This drone footage of a moose shaking free from his antlers reminds me of a lot of things. The most obvious is that feeling you get when you shimmy out of an underwire bra after a long day (ahhhhhh). The most profound is my favorite 20th-century theater monologue. The most relevant is my current need for a nap. These things are not unrelated.
First, some background: Why do moose cut their antlers loose? Growing them, after all, takes a massive amount of energy—they represent some of the fastest-growing tissues in the animal kingdom. But they are, after all, massive—a set of antlers weighs dozens of pounds, growing in bigger every year until a bull reaches peak maturity. When winter comes and food grows scarce, the living bone dies and detaches to lighten the owner’s load.
Moose and other deer could have evolved to grow ever-present protuberances, as is the case for most horned creatures. They mostly use antlers in mating displays, not serious defensive fights, so their headgear doesn’t have to be big enough to cause caloric issues come winter. But this is the way it has come to be: In the early spring, deer grow several feet of new cartilage from their skulls with the help of soft, vascular-dense skin called velvet. Their heads grow heavier by 20, 30, 75 pounds within a manner of weeks as the fuzzy skin floods the area with oxygen and nutrients and the cartilage calcifies and hardens. They lose bone density everywhere else, growing weaker even as the would-be mates they aim to attract work on gaining fat to thrive through winter pregnancies.
In summer the life-giving velvet dies and dries up, leaving bulls and bucks to scrape it away like a bad sunburn. Their fresh-grown crowns emerge dripping with blood, often dangling flaps of mouldering flesh. It is a sacrifice. It is a horror. It is the price of admission for reproduction.
Antlers or no, this is how most change occurs. We give up a part of ourselves to cultivate something new. We suffer no small amount of discomfort as it stretches and flakes and peels. We learn to carry the weight of it. Sometimes we need to let it all go. We scatter pieces of our change out into the world and it feeds new growth in others. It is a maddeningly cyclical process. It is a bloody business. It is the only way to grow.
But not every season is for growing. The world gets darker and the mornings get colder, and every system within us begs us to sleep and conserve. Humans have long ignored this in favor of constant productivity, but we’re not above the urge to hibernate. The instinct to quiet-quit our hunting and gathering and save our energy for the abundance of spring. The sense that it might be time to let go of burdens that felt so much lighter in the bright days of summer. We can fight it, but our bodies know the way. A moose doesn't smash its antlers to bits in a desperate bid to be rid of them; the dimming daylight triggers a drop in testosterone, which spurs specialized cells to gorge on minerals at the base of the bone and weaken it.
Winter will always force an animal to lighten its load.
Rachel’s Recs
here’s a place where I’ll end each newsletter, or at least some of them, with some things I’m enjoying at the moment or think you should check out
Read: My Libro.fm queer horror recs playlist
Buy: This platypus t-shirt I made, if you’re into that kind of thing
Listen to: The Rat King, a fantastic new audio drama featuring a cameo by yours truly