Death of a Decade

I woke up early this morning, and went out to search for a doe I shot yesterday evening. I shot the deer in the last of the day's light, and though we found blood, the deer did not fall before disappearing into the laurel thickets. There was a full moon last night, yet despite that the darkness was too thick, and losing the trail, we gave up for the night and left the doe, dead, dying, or merely grazed, out in the woods. I was bitter about giving up; I'd been hunting with a muzzleloader, but the deer had been close. It should have been a clean kill, on one of the last days of a fruitless hunting season. But instead of a body, I was left with a sense of guilt and a poor night's sleep. Today, waking in the pre-storm, slate gray morning to go search for whatever the coyotes may have left of the doe, I wasn't exactly in a pleasant New Year's mood.

It's one of those auspicious New Years that come every ten years; today is the last day of a decade. It's meaningless, really, an artificial designation on an otherwise uninterrupted timeline. But for us humans, place-markers like decades and years and millennia are vital, and keep us sane. And, as far as decades go, it's been a monumental one.

I don't need to go into the details of the past ten years to conjure up a sense of the changes we've seen. The rise of technology and terrorism, the fall of the glaciers and the ice-caps, the vindication of greed and the loss of privacy...I'm sure it's my mindset today that makes the last ten years seem so gloomy.

But, if nothing else, at least this will be one New Years when nostalgia gives way to hope for the future. It isn't easy, of course; the trends of global warming, fundamentalist violence, and environmental catastrophe will only increase in the coming years. Even so, looking back offers no solace. You simply have to hope that things will improve.

For my part, I'm putting my head down and keeping my fingers crossed. I find my joy in the small world around me, and maybe that's enough. The cows are happy, and so are the pigs, and maybe their own small happiness can be enough to sustain my own. Before venturing out to look for that wounded deer, I fed the animals, my morning, depressing as it was, begun in a cacophony of squeals and moos and braying. My day will end the same way. That's something.

We couldn't find the doe. The trail vanished, hoof-prints running together and disappearing in the leaf litter. Maybe even now her bones lay down out on the forest floor. But even then, the coyotes and the crows will have eaten. I feel bad about it, as I should, but there's nothing to be done but learn from my mistakes. Even now, as I write, the sun's come out, gleaming off the snow that fell all morning. It's a bright afternoon, filled with potential.

And tonight, the first decade of the new millennium ends. Good riddance. Let's start thinking about tomorrow.