Relative Something

Over the weekend, Cyndie reported that Delilah had dragged a carcass out of the woods. I was in the shower when she came in the house, looking for a camera. I asked what it was, but Cyndie said she couldn’t tell.

“It’s something big!” she announced.

It’s funny how our minds quickly conjure up images of what it might be. I stood there, washing my hair, imagining a variety of gory scenes of dead critters with dangling legs being dragged by our dog. A possum? A porcupine? How big was Cyndie’s “big?” How badly decomposed was it to be unrecognizable by Cyndie?

I offered her my camera, when she couldn’t locate her own, and continued to ponder whether it was something Delilah killed, or the remains of some other wild circle-of-life event that took place in our woods.

Delilah has a big fondness for bones. Cyndie has purchased several chunky bones, like pig knees from Fleet Farm, that Delilah carries around, often burying them, and sometimes crunching them to pieces. There was a time, a few weeks ago, when Delilah showed up with a long bone that looked like a leg bone, that she had found in our woods. That became a prized possession for several days, beating out all others for her attention.

When Cyndie returned with the camera, I got my chance to see what she was talking about. Yeah, it was big, but it isn’t what I’d call a carcass. My guess is that it came from the same source as that leg bone. I believe it is probably from the skeleton of the same deer that I discovered in our woods last fall.

That skeleton made quite an impression when we found it last year, and it’s still having an impact to this day. I’m actually a bit relieved that it wasn’t a new carcass that showed up. This one seems familiar, and we have made our peace with the loss of life that occurred.