I am with my mother when I die. I can see her looking back at me, eyes reflecting in the dark, white tail beckoning, but there is a light, strange double pointed and growing brighter. It feels fey, unnatural and I freeze - watching it - wondering what it could be. There is no indication of movement that might make me bound away, only a roaring which seems to come from everywhere at once. Only lights that grow larger.
I am a young doe. Still nursing but not very much. I have tasted fresh huckleberries and long for more. I do not yet know the abundance of apples or the hardship of winter. This is my first year. Next year, my body tells me, I will grow fat and mate and have a fawn of my own, but it is not yet that time. I am still in wonder of the world, a jumbled mess of instinct and instruction. My mother walks the ancient paths and I follow, learning.
But nothing in instinct or learning teaches me about this thing. It hits me so fast I don’t know I’m dead. I am flung sideways, my spine severed. I lose all sense of my body then, and don’t notice my leg splintering, as I skid off the side of the road. I try and move, follow my mother who is bounding off, but I can’t. My brain takes minutes to lose full consciousness, using up the last of my oxygen in fear and imagined pain.
A raven comes and pecks out my eyes so that I can see the end of the sunrise through hers. The flies come and rejoice in me, buzzing their excitement at my death and laying so many eggs across my body that soon my entire skin begins to crawl. I feel fuzzy, buzzing from place to place and wriggling deeper into my meat.
The metal instruments of my destruction speed by. I feel the occasional blink of attention, maybe a moment of sadness and then it is gone. No one stops. No one cares. I bake in the ditch. A coyote comes and sniffs me but she is wise to the death that lurks in this place and after lapping some blood she leaves. For three days I cook, buzzing, squirming, in the late July sun.
Then one passes with more than a moment’s attention. Animals know when they are being looked at, and I know it still. Then, hours later, a man comes looking for me.
He comes to me, and drags me down the side of the road, angry at every car that passes, and then loads me into his own, wrapping me in a big blue plastic tarp. The flies mutter at him. The maggots squirm in unending ecstacy, and I begin to travel again.
It’s hard to be at a wedding right now, and stupidly I didn’t bring my aids. No animal hide to hide behind, scraping to scrape away my shyness - inviting questions and answers. No mending to sew, or boffer swords to entertain. I eat for as long as I can, dance where I can, and talk as others initiate, conversations always bending towards my own relational endings.
Finally, walking past the yurt, a familiar voice calls out to me. “Pan! Do you want to come have a pillow fight with us?” - I turn and enter, grateful for the invitation.
The kids fluctuate and I find it helpful that I am here. No we are not going to pillow fight with the metal filled backrests. No we are not going to throw punches, kicks, or teeth into the fray. When someone says stop and starts to cry we don’t keep pummeling them. I forget how brutal children can be - left to their own devices.
But I am a teacher and soon we are playing a fishing game that morphs its way through each being a fish, caught and then escaping, then each getting filleted and cooked, the fire simulated through shaking their whole body, and finally into piranhas helping the fisherman round up fish in trade for salmon sushi.
“Who’s dad are you?” a child asks.
“No one’s.” I say
“You don’t have a son?” another boy inquires.
“No,” I say.
“But - I’m your son!” The little boy who invited me in says in clear indignation. News to me.
“Who’s your father?” a little girl asks one of the boys. “Oh I have lots of fathers,” he says proudly. “Lots and lots.”
Later I walk past Euryale putting her son to sleep, and for the second time today he calls after me. “Pan! - Will you come sit with us?” I come and sit, begin reading a book to him, but the energy is wedding wild and sleep is not easy. Raguel comes and before we know it we’re all snuggled under a comforter. It feels good. I don’t know how touch starved I am until I’m here.
Being me, I talk about hides and meat and Raguel murmurs in the tides of conversation that she’s calling in a fawn. “Not,” she adds, “That I’m manifesting a fawn’s death. I just want to be there when one dies.”
He pulls me out and covers me with the tarp for a time, the flies of this place still find me, rejoicing in the stink of me. There’s reluctance in him as he cuts behind the tendons of my legs and slides my legs apart across a metal gambril. Then I am hanging as I never hung in life, as if I had jumped and never come down.
He begins with my legs, sliding cool metal under my skin and cutting away from the meat, pausing now and again to shake maggots off his hands, or wash in the bucket beneath. My guts are busted and as he peels my skin down past my stomach my intestines come tumbling out. He tries, unsuccessfully, to stuff them back into my belly, three times with hands wrapping and wrangling my guts, turning them as they ought to have been turned when I saw my first buck or smelled the death that is cougar’s kin.
