Anatomy Trains

For one day, the weather finally clears in Oslo, and in the lingering evening from my tiny 15th floor balcony (reminiscent of a hot-air balloon basket – I have the sickening feeling that my evil twin is going to grab my body, leap to the railing and jump wildly for the waterfall) I can finally see more than the pounding spray below me. A sliver of cupped moonlight follows the sun to bed, and far to my left, the harbor – I didn’t know I had a sea view until this moment - reflects the last orange of the daylight.

By tomorrow, according to CNN, it will be cold rain again, and Patreus and Crocker will be tossed softballs by Congress for an easy hit into more war, more lives lost, more disruption for the poor people who were unlucky enough to be in Dick Cheney’s way. The way they got this war started – Rummy and Cheney and Perles and Wolfowitz – that’s got to be a form of cheating? It is hard to keep going sometimes, having faith that the political and the environmental degradation will not overwhelm this human experiment before the work that we do – preparing the next generation of children for this 21st century world - has a chance to take hold.

Each day I travel down the hill to the class in the town center on a five-minute tram ride. The ticket is 30 kr., about $6. No one checks whether you have a ticket,. My American sensibility suggests that $12/day is a bit much, and for reasons too complicated to explain, I have trouble getting Norwegian cash. In any case, I confess to jumping on and off again without a ticket some mornings.

The ethic that we grew up with in the hippie era – it’s ok to stick it to ‘the man’, including the phone company, the government, or anyone corporate, while maintaining a high personal ethic with our fellow individuals. (Supposedly – in fact we were sexist in our treatment of both women and gays.)

Nowadays, this kind of petty cheating is very rare for me – this one was remarkable for its appearance. Nobody wants to pay more taxes than they have to, so that’s simply a form of disguise. But not only can I afford the things I used to rationalize cheating on, but decades have shown me the humans in the corporations – and of course I have a few of those corporations myself these days. I still think ‘the people’ are getting screwed, but the sharply-drawn blacks and whites have all gone for the gray wash like those a friend showed me on some drawings in a museum in Edinburgh.

I have spent nearly $1300 replacing 2 shirts, 2 pairs of pants (a shirt has two sleeves, but it’s not a pair of shirts – why is that?), underwear, and a belt and a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo – and not even high quality clothes. Surely that’s enough? Doesn’t that justify some cheating? But what does the Oslo Transit Authority have to do with British Airways?

In some form of poetry, British Airways coughs up my suitcase in my literal last hour in Oslo – I collect it and drop it onto my flight to Munich. BA offers to pay me £35 ($70) for having lost my luggage – surely that’s a form of cheating? Not even worth filing for, as it will take more time than it’s worth.

As the plane peels out over the rugged and extraordinary coast, I contemplate what constitutes cheating, and rapidly move from the convoluted but navigable pathways of the mind to the wild and stormy uncharted domain of the heart.

I recently had to tell a good friend that he hadn’t made the cut for a team. From the brain’s point of view, it was a straightforward call, but my heart – my compassion and my fear all mixed up – blew the communication, and the friendship was shot out of the sky. I never did team sports as a kid, and I guess I missed out on how to do these things kindly but quickly and clearly.

More recently still, I had to tell another friend - who was much younger emotionally than I ever suspected – that her fantasies about our ‘deep connection’ were just that. This was a blow, as I had thought I had a good friend, with none of the clutter that can gum up the easiest cross-gender friendship (at least in my generation – Misty seems immune to the problem and has equal friends in both genders). But the empathy and charm I use to create the bonds of friendship is all too easily mistaken for seduction, so - all unintended – I was the cheat. I must be so careful, and I hate having to be so watchful, so closed-hearted, so vigilant. Must I so close my heart to live as I am in this world?

But: Thou shalt not commit pain.

And I did.

My dear, sweet, infirm and insane wife understands the pathways of the heart better than anyone I know. A lot of good it has done her (not). Some people ‘get’ her and celebrate her wisdom, some (like my family) see only the surface and shake their heads in disbelief that I am with her, and gloriously happy with her, despite our differences, despite the frustrations, despite the fact that in learning her, I have committed pain.

The human heart is minefield, a battlefield, a stormy ocean, and a nightmare of phantasms all rolled into one. Of course it’s an Alpine meadow, a calm Aegean sea, and an exhilarating flying dream as well. Right now, though, with my body breaking down and my mind running on fumes from too much travel and too little reflective time, my heart and everyone else’s seems terra incognita, ultima thule, one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

I look forward to time off the road, out of this plane, in the arms of the one who sets straight the paths, calms the storms, and sorts the complexities out in simple, direct, and refreshingly earthy terms. Quan, I celebrate you.

