Billy Buck Naked

The big buck came through the other day. In, as they say, the broad daylight. Bold move. For a guy like him. A guy the shooters would like to kill, then cut off his head and put it on a wall. But he moved with unconcern. And why not? He'd been in the fire.

He was the first deer I saw, after the fire. On the Friday. Or maybe the Saturday. I came off the porch and round the side of the house, and there he was. He was moving stiff. Because of the vision problem, I couldn't tell if he'd been burned. "Don't be burned!" I cried. I couldn't have borne it. If he'd been burned. But as I got to know him, over the next couple of days, I learned he had not been burned. He was just worn out. Because it wasn't just the people, who ran, in the fire.

A lot of worn-out deer showed up here, in the days after the fire. It wasn't burned here; there were green and living things around; I pushed aside the netting, to the garden where grows what normally I don't want them to eat, and said: “have at it.” And there was water. I put out all year round metal pails of water for the animals, and, in the fire, the main pail, I didn't even think to use it, even when the water was gone and I was trying to extinguish that damn burning car, because the water in that pail, that was theirs, I guess went my “thinking,” I had no right to it. So although the fire had burned out all the water in town, that pail was there, still full, the day the buck showed.

I stood there watching him drink and wondered how I was going to keep that pail full. The workers were already loading me up with bottled water—everybody gave everybody water up here—but deer drink a lot of water, and the squirrels and birds had started coming back, and they needed water too. So far there was just the one buck, but I figured more deer would come around. He couldn't be the only deer, left in the town. Just like I couldn't be. The only human.

Then the luck, the grace, the blessedness, continued: on the Sunday, PID ran "a boiler line" to the fire station, so the fire workers could shower. I was on the same line, so water returned to me too. "Just don't drink it," the PID guys said. That the same message we're still receiving today, more than three months on. They still don't know what all's in there. In the water. They know that in some places there's benzene. But not, so far, in any of the lines out here. Which is good. Because I don't want to think I've been benzening these animals, these last months. Just because they're animals who live outdoors. Rather than in.

The PID guys running the boiler line, they were a demonstration of how quickly we all up here adapted to the new reality. There were downed power lines lying all over the street, Almond Street, right around the corner from here, and the PID guys drove their truck over some of these downed lines, parked on them, then got out and walked on and over the lines to a hydrant. When the water was flowing, they opened the hydrant, and water sprayed all over the downed lines, PID guys still standing on the lines. This is not, normally, how one behaves, around downed power lines. But then, we were no longer in normal. We were in the new reality. Where every power line in the town was dead. And would be. For weeks.

But there was water again. The last time there had been water, had been about 72 hours before. That was when there was still a town. But then the fire burned through the water, and the fire burned through the town. All of it.

None of the deer who arrived here in those weeks after the fire were burned. Just worn out. Usually they arrived singly. Which is not usual, here, for deer. One doe was so exhausted she lay right against the base of the front porch and didn't move from there for three days. Me standing on the porch, peering down at her, she was less than ten feet below. Normally, no deer, would put up with that. Would have to get up and move. But this doe couldn't get up. Couldn't move. All she had, had brought her there; she didn't have any more. The only feed within range of her head were dead ivy leaves. That wasn't enough. So I brought her some of the fruit that workers had gifted me. She couldn't get to the pail, so I brought her a pan of water. After a while she could at least stretch her neck enough to nibble on ivy alive. Eventually she rose to her feet, and migrated across the gravel driveway to one of the preferred deer recovery areas, a cunning little niche in which she was sheltered, but could also observe the world in all directions, in case from the world there came dangers. She was exposed only to me, standing diasporaP_1.pngacross the driveway, there on my porch; but once the deer determined I wasn't a problem, not a danger, just a fire ghost, they could there rest easy. Recover. Replenish.

None of the deer who frequented this place before the fire, have since the fire returned. That doesn't mean they're dead. The deer are just scattered. Like everybody else. The deer who've come by after the fire, before the fire they frequented other realms. But the fire, it burned through everything. Nobody knows where to go. The deer, too, are in diaspora. Trying. To find their way home.