Finally, giving up, he hoists me higher, and slipping his hands around my back peels my skin down until he can pull down my belly in one quick yank. The flies have been so industrious here, laying eggs upon eggs until they have calcified into an external sternum, and as he yanks, a shower of maggots fly on him. He spits several times. Some visceral revulsion for my ecstatic wriggling friends making him unable to stand them on his skin as they crawl across mine.
My skin comes off easily from there, the flies swarm and the stink endures, but my hide is thicker around the neck in the wisdom of my tribe, keeping wolves and wild cats honest in their attempts to bite our necks, and here it has kept my meat a little cooler. My severed head comes off with the rest of my hide.
He takes my body down now. A raven has come to watch and takes wing as he begins pulling it towards the lack of forest to our east. He caws three sharp raven calls, and leaves me there in the absence of trees among hawksbeard and thistle doing its best to heal the broken land. Beside me lie a raccoon and two possums, all three unskinned and a little mummified by their time on hot concrete. Their maggots wriggle at mine, and I am glad of the company of larger things.
Soon the ravens descend and begin picking me apart, grateful for my skin’s absence. When they have done their part the coyotes come, each dragging my bones to a different hidden place, where they crack them apart and give even my calcium to the clearcutt that drinks me like a thirsty animal, trying to grow as I grew until it too will be taken by metal things it has no names for.
I am glad, in the slow buzzing way that flies can be glad, in the cackling of ravens, and the bellies of coyotes - I am glad in the family of eagles that kick the ravens out and feast on me instead, I am glad in the beetles, worms, and mold, and rot that eventually take what’s left, I am glad that I am in familiar territory again.
My skin, head painstakingly peeled away, now sits soaking in the memory of fire. It is unfamiliar to me, but old, as old as all the rest. This fire cooked other deer, sauteed with onions and served on rice. This fire warmed late nights of laughing humans making ridiculous sounds back and forth, in the way of their kind.
Even as my body flies, and sinks underground, my hide sinks into another way of being. A human way. Informed by fire. The should-have-beens melt away with my fur, the maggots die, and I get slimy and certain that some unknown transformation is going to befall me.
Saturday is the day I deal with hides. It’s helpful to have a day. Others are invited but don’t always come, and today, after a slow sunlight strewn breakfast I make my way out to the tanning zone with its unalterable summer stink, and reach into the buckets of ash.
We’ve had five deer in the past two weeks. Today will bring our sixth. I pull out hides from buckets of ash and observe - Jullien has sat too long - he was a young buck hit on the 101 by discovery bay making his way North out of the mountains. He has more holes in his hide now than I would have hoped.
Osin is just about right, hair slipping and one layer of skin gelatinous but not punching through. Midnight - found at midnight the same day and processed by Yeshua until 6 in the morning - is also perfect.
Sin - processed with children on the first day of Hearthfire camp - a deer who, I’m really not sure how, took 12 hours to parse out good meat from bad, between teaching children anatomy and trying to command reverence as I let them feel what an eye, a tongue, fascia, and tendon all feel like - is not ready. I drop her hide back into the bucket remembering her lungs in my hands as I share the deep lessons of how the blood vessels in lungs look like trees, and we breathe back and forth. How they look like Usnea - a lung medicine. How they look like rivers, our bodies an echo of the wild world. We all look similar on the inside.
Buzz - named for the maggots that crawled across her body and occasionally made their way into my mouth, is ready and I pull her hide out. The maggots are blessedly dead, and I drape her over the scraping pole, pushing her hair off with my fingers. A few escapee chickens crowd around, snatching dead maggots out of the hair. When she is clean - a few holes but none in the center - I drape her over the roof of The Social Faux Pas - my car I have yet to actually give away and now serves to dry deer hides flat in the sun. Ready, I hope, for when Raguel comes by later today.
Osin and Midnight are next, fur falling to the ground easily and then stretching over a nearby water tank to dry.
I’m cleaning up my morning work when a car comes in. It’s Bleu and a friend and a dead deer they’ve picked up off Hastings. This will be Bleu’s second Saturday with me and I step straight into teacher mode, asking questions.
“What can you tell about how long this deer has been dead?” I ask. Bleu doesn’t remember and so I explain about fur slippage being the best indicator of meat going bad, and tug on the belly fur which holds solid. We note the lack of maggots, and the stiff body and decide - given that she was in full sun, that she’s been dead 4 - 8 hours.
“How do we hang her?” Bleu remembers this part. We each slit up a back leg behind the tendon and hang a leg over the gambril, then hoist, the leverage of pulley and rope easily bringing this deer up to easy working level. Together we gently make the cuts and slide our hands under her skin, peeling it off and away.