Following on from the reign of death, dead rabbits continued to show up after I left for another teaching round. Each morning Quan would find another one – throat gaping, neck eaten. The poor woman was sleepless each night waiting for some noise to tell her it was happening, and afraid to go feed them in the morning for fear of whom she’d find. The first Trapper Joe was convinced that it was a weasel, showing Quan weasel hair caught on the edge of the fence. He spread the kitchen table with dangerous looking killer traps, and showed Quan how to set them, using one of the dead rabbits as bait – another instance where we have had to cut up one friend to save another. What kinds of lessons are these?

The traps were set outside the rabbitat, with one Have-a-Heart inside, and some leg-hole traps on the top of the fence in likely places. Nothing got in the traps, but another rabbit – Quill, poor thing – was decapitated in the morning. The first trapper came and took his traps away, partially because no predator was being caught, and partially because he was afraid of being fined, since this story was all around our little town and he didn’t have a license. The second trapper – also named Joe – was an old geezer who put out large Have-a-Heart traps with stinky codfish and salmon heads as bait, but these traps did nothing either.

The next morning, Louise didn’t come out to eat, and Quan saw her legs sticking out from under the hutch. She reached into the closed area under the hutch to draw Louise out, only to discover that she was in the clutches of a barred owl, who had dragged her under the hutch to eat her. The owl hissed at Quan, keeping her claws on the rabbit – “This is mine!” Quan had a moment – the owl was only couple of feet from her face – but fascination trumped fear. The owl was on top of the rabbit, with a pile of what Quan took to be feathers – and thinking the owl must be hurt, and she called everyone – vets, Avian Haven, and animal control to try to get some advice. The best advice was to throw a towel over her and bring her in. Dubious that this plan sounded better in theory than it would work out in practice, she sought help and went back out.

With George on the camera, and our young friend Peter in his long rubber oystering gloves holding the towel, Quan slowly dragged out the rabbit. But the owl wasn’t going to let go of her meal. Nor was she hurt – the ‘feathers’ turned out to be a pile of rabbit fur she had pecked off - and as soon as the owl cleared the hutch into the open, she abandoned her catch and took off over their heads before any towel could be thrown – silently, totally silently. The owl hung around on a branch for about ten minutes, to see if he was going to get dinner back, and then flew off without a sound.

Awed, Quan took Louise and left her on the top of the shed as an offering, but the owl never came back. She then put him out on a stump near the pond, but a coyote – judging by the tracks next day – took her away. What was left of the previous rabbits, at least the ones not cut up for bait, we had taken out of the rabbitat and left for the fox that is struggling for his living under the barn up on the hill.

The next morning one of Quan’s dutchies was dead – same thing, throat opened, head partially eaten. Still unsure whether the owl was the cause of the deaths or just picking up after the weasel, Quan gathered everyone she could and started putting the bunnies in a makeshift protective fence. The bunnies hated this and were tearing around, injuring themselves and fighting horribly. When a bunch of them poured (gratefully) though a hole in the fence back into the main unprotected body of the rabbitat, Quan gave up and broke down, saying, “OK, abort this project. I give up.” Everyone left – it was bitter cold – and Quan took the little dutchie back to where it was killed, and left it as an offering to the owl.

Quan’s project with the rabbits has always struck me as a little metaphor for man’s dominion over the beasts. On the one hand, she has striven for a ‘natural’ habitat for the rabbits where they can be free and have running room and make their own relationships etc. On the other hand, it ain’t natural for domestic rabbits to be outside in such concentrated numbers. We have been lucky up until now, but this year we have had more disease of unknown derivation, and now predation, which is about as natural as it gets. But of course Quan loves each rabbit like a pet, so finding one with its throat torn out each morning was a little too much naturalness, and she felt as if she was just serving up dinner, putting her little charges in harm’s way. It’s a recipe for craziness, and in my phone calls with Quan these nights, I reckoned she was darn near ready for the men in the white van.

On the third hand, we both felt that feeding an owl was somehow different from having these rabbits taken by a sneaky weasel. The owls have been particularly hungry and deprived this year because of the early snows and declining vole population up in Canada. When I am skiing in the woods, I see fewer tracks this year – of everything – then any other year we have been here. So the owl is coming to where the food is.

And here’s the part that makes this worth an entry to this blog: the offering was accepted. Each night the owl comes down and eats a bit of the frozen dutchie. No more rabbits have been taken. It’s just a small owl, and couldn’t lift the rabbits to take them with him. We, thinking the weasel had just randomly killed and drunk the blood, took each rabbit out of the rabbitat to give them to the fox, who is also hungry in this bleak winter landscape.

The owl left the rabbit each time because they were too heavy for the small owl to fly away with. We were taking the rabbits out of the rabbitat for obvious reasons. So the owl killed each night. But once she left the rabbit there, the owl – not a wanton killer like the weasels or fishers – returned only for what he needed - a bit of the rabbit each day was enough. So Quan has learned from this of the measure of nature – “I should have just left each rabbit in place, so the owl could feed, and I wouldn’t have been losing a rabbit each night.’

