He was there all night in his gray donkey self, standing beside the covered body of his friend while the snow fell. Coyotes yipped from the hills but stayed back. Deer came through, and shied away, leaving only their startle tracks in the snow. Each must have smelled the warmth of new death on the winter winds. 

In the morning, the still body of the horse was circled by snowflakes and small donkey hoofprints. With the earliest light, the donkey began to bray. He brayed throughout the morning—turning the morning inside out with his calls—and then he kept going as if he could never stop, building out the day with an aching sound. 

While the donkey and I wait for the old horse to be buried in a deep hole beside the apple tree, the donkey’s sound gives shape to what I am feeling; a long hollow shape that carries the resonance of loss on the wind. 

I cannot know what the donkey is truly feeling, but it would be my human failing to say that his braying has no emotion, no missing, no long friendship lost. I do not have a word for this—when an old donkey stands all night in the snow beside the dead body of his horse friend—except perhaps to look to the origin of the word bray from the Old French of braire: “to cry.” Silent now, we stand shoulder to shoulder as the earth fills in the hole.