Close to the Edge Down By the River. R.L. Sterup

course, any such winning critter immediately was hunted by all and sundry, torch waving mobs mobbing to track and ritually slaughter the beast, lest it get too comfortable with the concept of casually picking off primates. Mostly successfully, although occasionally the odd man-killing machine escaped to parts unknown, presumably to kill and kill again, until at last arrested by a righteously flying chunk of hot lead.

      Then came more and yet more of the sod busting, perpetually hungry men and their wives and children, fencing more and more of the formerly open plain, while farming more and more of the formerly pristine prairie, and with the quartering and sectioning of each and every arable acre the habitat available to the meat-eating felines -- whose ancestors never thought to hone the fine art of dropping seeds in the soil and thence await the seasonal multiple return on the vegetable investment -- gradually withered and shrank, leaving precious little for the formerly abundant, scarcely conscious, species to hunt. They fled if not first shot dead. Our county hadn’t seen a grizzly bear or wolf in the better part of a century, and though coyotes yet roamed here and there, relatively few were they in number, skulking uncertainly amongst the places bunnies hop, and the occasional fox. And of course your rodents who never left, because never represented any particular threat, gentle seed-eaters that they were and are, and, also, no effort of mankind yet has succeeded in reducing the rodent population, at least not where rodents decline to be relocated, and so gophers and voles and mice by the hundreds or thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands happily bamboozle and perplex us, but not worth bothering about unduly, and besides, it gives our house cats something to do. Or the occasional hawk and golden eagle, also. But none among your top tier killers of cattle or sheep or hogs or sons.

      Then came the deer and with them the pair patiently watching and waiting, the first of their kind to re-colonize our county in three generations or better, so far as anybody knew. Choosing to appear, as luck would have it, at precisely that instant a maliciously indifferent vortex aimed its sights at our prone flatness. Talk about your coincidences! Like something from fiction. Or perhaps yet another example of fate finding its destiny, or destiny findings its fate, what have you, in the sense of preordained, or perhaps merely inevitable. Assigned a task like everybody else, a part to play, a role to fill, links in a chain, a food chain, ha ha, metabolizing as planned, assuring nature’s balance is somewhat chaotically preserved, never too much of this or too little of that, a check for every balance, designed to leap on inattentive primates, for example, for if left unchecked the population necessarily would explode unmanageably, far too many of the upright-walking critters roaming about the planet, so of course they must die, one after another, in due course, brought to their respective ends by this or that instrument, typically when very young or very old, by one of several handy mechanisms, even by one another’s hand often enough, oddly enough. For rare indeed is the species that manages overabundance by turning guns on one another -- one uncommonly sees an angus bull train an AK 47 on a neighboring herd, or a prairie dug unload an Uzi on a rival town -- but even that proves insufficient in the case of this profligate species, one with breeding-age females constantly in heat, and the Y chromosomes of a certain age forever sporting erections, or so it seems. And so they shoot one another dead on some pretext or another, or are run over by buses, or caught by a submerged limb and grimly held for seven long years, or, in the case of a few particularly unlucky souls, pushed by indifferent wind into the clutches of a top tier predator. For alone among the carnivorous classes cats love to play with their food, to keep it alive for a time, tossing and turning loose the pending meal before clawing it back again, even fattening the feast before feasting on it, or rather him, stuffing the fleshy morsel with sweets so as to enhance the eventual taste, say, for the predator into whose clutches a prey falls has no more choice whether to consume that prey than does the prey have the option of falling up instead of down. All in due time, of course. As it was writ.

      The pair eventually returned to their hidden lair to bed down, sleepy from the prior night’s prowling. They sprawled in a furry heap. Snoozing the way cats do, sunbeam dappled, one eye periodically popping open, but otherwise inert.

      Their most recent primate/prey/captive suitably caged near or by their slumbering massiveness, sawing logs also.