Circles of life

5/3/13
You can smell death from several dozen meters away. Though it's funny we call the stench death, when it's really an abundance of life. Millions of bacteria popping off; hundreds of thousands of maggots hatching and munching their way toward airborne adulthood; and however many ants can fit along a pheromone trail three centimeters wide by three or four hillocks long. Turning flesh into sugar and sugar into gas. Wretched, gag-inducing, fetid gas. The smell of life.

The smell of death is nothing. Naught. Absence. Vacuum.

But life! In teeming circles on and around this baby zebra. Awful, sweet, thick, heavy. Clinging to nostrils, to clothes, to air, to memory. I like to picture the world according to olfactory-favoring animals. I see throbbing waves of vivid color coming off this little black-and-white-striped offering. A bloom of hope for acres around, bigger than the treetops, brighter than the sun, denser than the bush. A little creature who almost was. Or rather, was for less than a season. Was for just enough to see a few glorious rainy weeks. Spared the cracking terror and daily torment of the next seven parched months of dry. He was lucky. From a certain point of view.

And so were the cheetahs, who happened upon the little guy at the edge of his herd. Perhaps he'd wandered after a butterfly, curious about this new world around. Perhaps he'd been spooked by a scorpion and run off. Perhaps he'd stumbled during a life-and-death chase. Perhaps he simply was slow.

Either way, his luck and the cheetahs' luck were inverse. Finite balance points in the universe, a tangible clockwork neutral. In the mottled shadows under the bush next to the kill lie two bloated forms, mottled shadows rising and falling in pained panting. They're resting and digesting, between stuffing themselves as full as possible. Literally as full as possible. Because who knows when their next meal will be. So they eat and rest, eat and rest, panting and lifting their heads just enough to check their surroundings, layering shreds of meat into stretched bellies, laying in calories for the next several days or weeks.

At night, hyenas close in for their turn. Too full to defend their kill, the cheetahs watch as the big slouching carnivores tear into the remains, crunching bone like rock candy, gulping greedy hunks and shredding the corpse even further where nimble little nocturnals can nibble and gnaw in safety.

By next day, the kill is little more than a stain, a trample spot in the tall grass. Splintered bones are carried off by teams of ants. Butterflies slurp up the leftover moisture. Flies return to the scene, perhaps remembering their first and final feast as maggots. A dung beetle scrapes and rolls someone's evacuation from the night before, tidying up the site. The original players are nowhere to be seen, vanishing back into the bush. Cheetahs hiding whole and fat, baby zebra split and shared and returning to dust.