Dawn light turns everything briefly to gold: house, trees, the three deer that run a short way into the woods and stop, nostrils flaring.
white-tailed deer
A grown fawn nuzzles her mother’s flank as if to nurse. The mother whirls around, head lowered, threatening with invisible antlers.
At 5:15, I’m startled by the dark sky, the closeness of the stars. At daybreak, seven deer stand within a stone’s throw of the porch.
Deer circle the wild pear tree behind the house, rising high on their hind legs to reach the fruit. A crow jeers from a nearby walnut limb.
At first light, some newly toppled tree creaks in the wind. What I’d taken for the dog statue on the far side of the yard swivels its ears.
Dawn. A migrant wood thrush flits from branch to branch along the edge of the woods. In the yard, a grown fawn nuzzles its mother’s neck.
An explosive snort of a deer that I hadn’t noticed standing in the dim light at the edge of the woods, her ears swiveling toward the east.
A series of high-pitched snorts from a deer up on the ridge. Coyote? Bear? Or—imagine the horror for an herbivore—an attack of hay fever?
A buck in velvet, his coat already turning gray, startles up out of the grass. A hungry hummingbird presses her bill to the metal flamingo.
Sticky and warm. A clink of ice in my coffee startles up a deer, her tan coat passing in front of a cloud of blossoming mountain laurel.
The dawn sky turns salmon. Down by the stream, the hollow cough of a deer. A swig of coffee and I’m off to count birds before the rain.
The silence of falling snow. When my furnace kicks on, the three deer digging under the wild apple tree startle and run down the slope.
A juvenile buck chases a much larger doe through the laurel, knobs for antlers and his grunts still half-bleat. The damp woods glistening.
One grown fawn attempts to nurse; the other runs into the woods, ducking its head as if pursued by some horsefly impervious to the cold.