Though it happened about a month ago, on a Thursday evening in August a mile down the road, I can’t seem to shake my mental images of the pathetic carcass, my first suspicion that something was amiss, the many subsequent, related observations, or the stench that eventually rose.

I wasn’t alone in curiosity. Neighborhood questions swirled: Why did the carcass linger for five days? How did it move from its side to its back, legs pointing to the heavens? Why not a word about it anywhere in the local press, given the circumstances?

Why would the press be interested, you ask? We’ll get to that. Bear with me.

What we are discussing is a road-killed doe who met her maker at a game-crossing spot on Colrain Road. Left behind were her twin orphaned fawns, spots faded from the naked eye, who lurked for days on the margins of death. Why, they must have wondered, would their mother not spring to her feet and continue showing them the way?

Although we often hear and speak of nature’s incredible beauty and majesty, let us not forget there’s another side of it as well. Call it ugly nature, or tragic nature – in this case, the poignant reality of sudden, violent death on a rural roadway through Greenfield. Though I’ve seen hundreds of deer in my daily travels up and down this road on which I’ve lived for 30 years, this was only the second roadkill. The first, a large doe in the 130-pound range, had lain long and warm on an early-morning lawn a stone’s throw from our most recent kill.

I happened upon the recent roadkill on my daily 7 a.m. trip to the neighborhood variety store. There I typically pour myself the first cup of coffee sold and pay for it at the till while engaging in playful banter with owner Bill. Though it went unmentioned to Bill, less than a mile up the road my attention had been drawn to a compact silver Chevy SUV pulled over with its emergency lights flashing. In front of the vehicle stood a balding man, looking at something across a shallow, scalped hayfield between the road and a woodlot.

With my view blocked by his vehicle and a thin line of tall, opaque roadside brush, I couldn’t see the object of his fascination until I had passed him. Then I could see he was observing two small deer standing skittishly some 50 yards away, along the edge of a small marsh curling into the woods. Though there was nothing unusual about the sighting, I did suspect something odd about the deer’s behavior. To my eye, what they displayed was confusion.

Then immediate questions. Two fawns? A small young doe and one fawn? Hard to decipher from what I had seen. Maybe I could better assess it if they were still there on my way back through. Thus, my hurry at the till. No time for small talk.

In recent weeks, driving past the same site, cornfield on the other side of the road, I had been seeing a doe with two fawns and another doe with one fawn. Separated family groups. Then, more recently, I’d seen them feeding together in a group of five. But what about this fresh sighting? Same deer?

On my way home, the SUV was gone but, sure enough, the two deer were still standing in virtually the same spot, looking like they were nervous about coming toward the road. No sooner had I passed them than I noticed a large bloodstain on the east edge of the road and, go figure, a deer carcass lying dead on its side a pace or two from a utility pole.

Aha! Now I understand. Twin fawns had seen their mother killed in the road, and didn’t want to leave her.

“They’ll stay close to the mother until her carcass is removed,” my naturalist brother-in-law told my wife on the phone when told of the situation. Retired on an idyllic, 150-acre, Maine gentleman’s farm he’s massaged into a nature preserve, he has beaucoup experience with deer and knows them well.

Sure enough, just as he said, the carcass remained for five long days and the fawns never wandered far from it until it was finally removed on a Tuesday morning.

It seemed the whole neighborhood knew about the dead deer and the pathetic fawns, and everyone was talking, especially worried the three-month-olds could not survive without their mother, or would themselves get picked off in the road.

I tried to gather information about the roadkill for a day or two before finally connecting with an eyewitness to the immediate aftermath. On his way home on a Thursday evening, he reported, he happened upon quite a gathering of law-enforcement, fire and rescue teams, neighbors, and passerby gawkers who pulled over to investigate. What he learned on the scene was that the deer had been killed, not by a car or truck, but by a motorcycle.

Bystanders told my source the operator appeared to be seriously injured, complaining that he could not move when being attended by rescue teams. I hope the apparent paralysis was temporary. Maybe the immediate result of a head injury. But how would I know? I’m no doctor.

Wild stuff, huh? Motorcycle kills deer. Emergency responders rush to the scene. Twin orphaned fawns disoriented. Biker on the road, conscious but unable to move.

I don’t know if it’s true, but I suspect it is. My source, a retired cop who’s intimately familiar with such accident scenes, likely knew a member or two of the responding rescue crew. So, I trust his report.

I asked around for days and no one, including the retired cop, had seen, read, or heard a word about the accident in the news. It surprised me. I spent 40 years of my life working in the local newsroom, where the scanner was always squawking, photographers and scribes tuned in, on the ready. Such a daytime event would have never been missed.

What happened? Was someone asleep at the wheel? Out to lunch? In a meeting? Did the accident make the Police Report?

Hmmm?

Maybe someone reading this has answers. Not breaking news by now. More like ancient history.

So, that’s all I’ve got. Comfortably retired, I’m done with the chase. Just thought I’d toss it out there, into the local-news tangle.

I guess you could call it trolling, in outdoor-writing parlance.

No. Better still, chumming.