In winter no one walked that road.
January was sunny and almost snowless. We were plodding along up to our ankles and Wasyl said, “Look at them all in a huddle.”
Before we reached them they flew off. Crows, white-beaked rooks, ravens, chattering jays, and jays with their wings touched with pale blue.
And some smaller kinds. In the place they took off from we found a deer.
In place of its eyes it had red cavities in a smooth white frame of bone.
Wasyl looked for the wound that had killed it, but the skin was torn in many places. Tufts of drab fur were scattered here and there.
“Maybe it dropped dead, maybe it was shot,” he said, and we walked back.
*
A week later we returned to the same place. From far off you could hear the warning screech of the magpies. Last to fly off was a raven. We heard the air whistle between its flight feathers.
The deer had become a complex white structure. Its ribs spanned an empty place and resembled beams, the rafters of some hall or hangar. I thought of the pavilions at the World’s Fair, perhaps the one in Osaka, or somewhere else. There was no trace of flesh, no trace of blood, just clumps of hair blown by the wind to the edge of the undergrowth a few yards away. Dry thistles decorated with brown and white fluff.
“Look,” said Wasyl, kicking at the snow around the skeleton. His boot slipped on the solid white shell. Birds’ feet had trampled the powdery snow like a threshing floor, into white rock. Even inside, under the tent of bones, it was hard and glistening. Skeleton and snow had fused into a single whole. In a nearby grove of young pines the crows and magpies flapped from branch to branch, waiting for us to be done marveling at their weight.