Member-only story
Mourning A Brutal Death
A Psychological Response To Suffering And Iniquity
I’d been driving through the vast nothingness of Wyoming’s winterscape for hours when my peripheral vision caught sight of an abnormality in the fence line. I turned my head just in time to catch a glimpse of the tangled hooves as I passed by.
Bringing the pickup to a stop and getting it turned around on the negative-traction slick took miles—I was riding mostly on momentum, the tires all but hovering on top of the compacted ice.
Had the wind and ice conspired against me and caused me to slide off of the asphalt into the deep, hard-crusted snow drifts that lined the two lanes, I would’ve been SOL. I was hours away from any sort of cell coverage, who knows how far I was from anything that could be described as, “Help.”
In a worst case scenario, there were scattered ranch outbuildings in the area that I could’ve walked to. Perhaps I could’ve found a working landline in one of them, or even stumbled into a ranch hand that would’ve been willing to help in some capacity—
—regardless, that wasn’t a situation I wanted to find myself in.
But, I owed the animal the effort; I owed it the risk—which was trivial in comparison to the risks we’d put on its own life.
