Red in Tooth and Claw

Blood in the water (or on the ice).

Where the carcass was drug up on the bank.

Leftovers.

Nella looks over the evidence.

Many of you will recognize Darwin's comment about the nature of Nature. This morning we got a first hand look at what he was talking about when we stumbled on a deer kill down near the river. We theorize that a couple of coyotes were able to take down a small deer and devour it. There's not much left of the deer, just some skin and entrails. What's left of the carcass has to be somewhere close by, but we couldn't really look for it since the dogs were going crazy trying to gobble up whatever frozen leftovers were laying around. The predator or predators appear to have caught the deer on a long sand bar on the near side of the river. The struggle took them upstream where the deer was finally killed on the ice. You can see the copious amounts of blood on the ice along the shore in two of the pictures above. After that the deer was drug up on the bank and ripped apart. The only substantial piece of the deer that we found was a big chunk of skin. You can see that in the other two photos. Although this wasn't a big deer from what we could see, there aren't many predators around here that can kill a deer at all. There aren't any wolves or mountain lions. A bobcat could kill a very small deer but anything bigger than a fawn could only be killed by coyotes. Unfortunately, we couldn't really analyze any tracks what with the dogs running around. I'll look for the carcass tomorrow and see if there aren't some definitive signs of coyotes.