My daily walk, which actually does happen on some days, has a variable route along a wooded lakeside and old tow paths along the Princeton stretch of the Delaware and Raritan Canal. It generally begins and ends by going through the woods, field, and lakeside path between my back yard and the northern abutments of the bridge that carries County Route 629 (Harrison Street) over Lake Carnegie. Once across, there are inviting walking paths going in both directions and on both sides of the canal, which at this point runs parallel to the lake. The very beginning of the walk (or the very end, if on the return)—that is, the four hundred yards or so between my yard and the lake—offers two possibilities. There is an “official” path used by most strollers and wide enough for the groundsmen to use now and again when bringing in their large mowers to trim the fields. Fifty yards or so to the west and more or less parallel to the official path is a long, thin glade where the trees are sparse enough that one can easily make one’s way around and through them on the grass. These are alternative pleasant routes to the lakeside, and the only motive to choose one over the other is a desire for variety.
About a week ago, having exited by the glade, I elected to return by the “official” path. This was after about three miles in hot and humid weather. That is a little beyond the comfort zone of my enfeebled condition. I was perspiring copiously and looking forward to a sit-down followed by a shower. Three hundred yards short of my house I came upon a downed animal flailing in the middle of the path. It was a pretty large doe, probably near her full growth. There was no blood, and I could see no evidence of a wound or a broken limb. It apparently had been on the ground for some time, and in its thrashings it had scraped away patches of hair right down to the raw skin. Though obviously in bad shape, it was still vigorously kicking its legs, its sharp hooves clattering. I was not going to mess with this beast. Years ago back on the farm I had seen large downed animals, domestic as well as wild, recoup their strength, rise, and totter on. I convinced myself that this was at least a theoretical possibility in this instance; so I simply kept my distance from the flailing flesh and continued the short distance home. The experience was of course disconcerting, a discordant end to a wholesome walk, undertaken in the pursuit of good health, through rain-fresh woods. However, I was able to put it mostly out of mind.
I did not return to that spot until two days later. It was under the same circumstances of returning from a walk, and by the same route. This route was downwind from the spot at which I had encountered the stricken deer, and the sickly odor of death reached me well before I could see the remains in the path. Anyone who has done much hiking in real woods knows the unwelcome smell of decomposing animal flesh. Even small critters, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, can cast off quite a stench. When I got in sight of these large remains, the color of the russet-brown beast seemed to have been transformed into something paler, a kind of light beige. It appeared as though someone had placed a tight-fitting cloth over the carcass. The garment was knitted or woven. You could see the individuated short segments of knitting stiches. Except that the segments were undulating, many of them rolling down the curvatures of the beast’s back and belly. What I was actually seeing was a seething mass of fat, moist, maggots feasting on a rapidly diminishing deer cadaver. The realization struck me suddenly with equal forces of shock and disgust—and disgust in its fullest old Latin sense, which goes beyond the mere recognition of a repellent yuckiness to suspect a kind of cosmic faux pas.
There is a large deer population in our part of the state, as there is through much of East Coast suburbia. It is in fact an over-population, encouraged by an abundance of food and a protection from certain difficulties and dangers of true wilderness. The animals’ greatest enemy here is not the gun but the motor vehicle. It is very common to see dead animals on the roads and highways. The phenomenon is national, and the danger does not reside with the deer alone. About two hundred people die each year in this country in accidents involving them. Municipalities have to contract with animal control experts, or at least with some strong guy with a full-bed pickup truck, to remove the roadkill. An infrequently used footpath through semi-private woods is not the same thing as a state highway. So I was surprised a few days later, when I next passed, expecting to see a pile of polished bones, to find only tiny trace elements remaining. There had been a clean-up. I presume a neighbor living much closer to the scene had called the municipality. But removing some animal remains could not resolve the disquiet which the episode had left me.
The problem of reconciling belief in a just God (or even the operations of a godless but benign material universe) with the fortuities of observation and lived experience has a fancy name: theodicy. Its classical literary expression in our western literature is the Book of Job, which, though a beautiful poem, is for most modern readers even less consoling than the Consolation of Philosophy. Whether you regard the problem as philosophical or theological, it’s a big one that has disquieted thinking people for eons. Goethe was only six years old when reports of the Lisbon earthquake upended his infant confidence in a providential universe. That even now in legal language “natural disasters” are often called “acts of God”—events in which individual human agency plays no role, at least so far as the insurance company is concerned—is possibly disquieting. From the point of view of the dead deer, was not its grotesque fate as much a natural disaster, and therefore “act of God,” as a great wind or a floodtide? The subject of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” is the premature death of promising youth, one of the classic topics in discussions of theodicy. “Are God and Nature then at strife?”—asks the poet, before anticipating in the poem’s most famous phrase the grim doctrine so many would find in Darwin’s yet unpublished theory of natural selection: Nature red in tooth and claw.
I recognize that I am saddled with various old-fashioned ideas that strike most of my younger contemporaries as quaint at best or at worst, worse; but I hoped that I had progressed beyond the early Victorian period. I walk for healthy recreation, and because I enjoy the freshness of nature even in its carefully contrived suburban preserves. Must I adjudicate the ghastly maggot feast on which I stumbled in terms of a problem in nineteenth-century moral philosophy? Are my interpretive options limited to “Nature red in tooth and claw” and a striking demonstration of providential order through the food chain and a recycling program vastly superior to anything on offer from the Waste Management Corporation?
