Good Walkies, as Wallace Would Say
Another banal post, hopefully slightly livened by a Wallace and Gromit reference. The weather is fabulous after nine days of rain. The path where I walk crosses Tinker's Creek twice. Each time there is a bridge. When I was coming up to the first bridge this morning, a deer was coming across it towards me. The deer froze, about two-thirds of the way acrtoss the bridge, head lowered, only it's ears moving. I could see it was trying to decide whether to bolt back the other way and I felt obscurely guilty...so I turned away, as if I hadn't seen it. Which was ludicrous since we had made deer/human eye contact. But I heard it's hooves on the tarmac and when I turned back it had finished coming across the bridge and was disappearing into the underbrush.
Also seen, a tiny dead mole, lying on it's side as if asleep, one pink paw like a zipper pull on a suede coin purse.
Also seen, a tiny dead mole, lying on it's side as if asleep, one pink paw like a zipper pull on a suede coin purse.
posted by Maureen McHugh at 3:53 PM
4 Comments:
We walk in rather different country. Where I live, adjacent to the Rio Grande, the farmers irrigate with river water and as a consequence the country is absolutely flat, originally leveled by Indians carrying dirt in woven baskets, and now kept that way by graders and laser-levelers.
The only things that interrupt the sight-lines are the irrigation ditches themselves, which rise four or five feet around the surrounding country, the cottonwood bosque that brackets the river, and the houses of my neighbors.
I walk along the irrigation ditches, which have single-lane dirt roads on either side. This means I get the best view unless I want to shinny up a tree. In winter we get sandhill cranes, snow and canada geese, hawks, and eagles. Year round there are road runners and Western meadowlarks. My neighbors keep cows, horses, sheep, goats, and far too many noisy and ill-disciplined dogs.
A few months ago some rustlers caught a calf and butchered it on the ditch bank, leaving the skin, hooves, and innards in a big pile. Fortunately it was still cool enough so that it didn't smell too badly. I reported this to the Conservancy District but though I see their trucks cruising the area every day, somehow they never managed to shovel up the offal. There isn't much left by now.
Be thankful for your dead mole, is what I say.
By "livened," do you mean "leavened" or "enlivened"?
Venison.
enlivened, I think
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