Regret and Racoons

On the mail route the other day, I saw a dead racoon lying on the centerline. I drove by it twice and didn't take the time to move it, and I'm regretting it now. That's the second dead coon I've seen in the past 3 days. The other was lying in the middle of a frozen lake with tire tracks across it's back. Someone apparently thought it would be fun to run it down and kill it. I didn't move that one either (I was to busy wiping its guts off from my dog because he rolled in it), and of course I regret that too. Ever since reading this passage by Dennis Martinez I've tried to move roadkill off the road when time permits.

"The words conservation and ecology, as we use them in the Western sense, don't exactly fit what Indian people did or do with the land. It was their livelihood, which depended on reciprocity. Thus, the trees were not seen as trees, they were also seen as relatives. The trees are relatives and other species are relatives and they watched you all the time. It was a forest that looked at you to see how you were handling the remains of plants and animals.

"An animals shadow soul is alive for a long time after an animal is killed, and it watches how you treat the remains

." [Dennis Martinez, pg. 93 Original Instructions]