Which brings us to this morning:

Once again, Quan saw the legs sticking out from under a hutch, and sure enough, there was poor little Minouche, the next to die under the talons of the owl. I bent down and looked in – the owl had small but needle-sharp talons, and the strangest face, like the dwarf in ‘Don’t Look Now”, orange-eyed, yellow-beaked, the feathers laid away from his features to make a very clean Italian ‘commedia del arte’ face, wise and witchy and full of arcane knowledge – you can see how they got their rep.

We went and got a cat carrier, and put the open door over the space where the owl was, and slowly started sliding the hutch away from him. He flew / walked right into the cage, hissing and growling, but a quick snap of the door and he was trapped. I put him in the trunk of the car, along with the cold and very dead Minouche. They said 20 miles, so I drove him up the river to Head Tide. Along the way, I stopped for coffee and our friend who works at the bookstore said he would love an owl at his barn, which is overrun with pigeons (‘rats with wings’, say the New Yorkers).

At the barn, I took him out of the car and over to the corner of the barn. I took out the rabbit and placed it in front of the cage. I told him we wished him no harm, that he could have Minouche, and we were sorry to displace him, but having the rabbits for dinner wasn’t part of the program. He was welcome to the pigeons, I said, and I hoped he would find this a good home. With gloves on, I opened the door and he lost no time in stepping out and into flight – so silent, so assured. His body was maybe a foot long, his wingspan near two feet. He flew to nearby apple tree, and stood regarding me. As I turned to pick up the cage, he flew off to a copse of trees at the edge of the field. May he find peace and another lunch – and I am glad we did not need to hurt him in any other way.

So now we see whether this was it – the single owl, not a weasel, caused all this havoc. Whatever the outcome, Quan is determined to downsize – too many rabbits to save in this world, too much angst.

As Mary Oliver (The Journey) says:

… there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company as you strode
deeper and deeper into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Rain in January is not a good sign in Maine.  It never happened when I was a kid, but now global warming throws these Cape Cod storms up across our coast as wetness, not as the sere white anger of winter snow.  Snow – usually a constant from December to April - is our dues to death, the sparkling white blanket that keeps Death at bay in the dark and the cold.  But even though we’ve had some snow this January, we’ve had more sleet and rain on its edge than we ought.  And these have been the rains of death, for each day the Grim Reaper walks outside the door.

It’s been a year for it, ever since last February we have been losing cats – Leyden, Gandhi, Sweetie - and rabbits – Gracie, Isaac, Thelma and a dozen others - with the death of Dakota crowning these Saturnian jewels.  But it didn’t stop at New Year; Quan and Lea had to kill a rabbit by hand to stop its ongoing squeal of suffering while I was in Japan.

And then just after I got back my old cat, Angie, lost it totally, shitting and pissing everywhere on the downstairs furniture.  She had been having ‘accidents’ over the last year, but this was wanton and just totally addlepated (not malicious). I called the vet to explore how it works, and she was available that very hour, so the time came upon me quickly and without preparation.

Before she came, I asked Angie if she was ready to go; she leaned into my hand – yes.  I asked her if she meant it, spelling out what ‘ready to go’ meant and she leaned in with more – yes, please.  I looked her in the eye, and she looked right back – yes, again.

When the vet came, she started at the smell, but quickly settled right back into my lap.  She hardly noticed the prick of the ketamine, even though her back legs are nearly without muscle.  The sodium pentathol looked like some blue Amway cleaner in the syringe, and this was the moment – she could come back from the wide-eyed dissociation of the K, but she would not be coming back from the pentathol.  She snuggled in closer, and Dr Welch took a limp leg and sprayed it to find a vein.

Quietly, quickly she was gone, a transition as smooth as a Mercedes, curled in my lap the whole time.  Even though she consented, even though it was peaceful, I am stricken to the core and leaden with playing God.  Even God has farmed this harvesting out to the Grim Reaper, and I have just killed my cat, my companion of bed a fire for 16 years.

Quan has suggested out by Dakota, but in dying Angie told me that’s too far from the house – too far from the fire was how she put it.  So I wrap her in her burial towel – she peed on me and the couch one more time in death, as a last laugh – and take her out among the fruit trees by the garden where she played.  The ground is not at all frozen, and the brown dirt mixes with the half a foot of white snow atop it.  Annie comes over and we mark her with a rock.

Angie was Quan’s first gift to me, first animal gift, before we were lovers even.  She said if you have a child you must have an animal, and instead she came by and left me two, and Misty named them – Angelina and Josefina.  Josefina was the more independent, and was taken by a fisher cat weasel shortly after we moved here, but Angelina – ever the lover of the warm fire and the close to home – stayed with us inside, loving me and Misty as special, and Quan for her everyday thereness.

This is so hard, to have to send her.  Why could she not just die on her own?  I resent Quan for telling me it’s time, but I know it is, she has been pleasantly senile and AWOL for some time, but I have resisted.  But now I stand with a dirty shovel, holding the reins of death.

