08:32 it said 08:31 when I had started typing.

 

I am thinking on awe as an antidote to helplessness. As a kid I was sensitive to death. At a friend’s party their cat brought in a still wriggling baby rabbit before killing it in the middle of the kitchen. I must have been 9 at the time. I was flooded with anxiety and sadness and burst into tears. Typical townie, they must have thought - as we’d only moved out into the countryside from London a few years prior.

 

In secondary school I shot rabbits with a friend. Some had myxomatosis and required a second shot to the head from point blank range to end them. The quick whistle of the pellet or .22 and satisfying wet thud as contact was made. I was not crying now and it was not with kindness I killed. Those years of my life in puberty were mostly diseased by melancholy. Anger, destruction masked a sadness I could not contain.

 

I’d later learn to skin the rabbits and preserve the pelts/butcher what meat was available. I don’t care for rabbit meat. My grandad had a similar disposition to killing. He’d shoot for pest control but my mother recounts a story where, after shooting a mother, he found her litter of babies and brought them home to care for and raise before release. The child is protected, the adult is slain. He died from Alzhiemers during my first term at uni after 10 long years of deteriorating. It was a dark time and I had no words at his funeral.

 

Through lockdown I begin collecting, butchering and preserving more animals, deer, squirrel, fox, mole, mouse. I do not hunt these animals. They are found dead. I do not like killing. I like less killing for sport.

 

A friend messaged me a female deer had been hit. If you bleed deer within 1 hour of death you can still extract meat for consumption. I collect her, the back leg is torn open and shattered. The pelt is mostly intact and there is uncontaminated meat available. She is a beautiful orangey rust weighing about 30kg. I hang her from the tree in the garden, separating skin from carcass. Her becomes it and it is no longer ‘deer’.

 

I am filled with curiosity. We are all tubes. The innards flop out with some encouragement, exposing a rich blend of raw bruises, oxygenated blood and electric green pre-digested grass matter. I am left with a system of meat and bone. The foxes and badgers will eat the rest.

 

The rhythms of nature may not be kind, but they endure. I am more accepting of my place within this tapestry now. 

 

I’d have liked to know you more grandad.​