The worst injury was that little fawn with the hunched back and crippled legs. I wish she'd stayed around until she was better. I wish I could see that she was better. I just want her to be better. I can't stop thinking about her. She's so hurt. And she's alive in my mind. She is like the town. She is the town.

I do know that deer, they can recover from terrible injuries. A while back, before the fire, there was a guy here, I called him Little Horn, young buck, he was a regular, and then one night he turned up with a terribly broken, twisted foot. He couldn't put any weight on it. It just dangled there. He was trying to get onto the porch, to get to the birdseed, but he couldn't make it. When I started fussing over him, he limped across the yard and lay down under the lilacs, another sheltered deer niche, where deer can see, but no one can see them. I brought him food and water there for three days. And then he was gone. I hoped no one would decide to "put him out of his misery." Because I had been into tubes, and seen that deer had recovered from injuries as bad or worse than his. Time doesn't heal all wounds, and that is a fact, but it can sometimes heal some deer legs. And that's what happened with Little Horn. A couple months later he cycled back. Couldn't really put any weight on the leg yet, but it was healing. That was clear. Then, some months after that, he showed up with two women and two fawns. So he was doing alright. He could put weight on that foot now, though he, and the foot, would prefer not to. I hope he came through okay. In the fire.

Deer are smart. That's how they knew to come here, and stay here, for a while, after the fire. The smartness of deer: the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what the smartness of deer is. Once I lived on a mountaintop in Sonoma County, near the coast, 160 acres, backed up against a state park, and there was none of the shooting, anywhere up there. And so, every year, when came shooter season, that mountaintop would grow thick with deer. It was like a traffic jam, up there, of deer. It was ridiculous. You couldn't walk anywhere, without running into some huge buck. They and I would stand up there, and we'd hear the shooters, going on about their shooting, in the lower lands below. The deer knew that, up there, with me, there would be no shooting. And so, when the shooting came, up there, is where they would go. Then, when the season of shooting stopped, they'd give me a nod, and amble back down.

Once I was sitting in the little house, reading, and I looked up, and there were two deer, standing on the front deck, Looking in the window. It was easy to read what they were thinking: what kind of strange mutant creature would want to live in a box like that? Weirder even than a bear. And it's not even hibernating!

That was probably the best place, that place. Though the house was the size of a matchbox, the water was gravity fed and so the shower was but a trickle, and the only heat source was a fireplace, which I fed with logs that I cut with a handsaw. Don't like chainsaws. Built a horse corral out of lodgepole pines there. Lodgepole pines want fire. Can't reproduce without them. This is how we know the forests have been having fire, since long before there was PG&E. Paradise is a town in a forest. People who live here, they want to walk outside and be in trees. But sometimes forests, they burn. That's just the way it is. It doesn't seem so much a sin, wanting to live in a forest, so as to deserve Gomorrah. But Gomorrah, is what we got.

I guess I'm kinda like the wife of Lot. Says there in the Zohar, if you look upon the destroying angel, you are yourself destroyed. That's just the way it is. So that's what happened to her. But in this version, the one with me, and the fire, though I did indeed look upon the destroying angel, and for many and many an hour, I didn't get salted. At least I don't think. Or at least not yet.

Where are we in this nonsense? Right. Had to leave the best place, because there was no money there. Around here, there is always somebody who will pay me enough money, to do something or other, so I can live somewhere a step above a culvert. But if I stray outside a certain radius of Chico, the money dries up. I don't know why that is. Chico itself, to my tastes, and at least in the heat of the summer, is a Hole of Hell. So I try to settle somewhere more human, that is still within the radius of the money. Durham. Forest Ranch. Richardson Springs. Cherokee. Paradise. It would be nice, if there could be mountains involved. If that's not too much trouble. Even when I lived in the Bay Area, I found a house on a mountain—the very uppermost house in Brisbane, on San Bruno Mountain. Also backed against a state park. My brother, when he first visited, couldn't believe it. "How is it you always find these Moses places?" he demanded. I don't know. I just need a mountain. This place here, it's kind of on a mountain. Kind of. Eventually. But it's not the top. And I need the top. The mountaintop. So I can look over. Like Moses, and also probably like Moses, for my sins, odds are I won't reach the promised land. But I want to look at it. Every once in a while. So that I'll know. There won't always be. Just this nonsense.

