In my last post, I jested, in closing, that I was going to go out and take down any bears that might be rummaging through our compost bin. I also reported that I wouldn’t be able to eat any non-locally-grown bears, if it were to turn out that they had actually been transported, under the auspices of a wildlife witness protection program, into Minnesota from a different state.
As that post indicated, I have quite a repertoire of Dead Animal Humor, especially because one of my cousins waaaayyy up North here actually keeps his family’s bellies full of meat throughout the year thanks to hunting and, more importantly, road kill.
Oh, yes, he does.
To aid him in his road-kill quest, he’s got some contacts with state troopers; also, he lives in a remote part of the state where all 87 residents know each other’s bank balances and underwear rotations, not to mention how they stock their freezers. With such connections, my cousin’s meat needs are easily fulfilled. If a moose gets hit on Highway 1, the solution to such a public, bloody mess is, “Call Kurt.” Or if a deer gets bonked, someone will inevitably stop by his family’s cabin, knock, and holler out, “Deer kill down by Misty’s place!”
After the call or the knock, Kurt collects his tools and any unsuspecting greenhorns he can wrassle into a crew, and he heads out, day or night, to begin the slaughter. And slaughtering a moose? A little bit bigger project than scrapbooking Junior’s trip to the State Wrestling Championships. Indeed, butchering a moose is intense, heavy labor.
But, holy buckets of Bullwinkle, you can eat the thing for ten months, so it’s worth the effort.
Right? Right? Right?
At any rate, you can see why road kill and compost bin humor trip so lightly out of my brain. Thanks to My People, I make up little vignettes like in my last post.
However. The day after I posted about out-of-state bears getting transported, a different cousin of mine (her eccentricity, by the way, differs from Road Kill Cousin’s; her thing is that she’s given all of her passle of kids “D” names. I’m glad she stopped spawning just after the birth of Baby Darby and before she had to resort to the moniker Baby Damnation) emailed these photos of a bear that was struck by a truck near Lincoln, Montana.
Dead bear. Funny, right?
Not so much.
In truth, it makes me sad. Look at that photo of the four paws at rest, in particular. There’s something strangely human there. If, you know, that human weighed 800 pounds and was horrifyingly hirsute.
Certainly, being a good Montanan myself, I know James Gandolfini here is pretty much just stew meat topped off by some fly-fishing resort’s new bearskin rug; despite that, I find myself wanting to knit the poor bugger some booties.
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Note to self: learn to knit.
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