With our two closest animals gone – Dakota and Angie – surely that’s the end?  But no, yesterday morning Quan found Cocoa Puff, out in the rabbitat with his throat neatly torn out down to the cervical bones, the blood sucked out of him.  A weasel eats like this – a dog or fox or coyote goes for the meat, a bird pecks, but this is quick and dirty work, and there is no blood on the ground beside her.

So, after ten lucky years, a predator has found his way into the rabbitat.  We lost two to dogs way back in the beginning in Scarborough, and we have lost a few periodically to disease, and a lot this past year to various ailments and old age.  But never have we had the rampant predator within the stockade.  Quan is so discouraged – her experiment in creating safety for the innocent and scared, her attempt to externalize her wounded inner child – is lying in ruins in the grey-lit January morning.

A weasel can get in the smallest hole – we track around the enclosure, looking for any gap in the chicken wire.  We cannot find one, but we’re not sure that’s how he (she?) is getting in anyway, and they are so slinky they can get through the tiniest hole or maybe over top via the trees? – who knows.

And sure enough, this morning there is another one for Quan to find, her white fur coated crimson, the head loose, the now-familiar anatomy of the tubes in the throat.  There is only one way to get it, and that is to trap the fucker.  As I leave on yet another trip for work, Quan has regained the tread of the determined and is set to find a trapper to stop this reign of death.

The center of our little compound is the horses. There are a hundred rabbits, 7 cats, a couple of dogs - but the horses are the largest mammals about, and they require someone to be there every day, and a lot of care and feeding. They give and take a lot of love; they’re all heart.

The call came through about noon. Misty and I were in town shopping for Christmas as the latest snow fell around us. Tammy was on the phone, “Are you driving?” “No.” “Donna just called, hysterical, Dakota is dead.” Misty and I flew back to the car and took off home. As we pulled into the drive, we saw everyone on hand - Annie and John and Donna and George and Tammy, all standing in that hunched and forward way that earnest people assume in the wake of a tragedy about which they can do nothing - gathered around a large mound of brown in the sea of white that is Maine this Christmas. Dakota, fallen.

Fallen in a decisive way - he went right over sideways into the fence and took one of the paddock’s posts with him. Donna thought he had impaled himself on it, but it is not even broken under him, no blood, no injury. In fact, all signs were that he just keeled over standing, making a snow angel impression of a horse. There are no signs of a struggle, not from his legs, not from his head. Baffled and crazed, I picked up his head - rigor had not set in yet - and his neck movement felt normal. There were no signs of excess salivation or foaming at the mouth, nothing in his throat. His ears were up, his eye open and clear, his stomach still gurgling and beginning to bulge - but he is gone, solid gone, no trace of him anywhere around. He had defecated after he had fallen, but that seemed normal enough. Neither his poop or his mouth smelled strange.

And yet Donna, Annie and John had seen the three of them cavorting around the paddock and pasture, tossing their heads, kicking up snow and really racing, spirited enough to call all three to the window to look. Literally minutes later, Donna went across to give them some hay; there was Dakota and the broken fence and the hell of an afternoon began.

First the three of them, then George and Tammy came up from the office, then me and Misty.

Quan came home shortly after, direct from a deep osteopathic treatment - she’s been poorly, and now this. I sprint to the truck as she turns in to break the news so she can take it in slowly, and after the first wave of shock she lies with her head on Dakota’s, but as with the rest of us it is no use - as alive as he looks, he is gone.

We’ve been having some trouble over a horse with a neighbor (long story) and he had made an indirect threat against our horses a couple of months ago, and then this week she dreamed about him in war paint, so Quan’s natural and immediate tendency in her initial keening is to think of poisoning. But there were no signs of it. Dakota was 19 or 20, had goodly years left. Donna said he coughed sometimes after a good workout, perhaps a sign of underlying heart trouble, but nothing definite. The manner of his death suggests a heart attack or stroke, not poisoning.

Camelot and Celebrity each take it differently. Cammie keeps coming over and nudging Dakota and biting his side, as if to say, “Joke’s over. Git on up, now.” Celebrity turns his rear end to Dakota, clearly upset. After a few minutes, Celebrity goes down on his knees and then to his side and starts to loll and roll. My God, it’s like 9/11, we now have a second horse going down. The call goes out to Wendy at the hospital, and she is out of the OR in minutes and here with her precious CB.

Wendy, who spends half her time in Hawaii for her husband and her play, and half her time here in frozen Maine for her work and her horse, is alternately professionally stoic and brimming with tears. CB (Celebrity’s nickname) is back in the stall, head down, eyes at half-mast, clearly out of it, circling the stall like a dog circling for a nap, and then backing into the wall and tucking his pelvis under, lifting his leg to ease his belly pain. Poisoning comes back to the fore in our thinking.