In the first place I lived in Paradise, my cat Nikky was a deer herder. He herded wild turkeys too. Every morning he'd go out, first light, and he'd stay out till twilight, busily herding the deer, and the turkeys, who each day moved through. They didn't know they were being herded. But Nikky did. He had just a wonderful time. I called him Walter Nikky. Because, like Walter Mitty, he had a whole wonderful life, he lived in, there in his head. Living it in that wonderful wild back yard there, not a yard at all, but just wildness, that stretched down out of sight towards a little creekbed, and then up a far slope. All that's burned now. This was over on De Mille. De Mille is destroyed. That's where they've found benzene. It's just poison, there, now.

When I moved into this place, a guy at Skyway Antique Mall—didn't burn—said "I know that place. That's on the deer highway." Deer highway? I queried. Yes indeed, he said. He'd watched many a deer, going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it, across Birch, traveling from my house, over to the oak lot, that should be the horse annex, but is now a pine lot, because they cut all the oaks down after fire, and now we don't know if there will even be the horse annex, because the feed store—didn't burn—owner is Hamleting about whether to reopen, and vice versa.

And all this, proved to be true. The deer wandered through this place like they owned it. And who says they didn't? They definitively established their dominion the first year I was here, when they ate all the alpine strawberries. Alpine strawberries are what all strawberries were like, before the monks started diddling with them. Monks, through the ages, have diddled with a lot of the plants. Because they aren't allowed to diddle women. And aren't supposed to diddle each other. They have to diddle something. So they diddle plants. In their strawberry diddling, they made them large and ever-bearing, but sucked out most of the flavor. Alpines are tiny, but bursting with flavor. They are also an arse-pain to grow. First you order the seeds from Bezos, and they arrive so tiny they make a poppy seed look like Half Dome. You then have to put them in the refrigerator for some weeks, because they need it first to be cold—you know, like alpine—before they'll agree to sprout. The idea is that when you take them out of the refrigerator, and put them in little peat pots in the house, they think that means they've traveled from winter to spring. So, eventually, they'll sprout. And maybe. In your lifetime. You fuss over the peat pots, for what seems like hundreds of years, and then finally they poke up tiny heads, fully visible with an electron microscope. After more eons you can transplant them outdoors.

Unless there are deer. If there are deer, they will stampede for hundreds of miles, to come eat them. I had some in a pot I brought over here from De Mille. I put the pot on the front porch. Figuring the strawberries would be safe from marauders there. This is before I understood that what the front porch is really about, is from it feeding marauders. The intro to this Reality was this strawberry pot, for when once I set those alpines out on the front porch, deer came from as far away as Iowa, to eat them. The photograph you see there depicts a criminal doe creeping up the porch to deer-lip the alpines. It was strawberries_0.jpgafter observing this burglary that I moved the pot all the way to the other end of the porch, right by the front door. The deer didn't care. Because a man has to sleep some time. And deer, apparently, don't. So, soon, the alpines, they had completely disappeared. But my partner, then friend, she had taken alpines from De Mille to her new place over on North Libby. Where she conjured a vast and bounteous garden, completely enclosed in deer fencing. So those alpines, there, thrived. Except they're all dead now. Burned. The fire took all of the deer fencing, and all of her plants, and all of her neighbors, though it left standing, snickering, her little tin-roof home. But she's not going to be there. Can't. Too sad. Living surrounded by Dresden. So she's of the diaspora now. Sebastopol.

