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October 13, 1997

 

Annie Proulx, in her nonfiction account of building a home on 640 acres in Wyoming,  Bird Cloud: A Memoir (2011), has this passage-

The air was stitched with ....hundreds of swallows... I found a dead pelican at the end of the island, the head completely gone, no other sign of injury. Gerald remarked that it was the habit of cats to eat the head first. I did not think the mountain lion would bother with a pelican, or, if it did, restrict its dinner to the head. But a well-placed shot with a large-caliber rifle or a shotgun could have blown the head off. 

Annie Proulx received a Pulitzer for The Shipping News (1993) and is the author of "Brokeback Mountain," which appeared in the October 13, 1997 New Yorker first, before being made into a famous movie. She still lives in Wyoming, but not all the time. Proulx was born on August 22, in 1935.

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