Recently our home was blessed by a doe raising her speckled twins in the woods around the small lake out back. She taught them how to make their way up through the back of the houses, to our garden and the neighbor's pear and plum orchard. Delight filled us more than frustration the times we discovered squash blossoms or pea flowers nibbled from their stems.
It was a hard blow the morning I discovered the doe's body at the head of our drive. My thoughts immediately flew to her relatively new born, still-spotted twins and how they would survive. We would see them near the road and toss them apples, carrots, and pears to lead them back down to the safety of our garden and orchard. Back to where they could smell the woods and the water of the lake beyond.
They were always together. Side-by-side the fawns nibbled grass, fallen fruit, rose hips, berries and more squash blossoms. We would notice their hoof prints in our carrot bed and along the dirt path to the lake. They drank from our fountain and bird bath while our cat chattered to them, doing his best to make new freinds. At night we could hear them rustling in the brush behind our home, bedding down in camouflaged safety of the salal and oregon grape.
Once while quietly tending to garden tasks and lost in my thoughts, I felt a presence. I slowly look over my shoulder and there they were--less than six feet away, probably wondering when I'd stop blocking their access to the raspberries.
Our hearts broke again the day we discovered one of the fawns fell to the same fate its mother had. I gently carried its body into the woods, placing water and berry leaves in its mouth and covering its body with roses. Deer have been a significant aspect of my life for as long as I can remember and the unnatural death of one, cuts deeply into my essence.
Several times throughout my life, deer has presented its graciousness and beauty to me in personal, memorable and often potent ways.
When I was seven years old, my uncle once found me on the edge of the woods near his riverside cabin in upstate New York. I was bent at the waist exchanging breath with a young fawn while its mother alertly stood nearby watching over us. Soft against my cheeks, the fawn's breath smelled like freshly cut grass mixed with spruce and cedar bark. Mine probably smelled of apple slices, American cheese and Cheerios.
As my uncle neared, the doe positioned her body in front of us and firmly nudged her fawn towards the trees. The young deer bound into the brush and the doe looked at me surely wondering why I had not hopped behind the salal as well.
I remember my uncle stopped, lowering his nearly seven-foot frame into a squat.
"So, you've adopted that one?", he softly said to the deer while nodding towards me.
The doe turned her head toward me, then back to him.
He smiled at me, his little niece perfectly happy to live with the deer, and shook his head. And the doe, deciding I would not make a very smart deer, turned and walked into the trees, her side gently brushing against my back as she departed.
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