Not long after the last of my alpine strawberries disappeared into deer lips, I bought a couple monk strawberry plants, I think at Grocery Outlet, and I planted them in a little area I'd fenced off with netting and metal stakes, so the deer couldn't get at what was in there. Those plants have some kind of juju, because they long ago not only took over most of that space, but also spread out and every direction from that enclosure, and into the whole of that yard. It's like Strawberry Fields Forever out there. And the deer, not once, have touched, a single one. Which just goes to show. There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of, in your deerosophy.

Also around that time I went fully over to the deer, when I read in the CN&R that officious nincompoops had hit Jamie O'Neill with a $650 ticket for feeding deer wet cob. The nincompoops sniffed that there was a Law, prohibiting feeding deer, and O'Neill, he had violated it, and so now he would have to pay Money. Being the kind of person I am, I immediately went across the street to the feed store, and bought there a big 50-pound sack of wet cob, and then I brought it over here, and, with great satisfaction, I proceeded to strew wet cob, hither and yon. Dimwit laws prohibiting feeding wet cob to deer come from those infected with dualism, dividing humans from nature, deluding that the two are somehow separate, that a human feeding deer is thereby "interfering" with nature, which is in truth howling nonsense, because humans are just as much a part of nature, as the deer. Or the wet cob.

And soon, many deer, there were, yea verily, upon these lands. Until, in time, it became actually alarming. Like a BF Skinner experiment. To see how many deer you could fit onto one place, without their brains going all Abnormal. There off the kitchen porch, from where flowed the cob, a veritable forest, of deer. At first, I gave these people names—Yearling Pet, Mom, Cutie, The Other Fawn, Dark Doe, Big Buck, Billy Buck Naked, White Head, Mr. Spindly Horns, Mr. Broken Horn, No You Can’t Get Through The Hole In The Fence With Those Antlers You Big Oaf, etc.—but then there were too many for names, and then the bucks showed up. At first it was does and fawns, and most always in the daytime, but then, in the night, the bucks started arriving. Bucks more likely to be night people. Because of the shooters. At first I thought it might be fine, the bucks. But then they started acting like boys. Which is always trouble. Regardless of species. They not only would gather round and press their noses against the windows at night, to try to rouse me out of bed to go out and give them more cob, but they also started thundering through the yard bashing antlers with one another, pausing only to scrape all the bark off the trees. Sometimes there would have to be weird deer grunting accompanying this behavior. The does and the fawns, in the day, they were like Bambi, but these bucks, at night, they were like The Wild One. And I didn't want bikers, in my yard. So I cut them off. All of them. No more wet cob. In order for it to work, the does and fawns would have to go without, as well as the bucks. I tried to explain this. To the women and children. The does would just stand there, looking at me, with those doe eyes. Then they’d nudge the fawns forward, to see if maybe some babies, they would unharden my heart. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s the boys. The boys, they are why you can’t have nice things. It's that way, in the deer. Just like in the humans.”

I’d feed them all wet cob now. But I can’t. Because the feed store won’t be open. Because the town burned down. Because we lived in a forest. And sometimes, forests burn. And boy, did this one burn. It’s mostly a boy here now, last couple weeks. Boy deer. Young buck. He comes usually an hour after sunset or so. Too spooked to do the day. Before the fire, there was a doe and two fawns, pretty much living here. Haven't seen them since the fire. Now there's this spooked boy. Spooked boy. Like me. He comes in the night, and he hoovers up all the remaining birdseed and squirrel food off the brick railing. I used to get exasperated at that. Now, I don’t care. I’ll feed anybody. Anything. One of his horns is broken off at the skull; the other horn also took a hit, there’s just a thin splinter there, jutting up about ten inches. I call him Splinter Horn. I assume he had a rough fire. Then again, I have heard no stories, of people, like, picnicking, in the fire. It was rough, the fire, for everyone. Animal. Vegetable. Mineral.

