"Look What You Did!"

I was on my way home from work, driving along a semi-rural road; newer housing development on one side, wooded area bordering the river on the other.  Up ahead, I saw a large bird exhibiting some very strange behavior.  The bird was hopping backwards, dragging the carcas of what turned out to be a dead raccoon across the road.  Then I realized that the dead raccoon was the one I had hit that morning on the way to work.

The bird flew off before I could see whether it was a very large crow or a very small buzzard.  Either way, it was impossible not to anthropomorphize the bird, with the it clearly screaming, "You killed this raccoon, MF!  Look what you did!  Just ... Look ... At ... What ... You ... Did!"

My morning had been like any other.  I drive to work in the dark and always see at least a couple animals: possums, deer, raccoons, the occasional skunk.  There are very few streetlights during my commute, so often I just see their eyes ghostly reflecting the light from my headlights.
I just requested The Straight Story from the library...  It seemed appropriate.
But that morning, a raccoon had been on the side of the road.  He saw me, I saw him.  We both took evasive action.  Unfortunately we both took evasive action right into each other.  My front left tire made direct contact into dire consequences to the raccoon.
I felt bad.

I do hunt, so it may seem surprising that killing the raccoon made me feel bad.  Our rural roads are littered with road kill - it happens all the time.  But I don't like indiscriminate killing, killing for killing's sake.  Maybe it is because I hunt that I'm sensitive to this.  Killing an animal as a deliberate act to take it home and eat it is entirely different from killing an animal on my way to work.  Thud-thud.  The raccoon dies.  So it goes.
The year I started hunting, a deer I shot was not recovered.  This made me feel very, very bad at the time.  The next season I found a deer skeleton about 100 yards beyond where I, and my neighbor who I was hunting with, stopped looking for the doe.  I've always wondered if that was the same deer.  I learned two lessons.  One, don't take iffy shots (it wasn't, but I was excited).  Two, if in doubt, always look a little more.

But there is an even larger lesson from an old deer skeleton.  From the road kill that lay strewn across the roads.  From the thud-thud of my truck's tires in the early morning hours.  These dead animals don't lay around in perpetuity.  Our roads are not strewn with an ever increasing pile of carcasses.  Nothing in nature ever goes to waste.
From the putrid, road-kill skunk to the ground hog shot by a pellet gun after the third attempt to dig his hole along my house to the enormous dead whale on the bottom of the ocean, everything gets eaten.  Everything dead feeds something else.
No, maggots and flies, coyotes, and turkey vultures may not be the most cute and cuddly of wild animals, but they all thrive on the dead.  I've seen road-kill deer be turned into scattered bones within a matter of days in the heat of summer.  The last remnants may go slowly, but feed a rich biome of microorganisms to trees.

So maybe that odd bird, hopping backwards across the road dragging the raccoon remains wasn't screaming how evil I am.  Maybe that anthropomorphized avian was saying, "Look what you did!  You made me dinner.  I'm gonna eat well on this dead SOB!"