I invite Bleu's friend in now, a short dark cute young woman who I quickly learn is a traveler soon gone - and begin to flirt with less assiduously. She’s into it and soon has her hands under the skin, marveling at sensation, and delighted by the ease of it.
When we hit a bruise she’s amazed. “Why is there blood there but nowhere else?” She asks.
“That’s a bruise.” I explain.
“What?!” She exclaims. “That’s what a bruise looks like under my skin?”
“Yup,” I smile.
“Why is that blood over there blue?” Bleu asks.
“Non-oxygenated blood.”
We talk about fascia - nature’s saran wrap, and it’s preservative effects, and take our time. “Why don’t we hurry? Won’t the meat go bad?” The friend asks.
Bleu grins, “Can I answer?”
“Of course,” I smile, glad for the recall.
“Meat at the grocery store is super different from fresh meat. It’s been in cold storage for several months wrapped in plastic, and although the bacteria can’t reproduce very fast, they basically spend their time in cold storage getting ready - so when you put it on the counter it rots super fast.”
Bleu looks at me for confirmation. I nod. “Living meat has basically zero flesh eating bacteria in it,” I add. It actually takes a really long time for fresh meat to rot.
“Oh yeah!” Bleu adds. “Pan says that Carnivores rot faster, because their gut bacteria wants to eat them - whereas deer guts it’s mostly just the stomach acid. The bacteria just want to eat grass.”
We have the skin down to the armpits when two more show up. Lauren, a tanner of twenty years and man she introduces as her friend. I haven’t met her in person yet, and I’m delighted to meet like this. She jumps in, letting Bleu bring out a roadkill squirrel and begin working it, asking questions all the while. I answer where I can and enjoy watching Lauren and her friend’s hands - moving with such surety and ease.
“Have you ever used an air compressor?” He asks.
“No . . .” I say, curious.
“Just stick it under the skin and fwoosh. Whole hide right off.” He says.
I blink. “Wow,” I say.
Soon more come. Lauren shows us the needle hidden in every deer’s leg. Deer are usually tanned using their own brain, and I knew that they are often scraped using their own skapula, and sewn with their own tendons. Now I imagine sewing one with its own dewclaw needle.
By evening some have left and others remain. Joy, a bright eyed blond fairy of a woman, has come with a roadkill rabbit which Yeshua skins on a plastic tray on the kitchen table as the rest of us gnaw on ribs. We decided to name this deer Oz - short for “non-oxygenated blood” - it makes sense at the time.
When Yeshua wants to eat I take over, and it’s not long before the skin slips off, with only a few holes through his thin hide.
“How are you doing?” Joy asks the rabbit.
I slip my fingers up into his face, a finger in each ear, and twitch his ears and nose.
“Well - as far as being dead goes this isn’t bad,” I say in a creaky rabbit voice. “Glad somebody is eating me anyway.”
“Thank you so much for your body.” She says.
“Thank you so much for picking me up.” the rabbit says.
With much laughter and delight Jasper the magical rabbit makes his way from hand to hand, passing out lucky rabbit paws and changing character drastically from person to person.
Body scattered to the world I sink slowly into the gray of my remains. My bones gnawed on by coyotes, my hide laid atop the kind of creature that killed me. There is still no instinct that connects me to the car but in laying here I come to know a little of it. This creature, that revels in its speed and eats the bones of ancient horsetail, never sought to kill me. This thing, like me, has met fire, its skin came from deep beneath the earth, and it too comes to know its death, unsure if it will ever journey again. We sit together as my moisture leaves me for the sky..
It is the wind that sweeps me from my place. The man picks me up and puts me in a pile of more than 20 deer, all dry and crispy, whispering the translucent remains of what they once were. Identity slips from us here and we sink softly into the other things we might be.
A long time passes, moons ebb and flow and then I feel his hands on me again. He pushes me into a bucket again, moisture filling me with life - and something else. I begin to remember in little bits and flashes. When I am fully saturated he pulls me up and wraps me around a log and begins to spin. The moisture cascades down and out, squeezing and opening. He pulls me one way and then another and then back again, stretching me towards my original size.
When I’m mostly moisture free he dunks me again, letting me pull in more memory. Colors are coming back to me. The green of grass. The way sun looks on water. Tastes are next. Mothers milk. The crunch of apples.
They are not my memories I slowly discover. These are the memories of a large buck who lived near here. He, like me, was hit. Someone had stopped and harvested some of his meat, cutting into his back and sawing off his beautiful antlers, leaving the rest by the road to rot. The man who works me now retrieved him and has scooped out his mind and melted it with another creature - a much larger ruminant than us, slow and ponderous, living off grain and grass in the human realm.
