Today I took my dog for a walk. He's an odd shaped, chihuahua-daschund mix with massive ears and a long, skinny body. His name is Frisco, but I call him more human names when I walk with him, just to make myself feel better about talking to a dog in public. We have long, drawn out, one-sided conversations in the bleached autumn sun. He rarely disagrees with me, but will occasionally interrupt me with paranoid barking. Usually it's only source is the raving of a confused rescue dog who doesn't understand things like 'cold wind' and 'fat people' because he's from California, where those things don't exist.
On this day, he bristled in terror and hurled himself towards a gully on my left, where I saw nothing but empty space and tree-tops. I thought perhaps he was astounded at the crinkly noise the leaves made as they emptied from the branches, but instead I saw two furry polyps moving steadily right beside me, the tree-top hunching under the overly-comfortable weight of their round fat bellies.
It was two massive raccoons, just maybe two feet from my face so suddenly despite their clumsy nature. I was more drawn to their impossibly frail humanlike hands than their signifying masks and luxuriously striped tails. They stared at us quite intelligently, but then I realized that this was perhaps their calculating a dinner of my tiny canine friend, so I pulled him up into his arms and he cocked his head, pinging radar off their faces.
I will say that raccoons, when they aren't furious, are probably the cutest animal I have ever seen. They have lovely dished faces and this appearance of being excessively stuffed like living marshmallow lemurs. I'm surprised nobody has domesticated a raccoon and taught it to do silly cute things like play dead or wear a large bow and jump out of gifts. (I considered momentarily how Frisco could barely be taught to sit down when told and how I might trade if nobody would notice, but then he licked me and I remembered that raccoons are terrible.)
I stared for awhile, as most artists do, a little too long at some points where other pedestrians might glance while they continue their jaunt. I desperately longed to pull them against me like down-filled pillows and snuggle into their plush tails, but I knew they'd much rather choose to piss on my arms and give me rabies. With that thought, I let Frisco touch the ground and we went on with our crisp morning walk.
Moments later- well perhaps, an hour- I saw a pile of course grey flecked with white. It looked like a sheet, parts of it gelatinous, and it had no real shape. I thought it some type of discarded fabric, but then I realized in its centre was a flash of glowing white- the glint of bone. It was a skull.
I had seen things like this many times before in varying states of decay, and if you know me, you know I am inexplicably inspired by these states of metamorphosis, the transformation of a thing into the undercurrents of its being- the gestural sketch in which skin and flesh hangs loosely. I always wander by without gloves, or on a jog, I might still see eyes and a face but in this case it was just bones. I gathered my bravery and I dislodged the head of the creature. There was nothing gory about it, not a noise as there was no longer any attachment to its once living body. It was as clean as if it had been neatly polished, which was a marvel in itself.
When I got home I began to clean the dead leaves and dirt from it, and wondered at what it was. I called my cat over to investigate, and though it seemed a similar size to his own head, I wondered if his fearless meant anything. If it was a cat, would he not sense it and fear it, or is that a process of purely human intellect? I knew it was no squirrel as the weight set neatly into my hand, more than a palm, and its molars were nearly as large as those I'd seen in my own mouth.
As if in some process of anatomical teachings, I had learned of both the living and the dead closely in a way only I could be satisfied with: the skull belonged to a raccoon. The animal I longed to reach out and touch only feet before me, suddenly I could touch its very realest structure, smoothed and bleached by the transformation of living and then dying. It makes me thankful to realize that these ideas exist, and that mortality is a concept I rarely get to see, let alone, touch.