I lived fifteen years in Cherokee. Some of Cherokee burned. I don’t know if my old house burned. I don’t want to know. There’s a lot I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know, when I look at my plants, that they all came from Mendon’s and Grocery Outlet, and Mendon’s and Grocery Outlet burned, and so there will be no more plants, from those places. The plants, now, too, sort of, also in diaspora. I don’t want to know that Jeannie’s burned, and that when it burned, the two zebra finches were in it, in their little cage. And also a cat. In a cage. I don’t want to know that Jeannie’s, where came maybe half the stuff in this house, probably won’t come back, and in fact it’s likely all the antique stores up here, burned and unburned, are finished, because they relied so on estate sales, and all the estates are pretty much burned, we’re down to less than 1000 structures, homes and businesses, receiving mail here, we’re smaller than Biggs, we’re trending ghost town, maybe those people who, when, during the maroonment, they looked at me like I was a ghost, they were actually pre-cogs, seeing what was to come; just waiting, now, for the time, to catch up.

So it was good, the other day, to see the big buck come through. Because he’s not burned. And he’s not a ghost. He’s substantial. And moving in the broad daylight. After that first fire arrival, he'd been by once before. At that second go-round, he’d caught his antlers in some little branches of the plum, overhanging the lower levels of the brick railing. Kind of annoying for him. So, after he left, I broke off those little branches. Pissed off the plum. But then the plum for months has been in perpetual pout anyway, because last spring the stout branch that flopped onto the roof, known as the squirrel highway, it was chopped off, after the fire department came by and ordered some tree-trimming, here and there, in case, you know, there was a fire. I managed to talk the owner and/or the trimmer out of most of the trims. Because I want to live in a forest. I want to be in trees. I want to be on a mountaintop. I want to see over. In the end it didn’t matter a damn, what anybody did, whether they rigorously adhered to “defensible space,” or if they maintained their grounds something like you’d put at the bottom of a stake before tying Jeannette of Arc to it and setting her alight. Which pretty much describes this place. It didn't matter, because the fire took what it wanted. “Fire,” one CDF guy said, “has its own logic.” And its logic, here, was to burn down the whole town. Leave just enough left. So as to be, basically. A mockery.

The buck was appreciative, that the plum branches had been removed. He could feed off that second railing now, without getting his horns tangled. There's also a third railing. Because we live on many levels here. That second railing, it’s the one you see in the photo. Where is set the strawberry pot. That was before the fire. This, this is after the fire. This, is what makes it seem like, everything, before the fire, that was just a mockery.

The buck asked me how it's been going.

“Well, you know,” I said. “It’s just the town being burned down.”

He nodded, fed some more, then backed off a bit, letting me see there was no more feed there. So I walked over and poured forth some more. He backed up only a foot or so. He didn’t care. That I was less than two feet from him. Why would he care. He and I, we were fire people together.

"I'm so sad," I told him. "You wouldn't believe it."

"Of course I would," he said. "I'm there too. But what I think we should do right now, is eat this birdseed."

"Okay," I said. And so that’s what we did.

I was going to end it there. But then, smoking all the cigarettes, out on the front porch, I remembered I have some alpine strawberry seeds, there in the refrigerator. They've been in there a long time. It's been a long winter for them. I'm thinking, maybe I should take them out. Maybe, I'm thinking, a try, for a sprout. For spring.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBPTuAl2Qyk]

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Deja's picture

I didn't know just how much, until it stopped. Thank you for this gift you have given us. Such a wonderful storyteller!

Please keep me posted on the impossible strawberries, and the returning deer. Also, I'd like to donate some deer feed. I'd prefer it not be from Bozo. Please let me know how best to do it (pm me?). Mail is running, so it can be shipped. I know it's illegal for you to feed them, but you're defying the deer police already. Thank you for that too.

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magiamma's picture

Very much. I share these with one of the diaspora here. She reads them hungrily and then is silent. I talk to the birds and any of the other people who will listen. Even the tree rats.