But they are the memories of being alive - and I welcome them. The man takes me and stretches me, working me open, memories slipping between the fibers of my being and letting them move again. I remember the softness of laying in the sun. I remember the sound of birdsong. I remember the alertness of danger. I remember hunger. I remember a mother’s tongue. I remember the feeling of running. I remember fresh huckleberries. I remember.
The man pushes my hide open over a stake in the ground and then moves to a metal cable, moving around my edges. Slowly as he works the moisture starts to leave in the afternoon sun but the memories remain.
Layers flake off as he pushes and pulls. Things I had still been clinging to, the old defenses that served me in life, and aren’t needed now. He works and I am worked, finding in this memory of life, any life, the softness of myself. Becoming softer in each iteration. Transmuting myself into something else.
Finally, in the dark, finished by the heat of fire inside his home, I am all the way dry. He has kept me moving all day, each molecule of oil from these once living brains has made its way between each fiber of my skin. Sucked in by the memory of moisture, these thoughts held in fat have found a place in me. No longer the faded land of the dead, but vibrantly living velvet.
Raguel never comes for her hide. It sits in the pile, distinct because I kept the face intact among all the others I’ve lost track of.
One evening I decide my romantic relationship far enough extinguished to follow the draw of Raguel’s Onlyfans. Something I’ve known about for a while, but felt like going and looking at might be akin to cheating. Now though I feel like I can follow this thread.
I’ve had a crush on Raguel through college - a good ten years now, and I’ve always appreciated the opportunity to project rampantly on her. She checks all the boxes of my anima, but expresses herself enough it stretches sometimes. Mostly over the years we’ve danced in the same spaces, an even easier medium than instagram for imagining things about people.
I cautiously make an account, making sure nothing is in my name so she’ll never know, and navigate to go feed the fire. I immediately find most things of interest are behind a paywall and grumble a little. This isn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped.
There are some things though, and as I settle into the routine of clicking through videos and images and noticing what piques my own desire, I start to become conscious of the crackling feeling of projection sliding against reality. I love this feeling. It’s like picking off scabs. It’s a good sort of pain.
It seems that I was expecting intimacy. I expected to see her in a different way. Vulnerable. Instead I find the normal mask of desire and that ridiculous way women act that they think makes them attractive. What our culture thinks is desirable. Her come hither eyes stare at me from her come hither mask on the come hither screen - and it’s sexy - but it’s not intimate.
I’ve had so many more intimate encounters with Raguel dancing. Easy conversations in the sauna. Gods, I’ve felt more connected to her unguarded self listening in on a conversation or watching her play with Euryale's son. My entire relationship with pornography feels crackly suddenly. Unreal in a different way then I knew it wasn’t real.
And what can I do with my computer alone besides sit with myself in this feeling, and really try and feel it. I rub myself against it from all angles, seeing what preconceptions, habits or ideals I can slough off. Raguel becomes the stake and cable and I’m so glad I have the capacity to not hate her for it. Instead I grow softer.
The next day I pull Buzz off the pile and boil up some brains. Leftover cow with some new from a maltreated buck. As I work her, I keep working myself, working my mind as I work brains into her, until the edges I work myself against don’t feel sharp anymore, and I know I’ll have to find some other edge to soften myself against now.
Fire is life. Fat is memory. Skin is connection.
After Pan skinned me he put me in the memory of fire, then he filled me with the memory held in fat. Now he preserves me with the prayers of trees.
Soft and alive in a different way then I was when animated, I am draped across a dome made of sticks and surrounded by the pelts of others who died like me. Softly we connect. The raccoon who was so ready for winter. The possum Pan killed, lower spine broken, her ghost less present than the others. The mink, supple against me. We are soft and content and ready now.
Beneath us a fire smolders, smothered into excessive smoke. Like all ghosts, the ghosts of these trees want nothing more than to be dissipated upon the wind, but we surround the fire and the smoke has nowhere to go but through us. It passes between our newly open fibers, leaving traces of its prayers in a new yellow blessing. Cedar crackles beneath me, sweetening us with a grandmother’s gentle touch.
Smoke is a prayer, and I pray with it. I add my prayers that other young deer will live as I could not, and die in the ways I could not die. I pray that this cycle of honoring, using, stretching and softening may continue in its right way. I pray that the man who stands here now, softer than when he began will remember his instructions, and will pray to make them stick. I pray for a softening, a sinking deeper, dying, living, working, stretching. I pray that whoever wears me will walk a softer road.
And as with all prayers, it is the one who prays who changes.
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