She knew it was stupid, but she wished she had a gun tonight as she frantically ran along the side of the road looking for a stone big enough to take down the little fox slowly dying in the middle of the road. I severed her spine when I hit her in my car.
I braked as hard as I dared on a curvy mountain road. He ran in some desperate circles before it happened, warning me not to add to the confusion by straying.
Please, let that bump have been a bump. How I prayed to see nothing but asphalt in the rearview mirror.
She is breathing. The sides of her aren’t even fluttering fast. I feel the warmth of her, the feathery softness of her fur, my fingertips sliding into the spaces between her ribs. I see the Divine in her bright, shining eyes. She looks into my eyes, moans softly at me, transmitting only love. She sounds like she’s humming, purring. “I forgive you.” she says, comforting me instead of the other way around. Her little voice has the exact tone Qaisuke has when she asks me how my day was, doing her doggy dance.
Seconds later, I’m driving around in my car looking for something big and heavy to finish what I caused. All I can find is a pair of pliers. What am I going to do with the pliers? Send them straight to your head? Rip out his carotid artery? What if I can’t find it? What if I get lost? What if he clings to me in a renewed frenzy of life and rage? How dare I be afraid of a dying baby? Why haven’t I done anything already? Should I run her over in my car again? When in life do you get to practice lining up your tires with someone’s head? Cars zoom by, their drivers flashing their high beams as they pass, some courteously moving across the double yellow line to avoid us, others straddling her body. God help me.
I know it’s ridiculous to wish you had a gun to finish off a 10 pound shot. baby fox The child in me wants an explosion of noise to hide it all; his tenderness, his innocence. I crave the certainty of one shot to eliminate the chance that the second hit won’t cut it either.
How tenderly he looks at me as I hold the biggest stone I can find over his pretty little head. No accusation, no anger, just surrender. I can not, I can not. I walk in useless circles wishing I grew up on a farm where death is a part of life. The vet! I’ll take her to the vet. I put the rock down, trying to figure out how to lift it safely. I feel the sharp angle in her back where she’s broken. It’s too late.
I pick up the rock again and knock it down. She begins to have convulsions, her gangly adolescent body of hers spinning round and round across the road, her luscious tail waving, all fours of her spinning like a break dancer come to life. Flustered and uncertain, I hit her again.
Another driver stops to see if I need help. “I-accidentally-ran-her-and-didn’t-kill-her-and-I’m-trying-to-end-her-pain of her…” he stammered. He also hits her over the head with the stone, picks her up by her tail and places her on the side of the road. She is now dead. he says.
I run to her, pick her up, hold her still-warm, feather-light body in my arms. I feel the fragments of her broken skull rub against each other under unbroken skin. I hold her paws between my fingertips. They are only slightly smaller than Qaisuke’s paws. Her lips are loose, her tongue hanging out slightly. He looks like Qaisuke looks when he sleeps, only his eyes are open.
Laying her gently in the back of my car, I drove the rest of the way home, staggering and terrified that she still had life left in her. Was that a sigh or an involuntary muscle contraction when her neurons last fired? At 30, I’m still naive about death. I have been to funerals of course, came home to old hamsters cold and stiff to the touch and even euthanized ducks for sure. But none of these prepared me for the process of waiting for signs of life to creep slowly out of the body of another mammal.
When I got home, I watched YouTube videos on how to properly skin a fox. It agonized me that I wouldn’t be able to use every inch of his body. Eating the meat of a carnivore is too risky. The least she could do was make something beautiful out of her fur, preserve it forever for her memory to live on. I observed various ways of skinning a small animal, including one that was like a race where the hunter made a minimal number of cuts and ripped off all the skin up to the nose like a sock slipping off a foot.
I chose a beautiful tree to hang it in the middle of the green. The almost full moon reads our path like the sun. Her body was now cold and rigid. She seemed to have doubled her weight. I chose the smallest knife I could find in the kitchen, hoping its compact size would make my cuts more exact.
With all the precision I could muster, I began cutting, first at her ankles, then along her inner thighs, down her belly, up her chin, careful to take only the skin, leaving the fascia to wrap around her muscles, careful not to spill the contents of her intestines. I fumbled, mistaking my left thigh, spilling blood that should have been contained, a flapping tendon.
His face, his little nose, his white muzzle, his ears, were so similar to Qaisuke’s. Qaisuke is my dog, my soul mate in every sense of the word. I wonder if anyone has ever recognized the person who once lived in the body of the corpse they are dissecting.
The resemblance was intentional. How often do you see in the animal you are sacrificing the spitting image of the one you love most in the world? I hope often, because it made me love the baby fox more, saddened me more, made my grievance deeper, made me feel very fully and welcomed all of it. I need this, I want this. By letting sadness fill me, I connected with the dancing pathos of the universe. I felt that every cell in my body was overflowing with love, that tonight I moved an inch closer to that elusive and distant state of Nirvana. I felt like I almost had enough sadness in me to belatedly cry for every animal or person that has ever been hit by a car and only partially dispatched, left to die slowly, scared, crippled, and just because the driver didn’t have the guts to stop and take responsibility for the full release of their hit-and-run on the other side.
I carried the lifeless, hairless, and furless body of the fox to the cliffs behind my house, overlooking the water and mountains. I asked for the guidance of Mother Earth and Father Sky for your ceremony. I nestled her snuggled into a concave crevice that was just the right size. I prayed that another predator would come for her body, take her gift, and be nurtured. I asked the fox what his name is.
“Ayelet” in Hebrew means “gazelle” or “doe”. It is the most beautiful name for me, the one I was saving for my unborn daughter or my next animal companion. At first, I resisted. Part of me didn’t want to give that precious name to someone who would be leaving so soon. And then I realized that Ayelet would always be with me, that she is my spirit guide, an angel of mine, who had altered the course of my existence by teaching me more about my place in the universe than I have learned in 18 years of school. Ayelet is the name of the baby fox. Without knowing it, I was keeping her name to her the whole time.
Come tomorrow, Ayelet’s body was gone. Only the white quartz stone that marked the site remains.
We as a culture have been taught to avoid sadness, to run away from pain, to pretend that the heartbreaking events that were meant to help us grow and raise our soul’s vibration don’t matter or never happened. We are programmed to swallow our own emotions and tell others “Don’t cry.”
How about we run straight into Sadness, go through it, let it cover us, envelop us, bathe us in its tears, dance with us? Sadness comes first from loving someone and second from the fear of losing them. Do you dare to trust that what seems lost is not really? That a higher power is taking care of them? What will you find again? That time is an illusion? Allowing yourself to suffer is life’s most basic exercise in taking what you need and releasing what you don’t. To avoid feeling sadness is to reject the Love that is available to you. So allow yourself to feel sad about everything there is to be sad about in this world. When you can release the fear that sadness brings, you will find yourself awash in Love.