If a dead bird hangs in the forest and only you find it, what does it mean?

Well … it’s always something, isn’t it?

Sometimes it’s something that starts out just fine, but then it gets all tangled up and hangs in your head where you can’t cut it loose.

For example, I tried to go on vacation, out West, and after a week off, I got to where I quit thinking about work, except for a couple of hours each day.

Around that two-hour threshold, my wife and I put the dogs in the pickup and drove miles out winding, rocky forest service roads to a remote trailhead where we hiked to a lake in a hidden valley I would name if I wanted everyone else to know how to get there.

It was just perfect: The air was dry, cool and breezy; the sun was out; the sky was blue,

The lake was clear as glass, and the dogs had a good swim, and we sat to read and nap. I was reading a book about naturalist and adventurer John Muir, which would have helped me sleep were I not thinking about work.

I sat with my back against a stump while my wife dozed off.

Then she woke up and said, “Do you see that robin hanging from the tree?”

She was sitting perpendicular to me, like 20 feet away, and pointing to what would have been the center of our clock face, were I at six o’clock and she at 3.

I looked up, still could not tell what the hell she was talking about, and said, “No.”

“There’s a robin hanging from that tree,” she said. “Don’t you see it?”

I looked up again: “No, I don’t.”

“It’s RIGHT THERE!” she declared, pointing.

This exchange replayed several times while I read the same sentence over and over like you would if I went on.

Finally I put the book down and got up to look, and damn if a dead robin wasn’t hanging from a tree, right in front of me, but too far away for me to focus on it.

The bird was hanging from its beak, and I could not tell why. It was over my head. And like a trite analogy about turtles atop fence posts, it did not get there on its own, I assumed.

Like a crime reporter who can’t stop thinking about work, I assumed also that this was some sort of threat: Someone killed that bird and put it there. But with what message? “I’m going to be robbin’ you?”

Knowing Muir wouldn’t hike into the wilderness and just leave this hanging, I got a stick and snared the limb and pulled it down to free the bird.

The bird had a fishing fly hooked in its beak, and the line had tangled on the limb.

So my assumption was the bird got hooked eating the fly, and then the line tangled on the limb, if it wasn’t already, and the bird either died on the limb and dropped, or it died trying to fly away.

People really should collect their fishing tackle, if they know where it broke off. But maybe this was someone swishing the line back and forth like Brad Pitt in “A River Runs Through It,” and he lost his lure behind his back and over his head.

I shot some pictures to document the scene, lest it have some deeper meaning. Like an omen.

I should have collected the specimen, but instead I stuck it in the crook of a tree too high for dogs to reach. Trying to bury it might have left it where canine scavengers could dig it up, and wind up with the hook in their snouts.

So the dead bird yet may be there, decomposing in the dry air, until all that’s left is a winged skeleton with a fishing fly hooked in its beak.

It’s like an omen, warning you that you won’t be able to quit thinking about vacation, when you go back to work.

This story was originally published July 29, 2018 at 4:21 PM with the headline "If a dead bird hangs in the forest and only you find it, what does it mean?."