“The Deer,” by Mary Oliver
She appeared to me first last fall, in the near-black of a moonless dark.
Sleepless, I may have heard her footsteps, but maybe it was just the wind in the dying birch leaves.I hear everything at night. The creek across the road, the past, with all its failure and triumph, the hum of an intrusive streetlight, the rush of my own blood, relentlessly saving the only life it knows.
The doe was under the crabapple tree, pawing at the fallen fruit. She was last year’s fawn, maybe, compact and a bit squat for a whitetail.
She was already putting on fur for the coming winter, her tawny coat giving way to a mat gray. Her chilled breath frosted the hairs of her snout.
Hidden by the dark house, I sat unseen by the living room window and consciously tried to turn all my attention to her.
The ubiquity of deer has made that ever more difficult. In our upper Rattlesnake neighborhood, deer outnumber dogs. That should perhaps be a blessing in our anesthesized, screen-filled lives, a chance to brush shoulders with the wild.
Instead, because deer are everywhere, seeing them has lost its sense of mystery and wonder, which surfaces maybe with the year’s first fawn but mostly not at all.
Around our house, Jakki will literally fawn over fawns, but the English language is in for a beating if one of those fawn’s moms ventures onto the deck and chows down on our allegedly deer-resistant flora.
With all that in mind, I sat quietly and gave myself fully to the deer. Beyond her skittering watchfulness, what struck me most fully about her was her face. I’ve watched enough deer over time to know they all look different, but this face was, somehow, more different.
Her muzzle was shortened, her ears a little less erect, more doglike. But mostly it was her eyes. They were, for a deer, too close together, but what I saw in them was the mystery, both the other-ness of the wild and my own sense of connection with the natural world.
I must’ve sat for an hour with the deer. She browsed for a while, then curled up in the frozen grass and slept. Finally, I did the same.
Over the weeks and through the winter, I saw her regularly, recognizing her easily amidst her colleagues by her impish mug.
Her love affair with the crabapple extended into the snow season. In time, I could see what differentiated her curved hoofprints from those of others that gathered under the crabapple.
For a month, the little doe would startle if I stepped out the front door, lighting out for the woods, but as the weeks passed and food got harder to find, she brooked my presence more patiently.
I don’t want to make too much of this. I’m no deer whisperer, and I don’t want to to say I had some ethereal bond with this doe. At least not one that she took part in.
But what she did was re-open my eyes to the astonishing wonder right there in my own neighborhood. What she did was wipe clear the window of amazement that always exists but remains too often shuttered as we cycle through the dulling sequence of workaday living.
“This is the earnest work,” the poet said, and she is right.
When the winter ended, the doe moved on, as green-up moved up the hillsides and creek drainages. I missed her, but I moved on, too, to spring vacations, to my daughter coming home from California, to every little thing that passes the days.
Sometimes, late at night, I’d think I heard her, but it was always just the rush of blood and creek water merging at the intersection of past and future. The most I could find were mud-smudged hoofprints that might belong to hundreds of deer.
And yet she lingered in my mind, making it possible for me to look at other deer not as neighborhood pests but as emissaries from the world that exists beyond my everyday life.
What she did was not make me ponder wilderness and what it means, but allowed me to simply sit for a while with the notion of being wild, of moving only out of need for food, water and cover.
To let the other things that pass for need slip away.
Every week, I see a deer dead by the side of the road. Because of the cross-eyed doe, because she made me see rather than look, I recognize most of them. A sentimentalist might have named them, but I just remember their faces, the curve of their antlers, the one that limps, this fawn that goes with that mother.
Most of them die needlessly, killed by motorists driving too fast for reasons antithetical to the “earnest work.”
But I’m not here to rattle sabers, and my ears aren’t capable of hearing the excuses anyway.
Besides, we all die.
A few weeks ago, on a bike ride on the trail north of our house, I came upon a small deer dead in the woods.
Her nose was blunt, too short for her face, and her ears folded over at the ends. More gray than brown. Her body was smooth, no sign of a wound or injury. The ground around her was undisturbed, dry, not even a hoofprint.
Her eyes were closed, and I left them that way, mostly to avoid the truth of their gaze.
I dragged her a bit deeper into the woods, covered her body with limbs and straw.
I remembered a few more lines from Mary Oliver’s poem.
“You never know.
The body of night opens
like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke, like so many wrappings of mist.
And on the hillside two deer are walking along
just as though this wasn’t
the owned, tilled earth of today,
but the past.”
Then I got on the bike and rode home.
Late that night, sleep still far away, I heard the unmistakeable sound of hooves in the yard. No blood, no water, no past, no future.
Just deer.
I came downstairs and sat in the deer window. A dozen or so does glided across the grass, into the ransacked flower beds. Unlike that first night, the moon shone silver.
I sat in its reflected light and began the earnest work of remembering all their faces.
