It was not a job Ryan enjoyed, but looking at the pasture-paddock, he saw no other choice. Across the hillside, there were only weeds: ragweed, briars, and a lower weed that smothered the ground and no animal would eat.
For years, he’d left alone, as the cattle picked through and ate on the grass between; taking too the tops out of weeds and keeping enough of an open canopy for the grasses to continue; but after seasons of gaining ground, going to head and spreading ever thicker, the weeds won out. They controlled the earth, blocked light from grass beneath, smothering the good and raising high what no animal would eat.
It was the only way to give a chance, and so Ryan brought the old tractor and disked-blade mower and began. He cut slow the end row perimeter of the paddock, keeping near to the fenceline, blades beating and thrashing and grinding and leaving the weeds cut and managed in spread of green chaff beneath the keeping blades. Sprouts were cut, their shattering of wood sounding as they beat and broke apart in the centrifugal force of iron’s momentum.
Around and around he went, each lap drawing nearer to the pasture’s center, nearer to a total clearing and open ground to start again.
By the third pass, nature of the pasture changed.
First to appear were swallows, violet bodied and wide split tails with orange and cream bellies, small beaks left open as they swooped and danced and spun in the sky feasting on the scatter of insects before the mower’s annihilation of their weeded cover-world.
All around the open ground, the swallows swooped, following in tow and feasting rich on the insects in stunned attempt-escape.
Next appeared vultures, black and large-bodied that glided slow in air, and sometimes—it seemed—completely still, surveying the carnage and eyeing sight of death and open flesh prepared by encounter with mower’s blade. Eyeing, they swooped lower, gaining better sight, seeing if body would scatter. Some rested on tops of the hedge fence posts that held gates, passageways from one paddock to the next, centuries that hunted not the living, but consumed the empty vessels of broken bodies death already claimed.
Ryan watched as the birds swept low, red faces and tiny eyes, and their lighting on the ground; still beside the focus of their beaded eyes, ensuring life departed before curve of beak began tearing of the flesh and consuming of the body.
Sometimes, when one vulture started in, others would accompany; and they would fight over the small meal when there were others lying all around. With their small heads and beady eyes, what other had was all that they could see.
Maybe envy and covetousness were not solely human features.
Round and round, Ryan kept, making low the weeds, and as he drew nearer into pasture’s center, larger animals began to flush. There were the fat field mice that bounced into and out of the beaten brush of mowed lanes as they fled out from the closing cover and sought hiding where little remained.
Rabbits too; the hillside was covered in rabbits that flushed as singles and family dens, parents seeking to evade the blades and young bunnies of ground-top nests seeking to follow; confusion of the parents as they sought their own safety and, too, those of their little ones.
New birds from high appeared.
Then came the hawks and smaller, faster, falcons. Above the open ground they held afloat in watch, and finding began their falling strikes; talon pin and clasping ending on the field mice, which they ate right on the ground, but the rabbits endured a longer terror.
He watched as a falcon made off with one, a meal nearly the falcon’s size that raptor struggled to lift and raise, falling low to the earth between, never releasing, as he made for limbs of waiting treeline.
He could not near it over drone of tractor and beating blades, but he knew the sound that would carry, high shrill cry of rabbit in terror that attracts predators far and wide: drawn to feast, or sound of fear, living reason for its cry.
Away the falcon kept, and he knew, when in the branches, cry of the rabbit would cease, beak making quick work as it tore out its throat then opened its underbelly, starting into entrail feast.
For as much as man speaks with romanticism of nature’s beauty, nature is cold and cruel and heartless. Such is the way that nature’s made. It can be no different.
Ryan thought of angels, of stories in the Bible—of beauty and violence and obedience to God’s making of their nature—and wondered if they were, in way, the same.
Ryan watched, as the birds of all kinds continued, and he thought to himself, “They really had no chance. It was all a matter of lots. You were either taken or allowed to live, but right then—all were at will and chance of fate. They couldn’t make it to the cover.”
This was Ryan’s thought, and as he kept in steady rounds, he observed further on. Blackbirds came in flock not for flesh, but to pick through the seeds scattered from what was mown. They arrived in flock that spread on opened earth, picking through the seed; and before him—as he mowed—another rabbit flushed; but this one was different.
It did not make in race across the open. It did not flee or panic.
It escaped the blades, and then lied low, tucking ears against its body and flattening long in profile beside tanned stem clump that matched its body tone. From open hide, it did not move. It did not flee, but stayed still and composed as the raptors circled high, falling in force on those that fled in panic across clearings without cover.
Ryan observed from seat on high as, holding, he passed the rabbit by.
The raptors would not get them all.
Ryan lamented the carnage. He had no choice. Without his action, the pasture would be lost; but the lowering of the weeding canopy would open the ground again for better growth; even if there was carnage now for the living.
Mowing still, he contemplated all he had observed—the arriving of the birds, winged reapers, appearing in echelon of size and target game.
He thought of God and angels, degrees and levels of sin, and the terror of last-days; the reaping of angels from above in judgment, feasting first on the smaller sinners and rising in target to larger wrongs, new angels’ arriving for targets of different size and sin.
The mowing, he imagined lived much like the rapture and end of days.
He imagined God would feel as he, not wishing to do what he knew he must; lamenting the leveling and laying low of what once was fruitful but was overtaken by only weeds; knowing from the leveling, there would be reaping from the sky as lives scattered in wrecking of a world, but what other choice remained?
To do nothing was to surrender it all to Hell.