Wendy talks to animals, and CB keeps telling her, “I killed Dakota.” CB had a little blood coming out of his nose, and there was a little blood - a few drops - on the snow just in front of where Dakota’s head would have been just before he fell sideways - but there is no blood coming from Dakota, not his mouth, not anywhere. What credence I can give to Wendy’s animal conversation I put in the category of child psychology: horses are 3-year-olds, and most 3-year-olds think that anything that happens - a fight, a divorce, a death - is their fault, they caused it somehow. So if CB feels guilty, it is probably just the egocentrism of a child. We do consider whether the two of them could have butted heads hard enough in their cavorting to kill Dakota, but who has ever heard of such a thing? And the corner of the paddock fence where he died would have been a hard place to get much momentum going.

The rest of the afternoon is a melange of images - I’m not sure of the sequence - handing off phones, checking the grain for poison and the hay for mold, running to house for water, vet numbers, tea, warmth, back and forth between the dead and the living horse, between the stunned and the grimly determined people. Aside from the first few minutes of hysteria, and the moments of crisis with CB, there is just the heavy-headed tunnel vision of grief - do what’s next, what needs to be done. There is nothing we can do for Dakota, so we cover him with a tarp in the gloom, and all our attention goes to CB.

The kindly vet arrives after the early dark drops over us. The stethoscope to the flank, checking his lips, taking some blood from a vein as large as a garden hose - even I could do that one, I think. She decides he’s colicking, and proceeds to sedate him, and then feed a large surgical tube up his nose and down his throat as he’s standing there - 6′ or more of it, blowing in the other end as she feeds it in to open the esophagus before her. Once it is in his stomach, she pumps warm water and mineral oil down the tube, so grease the way. I try doing some gentle visceral on him, but his cecum, she says, is 6′ long, and the tie up could be there or in the small intestines.

He needs to stay upright, if he lies and rolls in his pain, he could twist his intestines further and die in extreme agony. Wendy sets herself up for a night in the barn- she’s a nurse, she’s used to pulling all-nighters. By now it’s about 10 degrees (-12 Celsius) and everyone is dog tired. We go out and take the tarp off Dakota and the vet examines him in the frozen, ‘Fargo’-like atmosphere of a couple of flashlights bouncing their light off the snow. She looks at his lips and gums, smells his poop, and attempts to get urine for a poison test to put Quan’s mind at rest, but we can’t get enough. It’s enough that he’s dead, I say, gathering her in.

Later, the vet calls back with CB’s blood test results - could be poison, could be ulcers, creatinine enzymes up, albumen down, something else - but in any case we are shoved back into uncertainty. Last to show up is Lea, horse whisperer and bodyworker, who checks CB out and says, “He thinks it’s his fault. It’s his stomach or liver that wonky.” Seems to fit with the tests, but we are still in uncertainty. She goes out to Dakota and pulls back the tarp and puts her hand on him for a minute, chuckles - I thought she was crying, but - and says, “It happened so fast, I don’t know what happened” she is quoting Dakota, “Something exploded in my chest, then I felt it draw in in my hind end, and then I was gone.”

Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s devastation, a friend gone, can’t count on anything, never too early to say goodbye, life’s impermanence, and what to do with 1500 pounds of frozen horse flesh? Somebody’s called Toby, and he’ll be over tomorrow with his excavator. Wendy’s on a mattress in the barn watching over CB, Donna and Quan are emotional pulp, and all of us fall to our beds and what sleep may come.

My friend, our horse. Sort of - really he was Quan’s - she almost literally birthed him, as his mother Sonoita rejected him, and the vet had to knock her out so Quan could lift him to the teat, so that it was Quan’s smell and Quan’s face he bonded to as he took his first nourishment. Inseparable they were in the first days of our relationship - what a thrill it was to see the two of them flying down the beach, sand flying behind them, their movements so synchronized that they moved as one animal, one mind, one heart. He would come out of a herd at her whistle, head up and mane flying, ready to play. He even put up with me bouncing around on top of his awkward trot from time to time.

But after Quan’s closed-head brain injury, we had to get her a smoother-gaited horse, and Camelot the Tennessee Walker became Quan’s horse, and Dakota was ridden by Donna (more often) and I (occasionally). At her urging, I rode him for the last time just the other day - I guess I was the last one to ride him, throwing snow behind us as we galloped (believe me, I was trying to slow him to a trot, but he was full of oats) out to the point. After these many years, I don’t have the same strength or agility, but I’ve gained a little seat, and feel our centers move with each other - or at least know when they are not. Oh, I will miss him, chestnut brown, half quarter horse, half standard bred, probably the worst of each but we loved him dear and will miss him sore.

————————————————————

That was yesterday. Today we all woke up to the new reality of life without Dakota. I turfed out about 6:30 and went to the barn. The orange rising sun was bouncing off the crystalline snow - a perfect Maine winter day. I figured if the worst had happened and CB had died, I would have heard about it. Wendy had left at 6am, a note says: CB looking ok. I give him 1/2 cup of oats, and he eats, drinks, and farts with relish. Not wanting to awaken Quan, I tromp off through the woods, but the snow is too deep, so I end up by the water, taking the outboard off my dad’s scow, Marisco, and setting it upright for it’s long winter sleep, and then poling the boat over to the ways and trigging it. It’s a concentration job, taking my mind off it all, keeping my footing by the water with all the snow and ice.

