I see dead things

It was a gopher snake, as flat as a sheet of paper, and it lay on a blacktop road in a once-moribund would-be subdivision near us in Genoa, Nevada, where construction ground to a halt with the Great Recession. Thanks to our current housing boom, though, construction sites have been popping up in the sagebrush like ground squirrels. Job trucks come and go, outfitting the retirement dream homes of fleeing Californians with the requisite lodge-y fittings. Traffic on our quiet roads has become brisk.
The local fauna, unfortunately, have not gotten the memo. I cluck with concern when I run into other neighbors on their morning walks.
“Did you see the dead (fill in the blank) down by the (cemetery/bar/pond)?” we ask each other.
I don’t confess to them that, yes, in addition to seeing the dead critter, I have examined and maybe even photographed it.
I used to be the sort of person who desperately averted their eyes when driving toward a squashed squirrel on the road, its tail waving in the breeze of passing traffic like a flag: Look at me! I’m dead! Back then, I lived in a townhouse. I didn’t even have a yard for something to live in, let alone die in. But when I met my husband Mark, he began to agitate for a move to the “country” (yes, this seems to be a pattern.) We wound up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which is chockablock with living as well as dead things. We were awash in wild turkeys and squirrels, raccoons, possums, skunks and deer. Not to mention mountain lions, expert creators and consumers of dead things.
One morning we discovered the mysterious silhouette of a raccoon on our front lawn, composed entirely of fur. As if it had been scared right off the critter and fell to the ground, cartoon-style. (I learned later that mountain lions strip the fur off their prey.)
I think the gateway drug was getting a dog. Dogs, as you know, adore dead things and have a real knack for finding them. Perhaps it was over-identification with my pet, but I began to take an interest in her discoveries.
“What have you got there, girl?” I asked one morning, gazing at what I’d presumed to be a nice stick. It turned out to be a deer leg, the inedible bony lower half with the hoof — basically a mountain lion’s toothpick. And lo, I realized that it wasn’t particularly gruesome. In fact, the engineering of a deer leg was pretty darned interesting. Those spindly little things can propel a deer over a six foot fence? What the heck?
A few years hence, after our move to Nevada, I became intimately acquainted with the Genoa Deer, who are nearly as famous as the Genoa Bar. Herds roam the town like marauding gangs. They’re a bit of a tourist attraction, not to mention a driving hazard. The near-fanatical enforcement of the 25-mile per hour speed limit here is about reducing auto-on-deer violence, and vice versa. One neighbor even posted a sign that read, “Slow! Suicidal Deer Crossing!”

While everyone complains about them, I think Genoans are secretly proud of our ambling ungulates. Just the other morning I spotted my neighbor (despite the warning notices posted everywhere) surreptitiously hand-feeding two mature bucks in his yard. My husband puts out a seed block in the backyard “for the birds” which we both know is largely enjoyed by the deer who hop blithely over our fence, ignoring Zorra, our 90-pound dog, relaxing on the patio.
Thank goodness, Zorra is completely uninterested in deer. I’ve watched the older does swinging those little matchstick legs, Punch-and-Judy style, to bat and bludgeon naive yearlings who dare approach the yummy seed block. A neighbor told me that her Pomeranian was stomped to death by an angry doe who’d given birth to a fawn in her yard.
Just yesterday morning, Z-dog and I met up with a doe and fawn on a trail, and as we attempted to pass, Zorra displaying her typical blase attitude, mama deer began to walk toward us with an unmistakable You lookin’ at me? attitude. We turned around.
Where there are deer, of course, there are coyotes and mountain lions. Every now and then we’ll be sitting on the patio and see Zorra’s nose begin to writhe in pleasure. Then, being humans and slow on the olfactory uptake, we’ll finally catch a whiff of something funky.
“Smells like something dead,” I’ll say, and walk out on the fairway behind our house, where there is, reliably, a half-eaten deer carcass.
But I’m curious these days, rather than repelled. Why did this particular deer meet her maker? Was it the handiwork of coyotes we heard the previous night?
Dead things are everywhere in Nevada, especially in interior decor and retail merchandising. Nevadans love their taxidermy. Step out of a plane at Reno-Tahoe International Airport, and you’ll receive a crash course in Things You Can Kill Here. There is a gorgeous black bear taking down a beehive (you can’t kill those, actually), a mountain lion stalking a deer who is inexplicably hiding in a burrow in the ground, and a huge bobcat attempting to swat down a pheasant it’s just flushed, all displayed in the terminal. The local outdoor store, Sportsman’s Warehouse, displays an astonishing amount of taxidermied game, along with notes about where that particular mountain goat or stag or elk was “taken” (a Hemingwayish euphemism that sounds so much more reasonable than “killed as blood sport.”)
It’s not just hunters here who love to display dead things. A gallery owner I met, who has a spectacular contemporary space that would be right at home in New York or LA, had her pet golden eagle, a licensed rescue who could not be rehabilitated and released, taxidermied after the magnificent bird went to her reward. Even this required a special permit. The enormous raptor — nearly as big as the woman— is now mounted above the gallerist’s desk, as if about to swoop down and carry Turkey off. (Yes, that’s her name.)
Dead things seem to be “trending.” On a visit to Portland several years back, we visited a store with quasi-Victorian affectations that sold “natural curiosities,” including spooky bell jars containing preserved critters, various mounted insects, and small mammal skulls. There was an air of genteel macabre about the place, and its lavishly-tatted staff were quite knowledgeable, geeky even. (See? Biology can be badass!)
We spent an hour in there, and I picked out a pair of snake-vertebrae earrings for my niece as a Christmas gift. Still, I couldn’t imagine just…purchasing one of those adorable bat skulls. I mean, what happens when company comes over?
“Wow, what’s that?”
“A bat skull, actually.”
“Oh my God, where on earth did you find it?”
“I bought it in a store.”
See what I mean? Not a very good story. Animal remains shouldn’t be sold like band merch of the dead. Just the thought of an employee receiving the weekly shipment of bat skulls and entering them into inventory…somehow, it just loses something.
The other day I noticed that one of these places had opened in another hipster heaven, Midtown Reno. It seems that dead things are now a Thing.
Back to my flattened snake. As I stooped to examine it, I noticed something strange. It had fur. I looked closer and realized that this snake actually contained two flattened mice. (Yes, I counted the tails. And feet.) She must have been commuting home after a successful night of hunting in the sagebrush and stopped to enjoy a snake spa treatment: luxuriating on warm pavement.
This was something! I took a picture of it and texted it to my niece Francesca, an avid “herper” (reptile enthusiast.) Fran is a fan of something called “night cruising.” It’s not what it sounds like. She and her herper buddies drive around in the dark looking for snakes basking on roads. So, good news, bad news: warm asphalt is quite a boon to snake enthusiasts, just not to snakes.
Later, scrolling through my photos with a local artist friend, I quickly swiped past the snake-carcass picture, which was nestled among lovely snapshots of a visit to Lake Tahoe and an exceptionally pretty high desert sunrise.
“What was that?” she asked.
“A dead snake with two mice in its stomach,” I confessed, swiping back to it and showing her.
“Whoa!” she exclaimed, with true, Nevada-style appreciation. “Cool!”
