Winter has been cruel on all creatures, leaving the earth marked by frozen bodies, small and lifeless beneath the paws of creatures with bigger things on their minds. Who stops to mourn the curled form of a dead mouse, the torn feathers of a crow? Their kin, perhaps, if they have a concept of kin at all. Yet these deaths bring with them celebration, too, the hungry scavenger finding an easy meal, the hungry, frozen root finding nutrient under soil. 

 Bigger than the mouse and crow is the elk. Winter has been cruel for him, too, crueler than most: while wolves live out their petty dramas, illness takes hold under muscle and in blood. Slow at first, impossible to detect. Fatigue sets in. The elk takes shelter in the deepest parts of the forest with no patience for his wolfly settlers. 

 There will be other elk in this forest come spring. There will be the calf his cow will bear. Yet does it not seem unfair, the ceaseless turning of mortality's clock? The elk is smart, smarter than wolf gives credit: he is smart enough to not give in to existentialism. Let the wolves worry death like a bone between their teeth, like his bones between their greedy teeth. A mighty snort escapes him.

Snow is beginning to fall, gently, gently, over the collapsed form, a smudge of black swallowed by white. The elk's chest heaves once, twice, and then there is nothing. ​