The muskrat was dead. It was lying on its back to one side of the path, little rodent teeth bared to the sky, legs splayed, tail straight out. I passed it thinking only, “That’s not a very pleasant addition to the children’s garden,” and I kept cycling, looking for the pond.
At that hour, early on a Monday, and in that weather, cool, misty, and threatening rain, there wasn’t anyone else around. The sign barring bicycles on the garden paths could be ignored with impunity, the need to protect small children wandering about with their caregivers immaterial in that moment. How had the muskrat died?
I cycled around the entire garden space, and even the lawns surrounding it. I didn’t see a pond anywhere. But there was a pond. I’d been told there was a pond, and I needed to find it so that I could be confident in a few days of knowing where to meet the small volunteer corps gathering there to control some invasive species or other. I wasn’t clear on the details. I had a time, a date, and the vague description of “the pond in the children’s garden”.
I decided to cycle back to the carcass. I was curious about it. Not only did I wonder how it had died on a tiny dirt path where no motorized vehicles venture, but also I had never seen a muskrat up close.
The animal had only one visible sign of trauma. A large gash on its belly just above the joint with its left hind leg. A bit of internal organ was visible. I nudged it with my foot. Soft. No rigor mortis. Either recently deceased, within a couple of hours, or older than 24 hours. I guessed the former, since one might expect ravens or other scavengers to have ravaged the body already if it had been killed the day before. I flipped it over, then back again, and finally nudged it off the path and onto the grass so that no one would ride over it or step on it. That also made it a little less visible, although not much. I wondered if I should move it out of sight entirely so as to spare some little kid the sight of it, but part of me believes we don’t need to protect kids from nature’s realities. A small child might feel sad, or shocked, or curious, depending on past experiences and temperament. But such feelings belong to us all, and we all learn to navigate them.
It would be most likely that a park worker would find it first anyway. It was the time of day that they were appearing, tidying things up in preparation for the potential influx of visitors, performing the maintenance chores of the day.
My curiosity sated, I raised my gaze, and saw the pond right there, only about ten metres away from the path. How had I missed it on my first pass by that spot? It made perfect sense that a muskrat wouldn’t be found far from a body of water. I suppose that I had been so focused on the dead animal when I had first cycled past that I hadn’t noticed the pool, which was surrounded by vegetation and dark, with a floating scum of pale green algae. Just as the muskrat had been responsible for my missing the pond, it was now responsible for my finding it. I looked at its wound again. It could have been caused by a bicycle tire. It was hardly a clean slice. Caught by its hind leg and flipped by a fast spinning tire, skin and flesh torn apart, possibly couldn’t run with that injury, died by the trail. Poor thing. Careless cyclists riding too fast where they shouldn’t. I pictured one of those spandex-clad men, bulging calf muscles, body impossibly big on a bike impossibly thin, head angled aerodynamically, paying attention only to the speed. But it was unlikely that one of those riders would stray from the paved path, and wind his way through this little naturalized space. No, the location of the dead muskrat didn’t make sense, and I was probably unfairly blaming a phantom cyclist, projecting my own guilty rule-breaking onto another.
A snapping turtle made more sense. That, or some other predator. I imagined the muskrat, caught by the flap of skin and flesh at its leg joint, pulling, tearing itself away successfully, but with a mortal wound. It made it as far as the path and that was the end of its story. Until I came along, extended that story, and wove it into my own.