In the past week, I have stum­bled upon two car­casses. This is the skull of a deer. Been dead all sum­mer from the state of decay. Deer car­casses don’t even make me flinch, as I spent a good por­tion of my time in high school col­lect­ing road kill and drag­ging it into a field, point­ing a video cam­era and an infrared sen­sor at it, and record­ing what­ever came to feed (pos­sums mostly). I got over the smell and the sight pretty quickly in those years.

The sec­ond car­cass I found was some kind of canine. Either a fox or a coyote–probably a fox, given the color of the fur that was around. The fur had been removed from the car­cass, but it still had quite a bit of flesh on the var­i­ous bones, so it had only been dead a month or so. Once upon a time, I prob­a­bly could have told you exactly what it was by the shape of the skull and teeth and such, but I’ve for­got­ten most of what I learned about such things. The only thing that remains is some gen­eral knowl­edge. And an uncanny abil­ity to stum­ble upon car­casses in the woods.