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Entirely enjoyed the story Hecate. Thanks for sharing it. Oh deer.

~~~

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For 17 years we lived on a small 100+ acre lake. There is about 500 hundred house there, mostly summer homes for the city folk, maybe 100 full time residents. But being densely wooded, with a lake, and surrounded by farmland, it was a wildlife magnet. A perfect place for an animal to live and raise their babies. Especially the deer.

Every hunting season deer from all over would pack into the area because they knew they were safe there, and everything they needed was in abundance. There was also local groups of deer that would live there year round, we'd get to recognize them and they with us after seeing each other year after year. We'd watch them with their fawns each spring and as the fawns grew they would also make our area of the lake their home, they seemed to live in family groups. That is the does anyway, the young bucks would hang with the family group for a season or two and then head off to do their solitary buck thing.

Every day I and my Rottie walking companion, Gunther, and later, Max, would take our morning, noon, late afternoon and dark-time before bed walks around the neighborhood that was mostly just a few empty houses in the woods. The deer got to know us and after a while hardly paid me and my dog any attention at all, many times walking within a few feet of them and they'd hardly raise a head from their grazing, even with my monster sized dog next to me on a leash. They knew we were harmless and we were their friends. One memory that will always be with me was when Gunther and I was on a brisk autumn walk and suddenly out of nowhere a doe came streaking across the road not 2 feet from us with a frantic look on her face and making a kind of pathetic whining noise. Right behind her was a big buck with a large rack chasing after her with a wild crazed look on his face, snorting, grunting and slobbering, totally oblivious to myself and my oversized dog. It totally surprised me since it happened so fast, one second she ran out of the woods right across our path and the next second all we saw was his deer butt chasing her in to the woods on the other side of the road. Gunther was even more perplexed, he did a nervous little dance with his feet, squeaked a couple of times and then watched them disappear into the woods. I could tell he was thinking "WTF", just as I was. Gunther was a gentle giant and not once for the whole time I had him did he want to chase the deer but he did love to watch them.

One autumn, right before winter, on one of our walks I saw a doe limping badly out of the woods up the road maybe 50 yards away. As she limped out further I noticed that she was holding one of her front legs up with the bottom, just below the knee, dangling, either by just skin or sinew. I felt really sorry for the poor girl and I thought to myself, "she'll never make it through the winter, the coyotes will get her for sure." She hobbled off the other side of the road and then disappeared into the woods. Gunther and I went home and I told my wife all about it. Since we lived in a community of mostly summer homes and the area was full of deer, the folks from the city would come to hunt right outside the outskirts of our community. Most of the hunters from the city (Chicago) were seasoned hunters, but there was always a few that just played a hunter on the weekend. The posers would take bad shots from too far away or in too dense of an area and miss and wound the deer. Then out of lasiness or lack of tracking skills, the deer would be on their own to either heal from the wounds or die. I believe that this doe with the broken front leg was one of those casualties.

On another walk the next spring, out of the woods limped the very same wounded deer! Her dangling leg had dropped off and she was actually ambulating rather well. I could tell she was young and strong. She had made it through the winter and though she lagged behind she was hanging with the small group of deer that lived in that immediate area. It was exhilarating seeing her after the pathetic state she was in earlier in the fall. I was proud of her.

She hung around all that year staying close to that part of the woods knowing she was safe there. We saw her frequently, her front good leg got stronger and she got around rather well after a time. She was a survivor.

Then, to our complete shock, we saw her the next spring with a fawn! The next several years in the spring we saw her with a fawn and a couple of years she had twins. We dubbed her, Mama Three Legs. We saw her every year for probably about 6 or 7 years and then she was gone. But what a testament to the toughness and tenacity of nature. That old girl impressed the hell out of me and I'll never forget her.

Mama Three Legs.

Then a couple of years ago we moved, away from all my deer civilization friends closer to the human kind. I miss them and her.

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@JtC @JtC
Can see you walking Gunther with the surprise deer episode. Great descriptive. We've a few here. Couple seasons back, a doe frequented the woods out back. She had two fawns in tow. Fascinating watching her train the yunguns' about jumping fences, walls and such. Then she showed up favoring a leg one day. Thought, oh no, got tangled in a wire fence. Didn't look good. But she hung around, caring for the fawns for months. Limping like hell. Wanted to build her a splint. Next season, she's back with a new crew in tow. Slight limp. Tough animal. Can learn from the critters.

