That Time We Buried Two Bodies in the Woods
That time was just last weekend.
We drove out to our vacation house late Saturday night. I had spent the bulk of that day in coast-to-coast transit, mired in the antiseptic, soul-killing hell of airplanes and airports. After landing in Newark, I rushed home, gathered the rest of the family and with great anticipation drove another two hours away from the city due east. We didn’t arrive until well past midnight.
As we unpacked the car, I noticed the smell for the first time.
The next morning I awoke to the chirping of birds, blissfully free from the trappings of civilization. I walked the dog in the front yard and again noticed that same odor from the night before. There was a heaviness about it, as if the smell, albeit faint, was sucking the oxygen out of the air.
The house is surrounded by woods on three sides, with a driveway extending a hundred yards to the main road. My wife was sitting on the front porch. It was now late morning. As the dog and I wandered off to the side of the house, I stumbled upon the solution to the mystery. A small animal was lying on its side on the edge of the woods, flies buzzing about. When I approached, I saw that it was a baby deer. Dead as a doornail.
I know full well that many people who do not live in the city actively and aggressively despise deer—any deer, young or old. I also understand why. People plant flowers and trees and the deer pick them clean. They leave their droppings in precisely the next place your bare foot is going to step. They carry ticks. They jump in front of your cars at night—surprise!—and cause accidents. They’re not particularly intelligent, often seeming to run into things that will kill them. Given that their main predator out here is the automobile, their population often outgrows the ecosystem’s ability to sustain them.
We see deer at the house all the time, almost daily. For some reason, I always resist the reflexive instinct to be enthralled by them, lest I betray that I’ve lived my entire life in the bowels of New York City, and that maybe I don’t belong out here in the country.
With all these things in mind, it is impossible to see a baby deer lying lifeless and not feel pangs of sadness.
As I stood over the dead fawn, one obvious question arose. If there’s a dead baby deer, I wonder what happened to the mother. I walked a few yards into the woods, and it didn’t take long to find her. Halfway down the hill, already a dozen yards into the woods, lying on its side, flies buzzing every which way. Having identified the dead deer, I had also identified the epicenter of the smell permeating the yard.
I had two immediate reactions. First, the death of these two animals was a damned shame. But my brain took over in that minute and focused on the more pressing issue. What were we going to do about these two animal carcasses rotting next to our house?
To help answer that question, I reached out to the one person I thought best suited to navigate through the problem: our next door neighbor, Gigi. I don’t know how old Gigi is, but the number probably starts with a seven. A diminutive but energetic woman, Gigi had three primary qualifications: (i) she’s lived in this area most of her life; (ii) although retired, I knew she was a naturalist slash environmentalist in her professional life; and (iii) most importantly, because the mother deer’s body was in the woods, it was actually on her property. This was going to be a problem for both of us to troubleshoot.
I called her to inform her of my discovery. In less than a minute, she appeared in front of the house.
Gigi had the same immediate reaction—sadness—which made me feel like less of an interloper. She immediately told the story about how just a week before she was blessed to witness a fawn sleeping in her front garden. She didn’t finish the thought, but let it trail off. We both wondered whether this might have been the same fawn.
She then got down to brass tacks. The town would not take the bodies because they were not on the side of the road. We were at least a good hundred yards from any road on either side. It would be almost impossible to find someone on short notice to pick them up or drag those bodies to the road for municipal disposal, especially considering it was the Sunday of a holiday weekend. Either way, the thought of dumping these two ill-fated animals onto a flat-bed truck only to be hauled off somewhere only compounded the sense of loss.
Then Gigi arrived at the punch line. “This might sound crazy, but the thing that makes the most sense is probably to just bury them.”
She presented this as the best, and perhaps only, option. Before I responded, Gigi went ahead and called her friend, Pete, and asked him to bring over a shovel. In the meantime, my wife calmly ushered me inside the house and, once out of earshot, immediately provided her unfiltered opinion. “That is the craziest fucking idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
I was in agreement. Truth be told, despite the sympathy, I didn’t want to go anywhere near those animals. They smelled awful. They were infested with flies, and I didn’t feel like waiting for the maggots. As you approached the mother in particular, the stench of death was intense. My wife proclaimed she was going to drive into town to get coffee. I said I would make some calls. The directive here was unspoken, but clear, “If I come back and catch you digging graves, I’m going to kill you.” She left.
