He
wasn’t quite dead when I found him on Saturday morning; but I didn’t know that
until after I called Animal Control, and found the office closed.
Apparently
animals aren’t supposed to get hit by cars at another other time of day except 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. , Monday through Friday.
This
being Saturday, the office was closed and the message said for me to call the
police, and I did.
“If it
isn’t an emergency, they won’t respond,” the dispatcher informed me.
Since I
thought the ground hog dead, I hung up.
It was
raining. The water gushed down the guttered so that the body was wet. But I
left it, and went to do my chores.
When I
got back, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to move the body, and when I
touched the animal, he moved.
Not
much, but more than a nervous reaction.
He was
dying, but not dead. But he was near the wheel of a parked car and he was
soaked from cold rain.
Monday
seemed too long to wait to have someone come.
But I
had little choice. So with gloves and a snow shovel, I scooped him up and
brought him into my back yard where I have summer cushioned seats under an
awning. I put him on the chair. He moved a little. He was still breathing. But
he must have been cold.
I’m not
certain this is the same ground hog that lived on the cliff behind my house,
but I’m pretty sure it was.
I was
proud to have him as a neighbor, and his loss struck me hard.
I liked
seeing him poke his nose up into the air on warm spring days, liked see him grubble
for grubs. For this reason, I called him “Mr. Grubbles.”
Although
clearly on death’s doorstep and not completely aware of the world, Mr. Grubbles
clearly hadn’t yet passed into the next world. So I covered him with an old
hoodie and fixed a lamp above him the way I sometimes did for outside cats –
like Charlie.
Charlie
had often spent cold winter nights on the same chair under the same lamp,
keeping him from freezing.
This
winter I brought Charlie inside only to find that he had an incurable disease.
I put him down only ten days prior to my finding Mr. Grubbles. So the pain I
felt was over the loss of two valued neighbors. Their loss was incalculable.
They were part of the fabric of my reality. They made up the last vestiges of
the wild world soon to vanish under high rise construction and the chopping
down of trees.
I liked
to think that ours was an island of wilderness in this insane march towards
paving over every thing, and over population by my species.
But
civilization is relentless and uncaring, making victims even of those who
survive.
Slow
moving citizens like Mr. Grubbles cannot possibly survive the endless parade of
speeding cars that have turned my street into a highway (as well as a parking
lot at night). We seem determined to want to blot out anything that lives free
without taxes, whether it is those homeless men who lived on the Palisades or those less human, but just as important creatures who lived here
before us.
We seem
determined to blot them out of existence, but want them to perish by our time
schedule: 9
a.m. to 3:30 p.m. , Monday to
Friday.
Mr.
Grubbles passed away during the night from Saturday to Sunday.
I hope
he realized, he was loved.
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