We're walking around the field by my house, Dion and I—her dog pulling at the leash, collecting, no doubt, an arrayof ticks in her bristly white fur—when we come uponthe half-eaten leg of a deer, gnawed clean along the thigh bone,the calf still covered in its thin scrim of flesh and tawny fur.The dark hoof, a fatted arrow pointing uphill, toward where,we imagine, the rest of the deer might lie—a doe, I'm thinking—deep in a grove of eucalyptus, carried off in the jawsof a mountain lion. Dion pokes at the bone,says, Don't you want to keep it! Look at that hoof!
