Instinct

In my yard is the leg of a young rabbit.  It’s been there for two weeks now, gray, fur rustling in the breeze, all that’s left of what Boehner, our orange tabby, killed.  She ate only part of it, and each morning there was less and less, until finally all that was left was the tiny leg.  In the city I had friends who told stories of their cats’ bringing them “presents”—dead birds and mice, little creatures or parts of little creatures that they would place by the door, or worse, bring in the house.  We’ve had those, but we’ve also had larger mammals, squirrels and rabbits, left by the door.  Some of them have been nearly the size of the cats themselves.  Now when the cats yawn and bare their teeth, I notice how long they are.  How white and sharp.

Earlier this month, I was working when Rolo would not stop barking.  I finally went downstairs to try to quiet him down, and just to the side of our well stood two turkeys.  They began to move toward each other and bumped chests, then intertwined their long necks and joined their beaks.  It’s spring, and I thought it was some kind of mating ritual, but it never progressed in that direction.  Instead, they would separate, square off, then rejoin with the neck twisting, the beak locking.  They were so intent on what they were doing that they didn’t see me at the window, didn’t even notice when I slid it open a few inches so I could hear them click and sputter, the ruffle of their feathers.  They began to move closer to me, their necks spun together, held at almost a right angle to the ground, and I realized they were fighting.  They came so close that I could look in the eye of the one who was getting the worst of it.  I don’t know what I expected—some sort of intelligence, ferocity, fear—but what I saw was simply blankness, as if he hadn’t gone into this with any kind of intention; rather, he was simply impelled to challenge a rival without regard for the consequences.

Several months before this, last fall, Tom and I saw a black Lab scampering around the property.  He looked young, and I immediately thought about coyotes.  When we first moved here, there were very few, and the folks in town told us that the farmers and ranchers had shot them all.  They’ve reestablished a population now, and I hear them at night, yipping and howling, usually in the forest across the way, but sometimes in our woods and nearby fields.

We lured the Lab into the dog run, gave him some water and food, played with him a bit.  I called him, rather uncreatively, “Hoover,” because he ate all the food we gave him in seconds.  He was goofy and daffy and had clearly been trained, as he would sit on command and sort of wave his paw when asked to shake.  He wore a collar and we figured he must belong to the people up the road, that he was just on walkabout.  We let him out of the run, and he hung around for a bit, but then returned home.

We have a vast amount of deer here.  They wander around the yard, up and down the driveway, eat pears off the pear tree.  There are so many deer in this area that hunters are allowed to kill does.  This past winter, a wounded doe made its way into our neighbor’s field where it died.  I could see the body from my kitchen window, and I was surprised when the neighbors just left it there.  I commented on that to Tom, and he said that the coyotes would take care of it.

A few days later, I noticed that I couldn’t see the doe’s body.  It looked like something was still there, but I couldn’t tell what, exactly.  I told Tom that he seemed to have been right about the coyotes.  He looked at the spot with his binoculars and said that there was too much still there, that the coyotes would have eaten the whole thing.  “Who did it, then?” I asked him.  “Most likely dogs,” he said.

I watched the doe’s body for a few more weeks from the kitchen window.  It got progressively smaller.  Many times, I saw something black rooting around and digging in it.

A week later, the remains of the doe were covered in snow.  I was baking bread when I noticed Hoover coming up our driveway and heading past the spruces to the field, to the doe.  I went back to my bread until Rolo started barking.  I looked up to see Hoover, a long, white femur in his mouth.  He gave it a shake, then bounded down the driveway toward home.

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