A few days ago the dogs barked late at night and my husband let them out, and they chased something to the fence, froze, and hightailed it back to the kitchen and stood there waiting for my husband to do something. He'd heard a scream-like sound, and couldn't figure out what it was. I was guessing raccoons, and forgot about it until reading the paper this morning. A few blocks from us the police shot and killed a mountain lion. I've seen huge deer, raccoons and oppossums, and wild turkeys, but a mountain lion in our city is surprising. It must have come down from the park at the upper edge of the city, or the foothills, but why?
We had a great, wet spring, and it seems like there are plenty of critters to eat. So what was she doing? And now they've killed her. I know they couldn't do much else - she was in someone's back yard and had been wandering all around, but it's sad. The intersection of wildlife and urban is almost always tragic. The roadkill that is along every highway testifies to our maiming and mauling of these beautiful creatures. My Buddhist teacher often stops for roadkill animals and prays for them. She also takes them home and lets their bodies decompose. While she watches the changes in the carcass she meditates on change, dying and death.
On summer, on a retreat at her place, I sketched some of her dead birds, a sturgeon, a turtle, a snake and a mouse in their various stages of disintegration. They were beautiful, and I've kept those sketches, some watercolored to show the amazing colors on the birds. Dead things are shunned in our culture, but I believe my Indian blood makes me a little less squeamish. I saw plenty of dead animals at my grandparents' farms. It wasn't pretty to see, but it was a fact of life.
Perhaps I'm thinking of this sad topic because yesterday I saw my friend's dying dog. Probably for the hast time. I sat on the floor and patted her, and she got up for me several times. Her expression was sad but resigned. Her eyes said, "I'm not what I once was, but I remember you, and our walks with your old dog (now dead), and this is just the way it is". She knows I love her, so no words were necessary, and no goodbyes. She's in my heart as long as it beats.
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