Returning to the house, things start to happen fast. Quan goes to find the excavator, because the (other) vet who is to do the necropsy is coming soon. Toby’s brother Sean (Eileen’s new boyfriend - Maine is a small town) shows up with the excavator. He takes off through the fence to the crest of the field, where another horse, Duster, was buried years ago. I know that on that little ridge, at least, there is enough soil to bury a horse - the rest of this land being not far from sod to solid granite ledge. The backhoe is like an extension of his hand, and soon there is a 10′ x 10′ hole - only the top 6″ or so of topsoil is frozen, and he breaks through that easily.

Then he creeps the treads back through the snow to Dakota’s body. We scrabble around under the snow to find some space under him and pass a chain around his chest. This morning he looks really dead - legs splayed with bloat, the eyeball frozen opaque. Sean gently lifts the backhoe’s arm, and - Christ, it’s strong - the horse comes all the way up, as if in a sling, so the huge animal is carried in the air like a returning Achilles, not dragged over the ground like a vanquished Hector. Over the road - no traffic this Christmas Friday, though the whole operation does draw stares from the few passers-by - by the pond to his final resting place.

Sean lays him down by the hole, just in time for the vet. The vet wants him in the hole, so with as much care as if it was his own hand, Sean lays Dakota down on hs side in his grave. Me and young Sara, open face and blue eyes, a cover-all and rubber gloves up over her elbows, clamber down in with our equipment. Sean, John, Misty, and Donna watch from the rim above us; Wendy and Quan have opted out.

Sara starts with a mid-abdomen slice along the linea alba, layer by layer, ever so careful not to cut the intestines themselves open. There is a rush of foetid, farty air as the peritoneal cavity is breeched, and the cecum - 6′ long indeed and as big around as a gallon of paint - billows out onto the clay. But everything we find looks perfectly healthy in the small and large intestine - no twists, no necrosis, no discoloration, no sign of poisoning. The wind takes the smell away, and we are quite comfy - down in the hole, out of the wind, but with the smell Venturied away off the top.

We reflect the abdominal layers up toward the spine, and then use branch loppers to crunch and splinter horribly through the ribs just lateral to the spine. I don’t look up while I am doing this, knowing the sounds are as bad as the sights in these things, and remembering my first anatomy teacher and his sadistic delight in scaring the neophytes when he carved the chest of our first cadaver with a carpet knife, and ripped the ‘breastplate’ off with an unforgettable sound, sending students rushing for the lav and the sinks. Now we can see the lean, tuna-red horsemeat, including whatever passes for a trap or lat that the saddle rests on and I was pressing into with my knees not 4 days before.

The loppers and the scalpel alternate with a serrated knife because of all his winter fur, but finally we are able to reflect the whole side of ribs from scapula to hip so we can see the chest and abdominal cavity. The general cause of death is immediately visible - everything above the diaphragm is literally swimming in blood. I literally have to take a jar to bail liters and liters of still-warm (!) but coagulating blood from the chest cavity (Sara thinks they have 50 total, but she’s not sure), until we have emptied it enough to see and disconnect the spongy lungs at the hilum and expose the pericardium. The pool of blood I have emptied is literally around my feet, coating the bottom of the hole.

I know, it’s a friend, but he’s a carcass now, and Sara and I are well and truly into it, trading horse and human terminology back and forth as we play the CSI number of following the clues. The lungs are clean and clear. We bisect the aorta - smooth and open. We carefully detach and take out the heart - it’s as big as my head and looks very healthy. Nevertheless, here we find it: the pulmonary artery, just outside the right ventricle on its way to the heart, has given out - hemoraghic signs are all there. It could be just a genetic weakness, or - Sara’s theory - some pulmonary edema gave him that little cough Donna had reported, the pulmonary edema created pressure back against the artery, and then exercising hard on a cold morning gave extra push from the heart and boom - something exploded and, like those who end their own lives by opening a vein, he bled into his chest so fast that he simply went into euphoria and fell over dead. Lea was right.

I wouldn’t have done this to a friend, except for another closer friend to us both. Dakota is like her son; Quan deserves to know whether he died of natural causes or foul play, and so I must do what I can, even desecrate his body, to reassure her. And now we know:

Definitively, no poison - Sara doesn’t even take any tissue samples for toxicology tests. We have the confirmation of no ’skulduggery’ as George calls it, and even better, knowing for sure that he did not suffer at all.

Sara and I, fingers frozen in nitril gloves, climb out of the hole, and way say goodbye as Sean pours the dirt back into the hole with his deft ‘hand’ - soon he is finished, the ground smooth, where we will put a memorial come spring.

