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While I Was Sleeping: Death on the Farm
Well, TBPH, I didn’t sleep through it. I discovered, decades ago, that the reason I don’t get much sleep is not that I can’t get to sleep; it’s that I’m a very light sleeper, and everything wakes me up.
So last night, I was unsurprised to be awoken at 2:30 a.m. by a pack of yelping coyotes, obviously down the bottom of my field, making the sort of bone-chilling, “We Have A Kill!” racket that takes me back to my nights as a small child in Nigeria lying in bed and listening to the “laughing hyenas” outside. It’s different from the “howl,” a pack sound that’s often driven by the Claysville VFD siren, to which they respond in a sort of movie sing-along manner. (“The hills are alive, a-woo-woo-woo-w00,” etc.) These are primal, gleeful, bloodcurdling, screams.
Of course, I was too late. One of my black rams is dead. I’ll spare you the graphic here, although I’ll publish it elsewhere. There’s nothing left intact by now except his head; the vultures have been on the job since sunrise, and in another 24 hours, he’ll be picked clean. At some point thereafter, I’ll roll over him with the tractor and the brush hog, render him into smithereens, and return him to fertilize the fields on which he’s lived, eaten, and played for the past eight years. Anyone who finds that distasteful or odd probably hasn’t lived close to the land for a generation or two.
The neighbors are organizing. I’m not the only one who’s suffered such a loss in the past several days.
Pretty sure this will not stand and (in the ineffable words of Joe Biden), “they will pay.”
But in the meantime, my guys and gals will be locked in the barn at sundown.
That’s top-of-mind in my world at the moment.
You?
Published in General
BLACK Indigenous RAM of Color
I guess this post is why I’ve been seeing this in my youtube recommendations recently:
In the last 24 hours? No idea. It’s certainly not in mine.
Actually for a few days, maybe a week. No idea why. But you wrote the post, that was your job. My job was adding the video. :-)
I didn’t mean cause-and-effect, more like… kismet? something.
I had to chase a big coyote off my front lawn this morning. When I left for work hours later it was back, and gave me a dirty look when I hollered again at it.
We used to see them years ago; always at dawn or dusk and they looked mangy. The ones I see now are in the middle of the day, bold as brass, and look very well fed.
You’re not chasing it off with the fright calibre.
In many even suburban areas now, it’s illegal to “discharge a firearm” under such circumstances.