After reducing the muledeer buck to meat,
to one freezer shelf of venison,
I load the waste — a Snowboy Apple box
full of backfat, bone, bloodshot scrap,
ribcage and antlerless head — into the pickup
and drive up Soup-pot Coulee
where ranchers for decades have
dragged their winterkilled cattle
and led their spent horses. Among skulls
and pelvises, the empty sockets
poking through a skiff of snow,
a doe and her two fawns look
like ghosts-of-Christmas
yard ornaments flocked white by the spray
of a hard chinook wind. I jack
a cartridge into the chamber and fire
to frighten them from the road-
hunters making their last-day swing
before dark. I unload the box,
tip it upside down, lift it off
the jelled mold of carcass parts,
and with my ears still ringing, crawl in low gear
back to the house. How can I not think
of a job well-done, the tenderloins grilled rare
tonight with Chianti and wild rice —
how we kill to eat, and eat
to kill again, and how we love,
between the seasons we set aside for killing,
to see the living
go on living? We owe our prey some grace,
some contemplation of their lives
here with us. I think about the deer,
creatures of habit and caution, tiptoeing
through Soup-pot Coulee, coming down with dusk
to feed in alfalfa fields
near the house — what they must sense
upwind of the ripe red pile and the charcoaled
scent of their own flesh.