It was a 24-hour cycle from death to another horse’s crisis to the burial. In fact, this story sticks with all three of the Greek unities - it all happens within 24 hours, all in one place, and no sub-plots - we were all totally focused on this unfolding for the entire time.

Sara checks CB, who is fine and recovered from his seemingly stress-induced colic, though both he and Camelot keep going over to where Dakota fell, and looking around for their friend. How does a horse do grief? How does a horse do closure?

I have been on a deep tear to finish my book and preparations for Asia, and now I am another day behind. But who cares? - what gets done will get done. Misty and I have an arms-around-each-other talk on the sofa, alternating tears. The Christmas-time edgy bickering is gone. Tonight Lea will come and preside over a ritual to send his spirit on its way. Tomorrow will come, as it always does, and we will go on. But no one knows for how long.

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The ritual went well - drums and a fire, calling the directions, sending him on his way with whoops and sage - sure, we’re playing at Indian rituals, but we’re not pretending to be anything but white, and it helps seal the deal.

After the doing comes the being - realizing how scratched and cut up my hands are, how my shoulders ache Refinding my line and growing along it, taking the terrible stun and heaviness out of my body. And finally, doing done, the tears flow. We went to a party last night, but we could not stay - too raw, too easy to burst into tears, we were the only ones we could talk to.

Cammie is so sad this morning, we are all so sad. We cannot wish for a better death - stop dead in a second in the middle of playing with no pain. But for us, the living, it is too soon, too sudden, and the hole in the middle of our hearts - and literally in the middle of our compound, where the barn is, is tremendous.

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Camelot and Celebrity have been lost for days. They are both despondent and don’t know what to do. “Dakota taught them how to play,” Quan says. And I realize it’s true - the other two were raised in stables where all they did was work, but Quan made sure Dakota’s first two years were in a herd, and free running, and besides she literally taught him how to play. So he taught them how to play. And now he’s gone they don’t know how to continue playing, but they know they miss it. So do we - a big spirit gone, a big hole in the farm’s spirit, though the community rose to meet the challenge, each in his own way.

Quan has called a prominent animal psychic, who says that CB did in fact inadvertently kill Dakota - striking him in the chest with his hoof or knee or head when they were cavorting, and setting the artery-break in motion. It may be. We know it wasn’t poison; we know it was sudden and relatively pain-free. We know it came too soon for any of us. We know Dakota was overweight - he had a slab of fat around his torso as we took him back, layer by layer. We know he had an odd cough when overworked - could be an indication of heart weakness. We know he was leaping, rearing, and cavorting in very cold air just before he died. That could have created back pressure on his pulmonary system.

Perhaps CB was right, and he really did strike Dakota in their play and break the artery - we will never know. Quan is ‘mad’ at CB, but temporarily - it was no more CB’s fault than it would be if someone died in an auto accident, so she will let it go in time. We all move on from death, and so we are moving on, but slowly, heavily.

Dakota Darya!

Gift to our little alien nation,

Your breath was sweet and white in this winter world

I held your still-steaming heart in my hand

It was as big as my head, and just as strong,

I will remember you prancing sideways,

Forever feel the tattoo of you galloping uphill

Leading the others, pleasing yourself.

If you can be stopped in your tracks,

So can we -

Watch out! Love while you can!

Life at home has settled into something of a routine: arise to the book at 5 am, using the computer in bed until the battery runs down or I need a reference, then down to the basement (feed the cats on the way) to keep running my head against the wall of expressing my current (mis)understanding of coordinated fascial tensegrity.

The re-write of Anatomy Trains is painful, in that tiny additions knock on like a Jacob’s Ladder (like a tensegrity structure, like a fractal, like a semi-conducting liquid crystal array) to many different places in the carefully constructed edifice that was the first edition.

Consequently, as I go to tackle it, it is like a three-dimensional crossword puzzle (I love doing Will Shortz’ NYTimes puzzle every Sunday) that one must enter and get ‘at home’ in before any changes can be made.  With the telephone, email, snowstorms, and Quan’s animals, few are the hours where I can stay undistracted.

Distraction - traction - being pulled away - anything does it, even nice ones, and I retract afterwards, pulling in and being snarky to all and sundry. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it - I have gone from artist to autist, and I need - need! - the concentration to place this pitch exactly where I want it.  But in fact it is always a compromise, it will need another revision sooner than I would hope.  Why does it matter so much to me to get it exactly right, when few people will ever bother to read such an overwhelming mass of words?
I usually emerge, if we have power, around noon to answer the call of the business via email or phone, and then duck out with the cross-country skis to work up a sweat under the scarf and crackly jacket.  The coyote tracks and scat are everywhere - they’re on the move.  The two rabbits who live by the brook are still there - only once have seen them, but love to see their tracks.  Adam’s trapped the beaver right out of there, but the dam survives yet. Loads of sea birds still in the river - what do they do at night in this cold?

