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Anyone who is in close touch with Nature is aware that most wild creatures do not die of old age. The general rule is that eventually, due to weakness brought on by age, illness or injury, one wild creature becomes food for another. Scavengers, from birds and mammals, to insects and microbes, attend the demise and recycle the remains in the circle of death and rebirth.

Accidents are a part of this, too. They happen in the wild, and not just when creatures cross highways, or fly into moving vehicles, power lines or picture windows. Every once in awhile we come across the evidence, and may be taken aback by what seems a very unlikely way to meet one's demise.

Just this weekend, a musky of about 40 inches was found floating dead on the surface of the lake where our family cabin sits. It was almost white with its skin faded in death, but the distinctive bar-like pattern on its sides unmistakably identified it as a musky.

Also unmistakable was the cause of its death. Lodged headfirst in the musky's gaping jaws was a largemouth bass. It didn't take a CSI team and their forensics lab to unravel the plot. A bass too large for a musky of this size to get past its jaws was a good fish in its own right.

Unlike many fish, a musky's jaws open to a spread almost as great as its body circumference; fitting for a species at the top of the food chain. But this time, its "eyes were too big for its stomach," as we sometimes say about human eating habits. More precisely, too big for its jaws.

Unable to get the bass past its mouth, the musky also was unable to disgorge it. One look inside a musky's mouth explains why this might be difficult. Spike-like canine teeth line its jaws, and the roof and floor of its mouth have brush-like pads of tightly-packed smaller teeth. Unlike sharks, which a musky's toothy armament brings to mind, muskies do not bite or tear their prey, but swallow it whole.[[In-content Ad]]

As anglers we've experienced just how hard it can be to get treble hooks out of a fish, or a piece of clothing or other gear we accidentally snag. Especially if the large bass had any struggle left in it, one can imagine how difficult it might have been for the musky to release all those dagger-like teeth. It couldn't; and as a result both fish eventually died locked in this struggle.

I've seen a similar drama up close, in "real time" as it happened. While fishing a small river for trout, standing immobile in the current, I watched a foot-long brown trout trying to swallow a brook trout of about seven inches. The brown had the brookie clamped cross-wise in its jaws, and was doing its best to turn the smaller fish to swallow head-first.

But each time the brown trout loosened its grip to accomplish this maneuver, the brookie, still full of life, would resist, and the brown had to clamp down again to prevent its getting away. I watched this struggle for almost 10 minutes before the trout drifted downstream beyond my vision, the brown so intent on not losing a meal that it had paid no attention to my wader-clad legs just a few feet from it.

Another group of creatures that swallow their prey whole, the snakes, have a special anatomical feature that would have helped our unfortunate musky. They have specially adapted jaws that some say can "un-hinge" to enlarge. Their jaws are actually joined at their terminal end by a ligament, rather than being anchored in the skill. This ligament stretches and allows them to swallow prey even larger than their mouth at normal size.

Accidents of other kinds claim victims in the wild, too. There are numerous records of buck deer dying with their antlers locked together, a consequence of battles during mating season as bucks compete for the opportunity to breed with does that are coming into heat.

In winter, animals crossing unsafe ice fall through and are unable to free themselves, more common on rivers and streams where the flowing water keeps the ice from freezing solid enough to support them; or, in fall or spring, when ice is just forming, or thawing with warming weather.

Every once in awhile grouse hunters hear reports of a bird found dead impaled on a sharp stub of a tree or shrub, apparently speared as it exploded out of cover in an attempt to escape. Perhaps its pursuer was a goshawk, an efficient woodland predator so agile that it can navigate expertly in dense forest cover where the broad-winged hawks cannot. Or, it might be a hunter and his dog that have put the grouse to flight.

We may think that accidents happen only to careless or unlucky humans. But our wild neighbors lead risk-filled lives, too.

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