Four does pick their way down the road, file into the woods, and surround a small rhododendron. “Stop eating that!” I yell. They bound off.
deer
The opening day of rifle season. Deer run back and forth through the laurel—each shift of the wind must bring a different human’s stink.
A doe flees the urgent attentions of the resident 6-point, his burp-like grunts. Overhead, the loud cry of a crow chasing a hawk by itself.
After last night’s rain, everything glistens but the four gray forms of deer beneath the lilac, their thin clouds of breath.
Halfway up the ridge, a flashlight bobs through the trees, stops, goes out. Then the rustling thuds of hooves in dry leaves. Then silence.
An eight-point buck struts through the neck-high meadow, stirring up sparrows and goldenrod fluff, lifting his tail to shit while he walks.
I hear the grunting of a buck in rut, but see only a grown fawn chasing a doe. As they pass below the porch, I hear the bleat in his voice.
In the pouring rain, a six-point buck rips leaves off a lilac branch that the storm broke down, his antlers the same color as the break.
A yellow barberry bush at the edge of the woods trembles violently: two deer are stripping the fruit from its thorny branches.
At first light, the soft wickering of migrant wood thrushes. A deer snorts three times, and suddenly I’m seeing a bear in every shadow.
Riddle me this: Because of the heavy acorn crop, next summer we will see more roses. And this: the oak forest moves north on corvid wings.
The doe is turning from the top down, like a mountain: summer’s red has receded into her legs and belly. On the fawn, just five faint spots.
I glimpse the mother doe and her fawns running just inside the woods’ edge, hear the clatter of hooves going past. A minute of almost-sun.
Halfway up the ridge, the hectoring alarm-calls of a squirrel. A few seconds later, a deer joins in: explosive snorts. The sun comes out.