Back home by dark to light the fires and luxuriate in being with Quan, still very delicate from her jaunt to Mexico.  We like each other, so it’s great to just let the talk roll along, filling in the nooks and crannies til we fit just right, then no words are needed.

Aging is only bad if you hang on to what must be let go.

A Hollywood film director who shall remain otherwise nameless, working in London, visited my practice. A small, trim, and athletic man, he was completely mismatched by his feet, which were crabbed, tiny, thin - looking like some old hen’s feet.
Like many wealthy Americans he was charmed by the tailors of Jermyn Street, and had ordered himself a full set of ‘bespoke’ clothes - tailored to himself alone.  Because his feet were a problem, he had also gone to Lobb’s to have himself fitted for a couple of pairs of shoes.

In my second session with him, I tackled those feet with the zeal that only a new rolfer can provide.  I finished the session, and spent a couple of minutes making notes and putting the sheet in the hamper.  When I came out, he was sitting there on the church pew I had in the entrance hall, with his head in his hands, holding a shoe.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, “I just paid £600 for these shoes” - about $1200 at that time - “and now I can’t fit in them.
“Your not in America anymore,” I said, “Go back to Lobb’s and show them.”

The session had changed his foot a full shoe size in both length and width, as it turned out.  The gentle folk at Lobb’s were non-plussed, but entirely accommodating - they made both sets of shoes over again with new lasts to fit his new feet.

My life is replete with embarrassing moments, when I have over-reached, or let myself down, or simply put my foot in it.  When these moments surface in memory, I feel the pressure of the embarrassment and have to let it escape through sound.  My wife has learned to recognize these little grunts, hisses, or moans, and takes delight in wheedling from me what memories habe arisen unbidden.  (To her credit, she never uses them against me. She has a full arsenal of things I’ve done in her presence, and so no need to shell me with the old stuff.)

Like the time I took my roommate’s camera and shot the entire roll, lied about it - but when the film was developed I had been stupid enough to take a picture of a mirror that caught the side of my face.

Or the time I borrowed an outboard motor from a fellow yachtsman only to flip it off the dinghy into the shallow water, so that the owner had to spend all afternoon taking it apart and cleaning it, in full view of my red-faced self.

I am split in this - in almost every case I could name, and even those that are recent, or so egregious they would never make these pages, I can see that they are funny, or just sad.  But still, when they come up, they create such inward pressure bordering on pain that can only be expelled via a little groan.

I suppose this is a form of conscience; I suppose this is how we learn, but the phenomenon, this moment of psychosomatic pressure is interesting to me - what is happening inside?  The memory bobs to the surface, and the dissonance between  the hero one wants to be and the buffoon one is becomes temporarily unbearable.

And the groan serves what?  Is it like a fart of the brain, relieving pressure?  A form of prayer - Please God, make me one with my illusions again?

My companion and I were bumping across the vlei of the Masai Mara in a tiny jeep. Hearing the strangest of hisses above us, we looked up to see a hot air balloon, low and drifting in the morning cool.  “Quick, quick, that way!” pointing back behind them.  We turned off-track and bucked over the hill.  Four lion were just felling a buffalo, jaws closed on the throat, legs kicking, the cats leaping back and forth in glee.  As they settled in to feed, the hyenas circled an exact number of yards from them.  It was a precise circle, as if drawn with a compass and one of those electric fences.  Beyond the hyenas, the jackals circled, again on a precise radius from the feeding lions.

One by one, the lions, sated, wandered away to sleep in the shade.  The last lion, a male, finally took a last couple of gnaws from the pink flesh, and wandered off into the bush for a pee.  The hyenas moved in toward the lion, 1 foot in for every foot the lion left between him and the kill.  It was a precise minuet.

As the hyenas reached the buffalo and, keening, started to.feed, the male lion suddenly started out of the bush toward them – and us.  I was, “oh, shit, oh shit” fumbling for the key in our open jeep, but he wasn’t interested in us.  The hyenas and jackals raced back to their prescribed circle, and the lion took a couple of more licks, but he was only fooling, really, and shortly went off to sleep.  The hyenas took over, the jackals now circling the hyenas, waiting their turn.

At the end of the day of hippos, giraffes, elephants, gnus, and birds of every feather, we stopped by on the way back.  The buffalo was now a rack of bones fathered in shredded fiber, and the whole thing was covered by birds, alive with the ruffling wings, caws, and bobbing heads.  Soon it would be left to the microbes, and the cycle of death would be complete.

We went back to pitch our tent just outside the boundaries of the park, in the yard of a friend of a friend who studied baboons.  After a very interesting conversation on primates over several beers, we retired to the tent.  In the middle of the night, the beers pressing at the other end, I went to unzip the entrance to go outside.  At that moment, I heard the indescribably chesty cough of a lion just outside the tent.  I peeked through the screen window – there were four lion in the yard, checking out the garbage.  Suddenly the tent seemed very small and flimsy, and I placed one knee over the other rather than risk peeing in the direction of a lion.  We awoke again at dawn, when the coast was clear.