I stood under the sun in a field of wild daisies listening to birds as death stink sunk into my skin.

I had gone on a short death walk with a decaying skunk cradled on my shovel. Maggots wriggled through holes in its stretched and bloated skin. Stepping off my path in the woods I crossed a stone wall stacked in place by a forgotten farmer's hands where a weathered post and rusted hinges held barbed wire.

Beneath shadowed pockets I left him in a dark place where death would wave its wand. I turned the shovel over and stomped back home.

He will lay dead in the shade of an old farmer's wall where living things small and invisible will soon trade places and take the death away. The body will bloat, then shrink, then come apart as fur settles in tufts and a granular outline of life waits for rain to smudge it into the ground.

Death deserves sunrise, sunset, and the time it takes to come to an end.

Now we run past the skunk stones near a daisy field sloping toward spring's vernal pool that dries slowly. In late spring living things reach for dry ground.

How did this skunk spray my dogs through the fenced-in pen on Tuesday, then apparently trundle a few feet away to gasp its last beneath the rhododendron bush where I found it Saturday? How, how, how?

I had said, it still smells skunky over here.

Look for flies, Jerry said.

I heard them. Lifting the shrub's lowest limbs I saw a patch of furry black and white and ran. Lily still stinks.