It was untouched, a perfect, smooth muscle. A gigantic, overripe strawberry. I could not stop myself.
Sometime long after daybreak, a Florida panther killed a doe on the swamp buggy path at Wooten’s Everglades Airboat Trips, on the north side of the Tamiami Trail in Ochopee, where the fresh water is. The buggy driver must have jumped the cat because the doe’s body was still warm, half-eaten from the upper ribs down. The guts were gone and the stomach, too. So there lay the deer, the buggy driver said, neck and head intact, the black eyes open and large, looking like a deer ought to look, but the space between her sets of legs was half missing and half a bloody, meaty mess. Claw marks ripped through brown hair above the white ridge of exposed rib bones. Open and clean incisions, like scalpel work. The buggy driver called for JD and Rob, a couple of the airboat boys, to dispose of the body. It was too much for tourists to see, nature like this. Like it really is. Someone was bound to complain.
When the boys got to the scene, they looked inside the hole and saw her fawn, still wrapped in placenta. Its heart was beating but not much. They cut the baby out and breathed into its nostrils but the mama had been dead too long and so the baby went, too, the white rim of its hooves saying it had about three more weeks before it was ready to be born. The cat had taken the milk sack with the stomach and most of the intestines. The most nourishment must come first. That is the way of life.
I saw JD and Rob from the parking lot across the road from the swamp buggy ride, on the south side of the Trail where the salt water intruded into the wet prairies and fed the mangrove forests. They’d put the body on the bed of Rob’s white pickup truck. The gate was down. Rob clamped the doe’s hind legs between his fingers like changing a baby’s diaper and ran a rubber water hose in the body cavity with his other hand to rinse it out.
The truck bounced across the gravel lot to where I stood at the gift shop and entrance of the grim roadside zoo they called a sanctuary to help the tourists feel better about the animals trapped inside. My vanload of Everglades tourists zipped somewhere on a homemade airboat, probably in the far mangroves judging by the mosquito buzz of the distant engine.
They had put the dead fawn in an empty sack of deer feed. They threw the corn to keep the deer on the buggy trail for the tourists. Tourists like deer. They are cute and lovable. Innocent.
JD asked me if I’d ever seen a panther kill before, and I said no.
Do you want to?
Yes.
They drove away, JD motioning me to follow. When I got to the white pickup truck, now parked behind the corrugated building next to the tiger pen, the end of the zoo, Rob was already skinning what was left of the doe, peeling the coarse hide from the red velvet streamers of her muscles, the white sheet of connective tissue pulling away simple as bands of coconut taffy.
“She’s still so warm,” Rob said, looking at me for the first time. He’d taken charge of the skinning and the butchery, worked at it like a surgeon, too focused to concern himself with me until this one moment. He dismantled the panther’s kill with no gloves and a borrowed knife.
He placed his palm on her flank: “This meat is warm.”
The boys were going to eat her, and I stood next to them as they quartered her up. JD disappeared for a minute to find a metal pipe.
“This is the tenderest,” Rob said to me, a loin flopping in his hand. Then, after asking me if I wanted to see the really sad part, he rooted in the bottom of the feed sack and lifted up the dead, wet fawn. It was perfect. It dangled in his hand, the Braille of its white spots wrote the story of its life along its back.
“Is my knife any sharp?” JD said.
“Hell naw,” Rob said. They laughed. Everybody knows what a shame it is to have a knife not sharp enough.
What’s this? I ask. It’s some white bulb, a balloon of sorts, between her legs. Is that her bladder?
“Naw. Bladder’s eaten,” Rob said.
Her ovary?
“Naw, naw, couldn’t be. Gotta be like an intestine or part of it or something.” JD found another knife not sharp enough and cut around her front ankle like a new bottle of salad dressing. He peeled her hide from the front end, and he was quick, quick enough to splatter some blood and a thin spray of meat on my shirt so I moved between the boys to shield me. That’s when I saw her heart.
It sat inside the empty chest cavity, alone; her baby gone, her guts gone, her milk sack eaten by a panther long after the sun came up. Now there were two grown men stripping her hair and soon about to break her hip and shoulder joints with a metal pipe. But there was her heart, resting, like the clapper of a silent bell, inside of her.
It was untouched, a perfect, smooth muscle. A gigantic, overripe strawberry. I could not stop myself.
I reached into her chest and cradled her heart in my palm. The weight of a softball, a humid puzzle of fibers, it felt the way I want my heart to feel, like I spent my life running hard and fast, breathing the weather into it. Her heart had lived up to its potential. In a half hour, the boys would throw it to the water for the wild gators, and it would be gone.
The deer heart was the realest thing I ever saw running tours of the Everglades, which anybody will tell you has long since been ruined by the ideas of men.
This article appears in Oct 6-13, 2016.