Why Worry? Preternatural Musings

For Predator and Prey, Life Goes On

I sat against a tree trunk half way down to the canyon floor on a forty degree slope. I try to make time these days to just sit and watch. Breathe air and observe. There's a lot to see, and while you're moving you're it. Many eyes watch you as you move out, but forget you once you settle. Once the movement stops. Things crank back up slowly, and birds go back to calling out for careless love, 'cause it's Spring again.

The hawks wheel in orbits along the ridges, close to their nests, scanning with those terrible eyes, the infrared capability showing the urine trails left around the nests of their prey. Rodents never grasped the importance of clean latrines, so hawks eat them. Sometimes the difference between continued life and being a snack for a young hawk pivots on an obscure point that only Humans have noticed. Those who study such things, and not other things.

It's hard to know what to study, what with what we call everything just hovering out there some place on our vaunted inter-web source of all things knowable. Too many choices to make it an easy thing. Something that calls for contemplation on your own. A winnowing of the trite, and a trip to an entity operating within truth.

Two red hawks come barreling down the slope about three-four feet off the ground, maybe a five foot wingspan, the tips twitching for trim. This same pair have taken runs at my chickens. Maybe twenty feet separate them. They flare out into the canyon floor, breaking left and right, settling into two trees perhaps 150 yards apart. The waiting. The watching. A sudden dramatic move, and then the wait. They could have been two A-10 Warthogs piloted by likely lads from Kansas, bouncing enemies in someone else's land, but there could be no waiting in that case. Appear, destroy, vanish. We hate to wait when we kill for grins nowadays, in these wars, hunting monsters abroad.

So I wait, not for enlightenment. Too blind for that. I wait because the world waits, probably to see when our annoying asses finally nuke ourselves out of the equation. I can see life emerging as it always has, by random. The chaos of nature. There is no plan but chance to the nonsentient, and the mother mouse whose child is devoured by a hawk doesn't light a candle to a saint. Life goes on and will, with you or without you. So why worry?

How free it must be as a mouse on a hillside, no clue that a hawk will ever devour you. We can't do that. We all know we're done for, and we fear the knowing and spin hopes. It can't have been all for nothing, but available evidence says it most likely was. Whether or not you recycled or loved the less fortunate. Despite your concern and humanity, they only value your gold fillings.

So the fence is up: four strands of barbed wire with stiffeners, corner timbers in concrete and strung with T-posts, tuned up tight with a 4x4, a Mexican and a White Boy. Took a week of work in wind gusting around 40, same as the temperature. The barbs glitter in the sun and the deer are already leaving patches of winter fur on it. According to lore, my neighbors will become good.

(c) 2018 The Checkered Demon