April 10th

Irrigations set, I can break away and wander off across Pasture #1 to see what’s up with those vultures attending something unsavory. Eighteen of them took up as I approached, from the corpse from whose ribcage they were picking the last shreds of flesh, most of its bones were clean but all were red-painted with blood. A perfectly whole racoon’s  face stared up uncannily from the tip of an empty backbone. I shuddered, as much as I would had I come on a ghoul; but … we are the racoon and the racoon, we, this the truth that drifts round the graveyards in Mexico’s Dias de los Muertos. Later in the morning I saw the ravens had come, but I couldn’t imagine what was left for them. These avatars of War who once raised blind fear as much as would distant cannon that signaled them to their meal kept respectful distance in a circle outside the now-smaller vulture ring at the late racoon…

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