On Sunday, I was sitting in a chair outside in front of my house, enjoying the evening. It was around 7 p.m. and just beginning to be dark. The crickets were singing, but slowly: it was a cool evening. And then I heard him, and knew immediately, as I always do, that it was the bear. There are not many large sounds in the forest – most are accumulated small ones. Even the stealthy steps I heard at first sounded large. I couldn’t see the bear, but I knew where he was. I just sat in my chair, head cocked in the direction of the sound. After a pause, I heard something that sounded almost like thrashing in the woods: leaves crackling, branches breaking, rocks being turned over and clanking against each other. But it wasn’t quite thrashing – it wasn’t a fight. These sounds were coming slowly, one at a time, as if a large boulder were slowly being pushed through the forest, in scattered fits and starts.
I thought about getting up out of my chair to get a closer look – there are several different bears in the area, and at the very least I would have liked to know whether this was my little female bear who comes by from time to time, or the very large bear I had been hearing about but had never seen. But I wanted the bear to be able to go about its business without being harassed by me. And anyway, I knew what the bear had come for. I knew what was going on. I was surprised it had taken him this long.
It had been eight days before when I found a deer laying next to the old path that leads to my house. She was just lying there – a large old doe. Looking at her closely I felt sure she was alive – I even felt I saw her breathing. But I suppose all I was seeing was my own quivering – I put my foot on her flank, and she was already stiff.
I sighed, looking at her. I know the deer are destroying the forest, and it is our fault, we who have stripped the wolves and lions from the mountains. I know that more deer need to die. But that is death in the abstract. Seeing this carcass laying on the ground, the strange mystery of it all predominates – that this large animal would, only the day before, have jumped and snorted and eaten and copulated and fled and investigated, but now all that was gone somewhere. Gone somewhere, or gone nowhere. And now I was just a few feet away – it seemed so intimate, looking down on this sleeping animal, expecting it to arise suddenly, if for no other reason than embarrassment at the strangeness of the closeness.
I thought the coyotes and vultures would be there soon enough, but even by Monday the deer looked as peaceful and perfect as before – its flanks had perhaps bloated out a bit, but not much. It was Tuesday evening that the corruption began. As I came home that night and walked up the path, I saw many large orange and black beetles – carrion beetles, Silphidae – working all around the mouth of the carcass.
On Wednesday there was a hole in the deer’s flank near its hams, put there by some animal I presume. The gases left the body, which sunk the flesh on the deer’s bones, and the spine was now clearly visible – its body looked ghastly by now. The flies arrived on Wednesday as well, buzzing around the open flesh. The weather had turned cold, and the flies would warm themselves up on my cabin’s siding in the morning sun – when I stepped out in the morning they would leap into the air and start buzzing around. “All of this new life,” I thought, “coming out of death.”
It was Friday before I noticed a vulture, though he may have been present before. Only one came. He was so large and beautiful, baleful as the animal is to our imagination. When startled they would fly right into the forest, and it was amazing that they were able to squeeze their massive wingspans right through the trees.
On Saturday the smell became powerful. As I was cutting wood nearby I began to dread the shifting of the wind, which would bring the stench back to my nostrils. The flies now had multiplied manyfold. Their white maggots were visible everywhere, crawling on the ground and inside and outside the carcass. As the creation of new life almost always is, it was disgusting to the mind.
And on Sunday the bear arrived. Bears are known to defend their food caches, so I was extremely wary of approaching. But by nine p.m. the bear had been gone for more than an hour, and I took a look: he had dragged the deer forty feet, snapping its neck all the way back, and he had cleaned the flesh off the legs. He had left it behind a large, upright rock. If you were to draw a line between my house and the deer, it would go right through the rock. The bear had been trying to shield himself specifically from being seen by me. He knew the mountain well – he knew that I was the animal most likely to cause him trouble.
Out of death, new life – this is the Pattern, the Paschal Mystery, the Parabola, the Parable. Whether it is only literally true, or true in some deeper sense as the destiny of consciousness as well, is the question.
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