Fair Ellen-A Remembrance

October 15, 2015

I could tell it was her 500 yards away, because she was so small, and her head never went up quite right, or as high as it should. 

I was always glad to see her, glad, I guess, that she'd survived another week, month, year, or minute.

My heart followed her all year long, for nine years. 

Life is hard enough for a whitetail who's born perfect. 

But there was something going on with Ellen, that looked to me like a birth defect.

Her high-domed forehead, her crooked eyes, the swing and slant of her head.

No, the girl wasn't right, and I loved her fiercely for it, and for her spirit that put her shoulder to shoulder with does a third larger than she, and duking it out for her place in her little herd.

When a cretin killed her with his cruel arrow in November, 2016, giving her to the coywolves who reduced her to a small pile of bones in the hayfield

something in me couldn't let her go. I went out there with a bucket and took her head, but not before the coy-wolves chewed off her nasal bones. 

I'm a long way past caring if anyone thinks that's weird. If you're here and reading, you're ready for weird. Science Chimps don't care if people think they're weird. The need to know overwhelms.

I put Ellen's head in a bucket and kept it covered with water. I covered that with a cardboard box so it wouldn't smell too bad. And it didn't, because it was winter, and it was out in the garage.

On warm days I'd dump it and put in fresh water. Other than that, I let it go. This is a process called "maceration," and having done it with a gorgeous 8-point buck head (not the one pictured below), I know water to be the greatest cleanser and purifier of all. 

All you have to do is give it time.

Along about mid-May, she was ready to come out. That malodorous bucket of water, decanted and rinsed,  gave a little piece of Ellen back to me. 

After a couple of days in the May sunshine she was clean as a whistle.

I considered her asymmetrical eye sockets

and the leftward sweep of her entire skull.

Her teeth were in remarkably good shape, I thought, for a doe of at least 9 years.

Her domed forehead stands out in profile.

 But wait. There's something extra, something flat out weird going on at the back of her skull. What's that unit sort of dripping off the back?

Oh my God. Her atlas vertebra is fused to her skull. This vertebra, which should be free-moving and articulated and separated by a cartilage pad from the skull proper, is anything but. No wonder Ellen couldn't raise her head! And no wonder it pointed off to the side!

For contrast, here's a normal whitetail skull (below). 

Occipital condyles, in place and normal. Not fused to the atlas vertebra and drooling off the back of his skull. 

So Ellen's foramen magnum is about 2" farther down her spine than it would normally be. 

My friend Boneman (Bruce Mohn, who will be forever remembered for the dinosaur talon he made for my dino-crazy Liam) asked his colleague Lawrence Witmer, a vertebrate functional morphologist at Ohio University, about such a deformity, and Dr. Witmer was kind enough to go into OSU's collection and photograph this somewhat similar doe skull. A partial fusion, not as dramatic as Ellen's. Dr. Witmer advised that this can be the result of an injury or a congenital condition. I note the same domed cranium in this animal that Ellen displayed, and I'm going to guess they both were born this way.

Ah Ellen. Even in death you teach me. It comforts me to take you back from cruel people and the ivory teeth of scavengers,

to keep a bit of you safe in the studio, where I so often sat and watched you come shyly to the spruce for corn.

There will never be another like you.

If you are just stumbling onto Ellen, and you want her whole story, and you have an entire box of Kleenex handy, read "Love Lies Bleeding."  It starts out talking about morning glories and then goes to oil and gas drilling and finally comes around to the idiotic way that I, and the world, lost Ellen. Then I give you links to ALL the Ellen posts, in order. It's good, it's worth reading.