Road Kill

We stopped at our AN’s today to deliver some Christmas goodies, and ended up visiting for a while. Among the many subjects we touched on, one was road kill. Specifically, that my mom, in the last year or two she lived here, would go out road kill gathering in order to feed the ravens!

Our AN’s wife told the tale something like this:

Your mom was driving the two of us somewhere, and I noticed blood stains in the back of her van. I told her she might consider ceasing the practice of hauling road kill back to the property or people would think oddly of her. She quipped that people already thought her odd, so why quit.

Our AN’s wife described mom hauling a huge raccoon out of the back of the van. So heavy that she couldn’t lift it, but rather let it thump to the ground. How did she get it in the car?? Our AN said mom not only had the ravens in the palm of her hands, but eagles too! They pondered that this could be why mom was alway driving somewhere… The things you learn about your parents!

My DH and I have circled back to this topic a couple of times today. How did mom manage her foraging? The Island roads do not have space to pull over next to a prize bit of road kill. Did she park in the nearest drive and walk back to the dead critter? How did she not get run over herself? While the top speed here is only 45MPH, stopping in a hurry on windy roads because an 80-year old is harvesting dead animals for her eagles and ravens wouldn’t be easy. People do not drive less than the speed limit and often push the speed boundary a little. And where are the skeletons? If the raptors and corvids didn’t carry off the bones, mom must have cleaned them up.

While I adore knowing this about my mom, I’m glad I didn’t know she was a road kill warrior in the moment she was actively harvesting. It would have been one more thing to fill me with anxiety, and one more thing I had zero control over.