I will never claim to have seen everything, but I’ve seen most things in the spaces where I’ve habituated. Christ that’s a clumsy sentence, but, you know, fuck it. I’ve seen a lot of clumsy sentences and to that clumsy sentences credit it didn’t claim to be a graceful sentence. I saw something today I’ve never seen; A doe in my backyard, this backyard, the one here to the east of where I’m typing.
I’ve seen three does, two fauns and buck in the past week. The week before, in the Up, I saw all sorts of deer, coons, and general woodland critters, alive and dead and generally going about their respective critter business. But I’ve never seen a doe in my backyard. Ok, no buck, no faun, moose, elephant, pretty much no nothing but birds, bats, cats and dogs, or, and squirrels, squirrels by the buttload, red, black, grey, bushy tailed, rat tailed, three legged.
There’s this dowager doe that lives about 12 blocks east of here. There’s grasslands and the remnants of woods that were this area as recently as the civil war. But here? In my backyard? No. You’d have to have had a few beers, follow a buck home, and tick your hooves through a fair amount of suburb to make it here.
My goofy ass pulled up into the driveway in my candy apple clown car just as the doe was daintily picking her way through what could be called an alley if you can conceive of an alley as overgrown brush. It’s this sort of no mans land where they put power poles in the forties so most backyards end a few feet shy of where the poles are, given that there are house both west and east it makes a six or seven foot wide swath of untended grassy, swampy weedy alley. Back when this town wasn’t shabby some folks had fences, made the alley seem a bit better defined. As a kid I had this sort of fort/shack thing back there.
Any how the doe stops her sway back saunter (I swear she was coming on to me) and I stopped my one clown piling out of a car and we gave one another the once over. Christ I wish she was scared of me. Not because I have this powerless need to intimidate vegetarian mammals, but it’s damn hard to live to a ripe old age when you trust humans. Most humans and animals are acutely aware of this. I didn’t know what else to do so I smiled and she tilted her head the way animals with eyes on the side do to see someone better.
I know, seeing a deer is not unusual at all, it’s be weird not to. See a deer this far into tame territory is unusual. She had to pass frat houses, which, you know, didn’t put her in danger of being shot, but did put her danger of being roof-ied (pardon my phonetics) or having to shotgun a schlitz malt liquor.
Yeah, that’s it, I mean it’s not a great story but it’s unusual. Makes me wonder whether it’s an overpopulation issue or a food, but more likely, a water issue.
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