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more dead fawn hijinks
Monday, July 1 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
When I went to check the mail early this afternoon, I smelled a rotting corpse near the mailbox. I looked around superficially and didn't see anything. But whatever it was had to be fairly big to be making such a big stench.
Later this afternoon when I went to take the dogs for a walk, Neville decided not to go. He was sunning himself in the driveway, something he'll do even when it seems like it would be too hot for that. But he has a high albedo, perhaps higher than mine. So it was just Charlotte and me walking up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail when I remembered that there's a patch of chanterelles that appears in early July not far up the trail on the south side. There'd been heavy rains yesterday, so perhaps they would already be popping up. Sure enough, I found enough for me to make a meal featuring them, but it would only be enough for me. I took off my shirt and made it into a bag so I could carry them easily.
As I crossed over to the Stick Trail, I noticed there was a lot of some unfamiliar species of what looked like a lily growing on the steep slope. I couldn't identify it, but I thought it might be something worth planting at the cabin (assuming it can grow in that bleaker climate). So I scooped up one. On the walk home, I noticed it was a fairly common plant and there were plenty I could've gathered a lot closer to home. [Subsequent research has led me to believe it might actually be broad-leaf sedge, that is, not a lily at all. But it is a native plant.]
When I returned to the house, I could smell an appalling rotten animal smell near the front door. Had the heat suddenly lead to the hasty break-down of a baby rabbit killed by our cats? But then I heard Neville snarling at me from just inside the door. Then he actually started barking at me like I was a stranger. This was him in Mr. Hyde mode, the way he gets when he's guarding something he doesn't want taken away. And I could see that what he had was a half-grown deer fawn that had entered an especially fragrant phase of decomposition. This was probably what I had been smelling when I checked the mail earlier today. Neville had smelled it too and then dragged it from wherever it was into the house, which is not a good place for rotting corpse.
I knew that just getting that fawn corpse away from Neville was not going to be easy. I went out in the garage and got some rope and a stick, made a lasso of the rope, which I taped to the stick. By this point, Neville had dragged the fawn into the main part of the living room and was actually finding bits of it to eat from around a large hole in its ribcage. The smell was so intense that I was doing all my breathing through my mouth as I used the stick to try to get the lasso around one or more of the fawns very long legs. Neville didn't like this at all, and repeatedly attacked the stick, putting deep tooth marks in it. For some reason he was channelling his aggression at the stick instead of me, a level of stupidity that not even hornets exhibit. I managed to get the rope around the legs one or twice, but the lasso kept slipping off. So then I used the stick to somehow poke the lasso past Neville and over the fawn's little head. By doing this, I was able to get a solid rodeo attachment and could begin dragging the corpse out of the house. Neville was enraged by this, though he mostly just tried to turn this into a game of tug-of-war. At some point out in the yard he was pulling back so aggressively on the fawn's legs that I had to abandon pulling it any further, so I tied it to a tree, walked a wide circle around Neville, and returned to the house, where I had a lot of cleaning to do. (Fortunately Neville wasn't going to be coming in, since his focus was entirely on the dead fawn.)
First I opened all the doors and windows and turned on the ceiling fan. Then I used a dust pan to remove all the bigger detritus, which included chunks of fur, bits of bone, nuggets of fecal material, and lots of maggots. They hadn't hatched long ago, so they weren't very big: about a quarter inch long and no thicker than a wire used in a phone cable. There was no sense in being squeamish about them; I just swept them up and grabbed any I could't sweep with my fingers. Next I got a sponge with some water and sponged away all the wet spots, some of which yellowish brown with fecal material and all of which were covered with maggots. Once that I was done, I brought over a vacuum cleaner and vacuumed so thoroughly that the carpet looked clean. As I worked, I was reminded of all the true crime stories where people frantically try to erase the evidence of a murder, sometimes after waiting a little too long after committing it.
Despite my efforts, there was little I could do about the powerful stench, and it took a lot of air blowing through for it to dissipate. And there was still a hint of gameyness to the living room well after the rest of the house had returned to normal, and it was Gretchen could smell later when she returned home from work.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Once the house was relatively normal again, I went outside and dragged the fawn a bit further from the house so Neville wouldn't be doing his antisocial guarding routine right in the walkway. Then I addressed a few items on my honey-do list, including adding drainage to some rail-mounted flower pots and using an angle grinder to finally cut down the ugly rusting basketball hoop on the side of our driveway that nobody has used in at least fifteen years. Then I went inside and made dinner. I cooked up some rice in the Instant Pot and fried up a pan of onions, tofu, and mushrooms to which I added some bok choy I'd overcooked with garlic, vinegar, and water in a cast iron skillet. The combination made for a simple stir fry that was surprisingly good. A nice side effect of all that cooking was that the cooking smells somewhat elbowed aside the stench of the fawn corpse.
Meanwhile Charlotte was terribly confused. Neville wouldn't allow her to come near the fawn and was acting unusually mean (since he was not himself). So she responded by sitting in the yard and barking constantly. I was ignoring this while I was cooking and then some random woman showed up at the door to say Charlotte had been in the road again, something she does when she's acting out.
Before Gretchen got home, I dragged the fawn corpse to the top of the rocky knoll south of the house and managed to hoist it into a tree. Unfortunately I couldn't get it very high given the trees and branches available, and Neville was able to leap at the corpse repeatedly and latch onto the legs with his teeth. Then he'd just hang there for a bit. Then he'd drop and do it all over again. It was ridiculous.
After dinner, I saw that Neville had given up on the fawn and was done being Mr. Hyde. He'd come into the house and was lying there on the floor looking exhausted. So Gretchen closed the door and I snuck out through the garage to deal with the fawn corpse. The thing was heavy, maybe thirty pounds, and it was oozing fluids and maggots, so there was no way I was going to carry it. Instead I dragged it through the forest for a quarter mile or so westward like Hector's body around Troy until I got to the large bluestone boulders southwest of A's house. Charlotte was following me as I did this, but she was actually a little frightened of the dead fawn. She'd sniff it a little and then when I'd resume dragging it, she'd startle. Atop one of those bluestone boulders is where I'd put Charles the Cat's corpse back in 2020, since it seemed like a good way to keep it from being gotten into by our dogs. I put the fawn atop the very same boulder, where there's a little stone wall that I'd originally built to better contain and conceal Charles. (There hasn't been a trace of Charles evident since shortly after I laid him there.) All that dragging had removed most of the fur from the fawn's face and shoulders.
Back at the house, I took a much-deserved bath. The evening was fairly cool, which make a hot bath all the more welcome.
The plant I thought might be a lily but which was probably a broadleaf sedge.
Click to enlarge.
Neville in Mr. Hyde mode with the decomposing fawn corpse in the living room.
Click to enlarge.
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