I went back outside to assess the situation. Gigi was not there. I was considering our options when Gigi reappeared, this time with her friend Pete and three shovels. Pete, a jovial fellow in his mid-60s, held up his shovel and gave a hearty “let’s do this” laugh. It looked as if they were indeed going to do this, with or without me, but presumably with me.
“Let’s start with the fawn,” she proclaimed.
This suggestion was easy to go along with; it would have been almost impolite to turn down. This was like holding the door for the person behind you. “Sure, I’ll help you dig a modest-sized hole. Let me get that shovel from you.” I grabbed the shovel and dug the hole, two feet by two feet by two feet. It was at the edge of the woods on flat ground. Once the hole was dug, Gigi did the part that no one else wanted to do, and didn’t need to ask. Not wearing any gloves or covering her nose, Gigi grabbed the fawn by its legs and pulled it into the hole—not daintily—with her bare hands. She called our attention to one of its legs, which had been injured, likely during whatever trauma that killed it. If they ever did an animal-CSI show, Gigi should be the star.
With the fawn now returned to the ground, the body of the large deer loomed on our minds. It was obvious that this was going to be a project, probably beyond the competence of this ragtag group of AARP members. Not only was it going to require an exponentially larger hole, but some actual coordination and planning, most notably with respect to how to get the animal into the hole, once dug. Plus, it was just last winter that my wife put a lifetime ban on me ever shoveling snow again because apparently it is an activity that reliably causes heart attacks in men my age. I wonder what the medical journals say about whether these same men should be digging giant holes in the dirt on a hill in the woods on a hot summer day. This didn’t even acknowledge the fact that I was technically forbidden from engaging in any strenuous physical activity whatsoever due to a minor surgery I had the week before. Doctor’s orders.
This all raised the distinct possibility of having to dig one or more additional graves on that wooded slope. Either I was going to die or my wife was going to kill me. But when the three of us started down the hill towards the deer, the lone voice of common sense was still in town picking up that coffee.
Don’t ask me how I was compelled to go along with all of this. This is how people find themselves mired in a life of crime—incrementally, through rationalizing not saying no to people. You start by being a lookout. Three days later, you’re burying a limo driver. Once dug, the first hole was the gateway drug. Now, three feet from the giant deer carcass, the first time your foot drives the shovel into Mother Earth was that first hit of amphetamine. It kicked off a frenetic burst of energy to get this animal where it belonged. But it was impossible to ignore the visceral realities of the endeavor.
The deer was bloated, seemingly about to explode. It didn’t help when Gigi said things like “That trauma must have been something. Look how it evacuated its bowels.” This made me want to evacuate my bowels. As much as I was motivated by the practical desire to not have to worry about deer carcasses on my weekend off, I also knew, like Gigi and Pete undoubtedly knew, that these deer were most likely killed by people—accidentally, probably, but either way we felt compelled to fill some of the moral void. Even hunters know that there is a right way to handle the animals that they kill. Today, for us, these were not invasive mammals; they were a baby and its mother.
With three shovels, it took less than hour. We (I) made a number of Goodfellas references (“Who the fuck cares? I'll dig the hole.. It’s not the first hole I dug. I don’t give a fuck.”) Gigi continued her forensic musings (“It doesn’t seem like there’s been much rigor mortis yet; the legs are still bending.”). The work was grueling—there are never this many roots when they dig graves in the movies—but eventually a respectable grave started to emerge. Halfway through, my phone rang. It was my wife. I knew I had no choice but to pick up. She was apparently watching me from the window, laughing on the other end.
Once the three of us decided the hole was big enough, Gigi did what Gigi does best. She grabbed two of the deer’s legs, propped herself over the animal, and let all her weight—all 110 pounds or so—fall backwards gracefully into the hole, pulling the deer along. The animal tumbled softly into the grave. With my shovel, I made sure each of its legs were tightly snug so as to remain under the earth. Then we all got to the most satisfying part of any woodland grave-digging operation—filling the hole back up with dirt.
When the soil returned to ground level, we patted it down with our shovels. Before we parted ways, we all took a breath of fresh air. The smell was gone. The birds started chirping in earnest again. We joked about starting a local deer-burial business. Open 365 Days Per Year, including Holiday weekends!
I still believe that my wife was correct when she said the idea of burying those animals was ludicrous. But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t still the right thing to do. Sometimes it can be both.
“I used to cry whenever Bambi’s mother was killed, but then I realized someone just drew a picture of a dead deer.”