled by accident, briefly to meet her mild predator's gaze.
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