Thin fog. A yearling fawn play-mounts his mother, and is mounted in turn by his twin. A robin tut-tut-tuts from the driveway.
deer
Rain. Two deer in a high-speed chase crash through the laurel, the one in pursuit grunting like a buck gone into rut eight months early.
Dawn. Three deer become two, become three again. The sound of squirrel teeth on black walnut shell—that harsh madman’s whisper.
Sleet rattles on the roof like a fast typist. Two deer in the springhouse meadow: when they stop moving, they vanish into the brown weeds.
The white flame of a deer’s tail bobs among the laurel. Another doe shakes her head, flinging rain water in all directions.
Deer have been eating the wild rosebush again, and the yard is a maze of rabbit tracks. The fog lifts for a minute, then returns.
Dawn light turns everything briefly to gold: house, trees, the three deer that run a short way into the woods and stop, nostrils flaring.
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?