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@QMS
observations about Mama Three Legs, one time I saw one of her young ones limping like she did, not as badly, but a slight limp non the less, on the same leg.

As Mama got older she really labored on her good front leg, but what a tough old gal. Actually as hecate mentioned, three legged deer are not that uncommon, they're called tripods.

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janis b's picture

@JtC

Thank you for relating it.

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Lookout's picture

...I saw a herd of 10-12 does and fawns. It is a foggy, drizzly day here. The deer, still in their winter gray, would appear and disappear among the trees as they browsed acorns. I watched for several minutes as they leisurely worked their way across the ridge.

We have white tailed deer...

Just a century ago, there were less than a million deer in North America. Today, there are nearly 30 million. The Private Life of Deer looks at how these wild deer interact with one another, and how they adapt to living in a suburban environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1wo6lRmmuQ (53 min)

Another interesting Nature episode about deer is the one where this fellow lives with a herd of mule deer. I'm not sure if the pbs link will work (entire episode)
https://www.pbs.org/video/nature-touching-wild/
If not here's an intro (3 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlMDQeKAGYU

Thanks for the deer tale, and good luck with the strawberries!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

janis b's picture

@Lookout

that humans and deer must share a lot in common from their close association. Something domestic?

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Lookout's picture

@janis b

...in my part of the world

"Deerskins and Duffels" documents the trading relationship between the Creek Indians in what is now the southeastern United States and the Anglo-American peoples who settled there. The Creeks were the largest native group in the Southeast, and through their trade alliance with the British colonies they became the dominant native power in the area. The deerskin trade became the economic lifeblood of the Creeks after European contact. This book is the first to examine extensively the Creek side of the trade, especially the impact of commercial hunting on all aspects of Indian society. British trade is detailed here, as well: the major traders and trading companies, how goods were taken to the Indians, how the traders lived, and how trade was used as a diplomatic tool. The author also discusses trade in Indian slaves, a Creek-Anglo cooperation that resulted in the virtual destruction of the native peoples of Florida.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Deerskins_and_Duffels.html?id=Aymz4...

To me deer are the ghost of the woods, appearing and disappearing like fairies. I don't hunt, but if the big collapse ever happens, I would.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

janis b's picture

@Lookout

Thank you for the background.

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Anja Geitz's picture

Thank for the song and your deer (dear) story.

Hecate, you have a way of moving me that leaves me smiling through my tears:

Sometimes there would have to be weird deer grunting accompanying this behavior. The does and the fawns, in the day, they were like Bambi, but these bucks, at night, they were like The Wild One. And I didn't want bikers, in my yard. So I cut them off. All of them. No more wet cob. In order for it to work, the does and fawns would have to go without, as well as the bucks. I tried to explain this. To the women and children. The does would just stand there, looking at me, with those doe eyes. Then they’d nudge the fawns forward, to see if maybe some babies, they would unharden my heart. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s the boys. The boys, they are why you can’t have nice things. It's that way, in the deer. Just like in the humans.

Lordy. I wish we could bring you a picnic basket and a bottle of wine, take you to a pristinely untouched part of the mountain top and dance barefoot in the sunshine and the grass...

[video:https://youtu.be/QFlcs8vwLK4]

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
appear as tiny ants against the background of majestic mountains. Good drone footage.
Thanks

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Anja Geitz's picture

@QMS

Aren't they? I can almost imagine the wind on my face while up there...

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
the winds blow thru the face
we are but a speck
sensing pressure
resisting
momentarily

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Anja Geitz's picture

@QMS

Is your affinity towards the mountains related to a personal experience?

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
lived there until the sea brought me back
not sure which is stronger
both dreams
real

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Anja Geitz's picture

@QMS

The mountains, the trees, the lakes. Evoke a sense of wonder and awe in me that is almost spiritual in nature. While the smell of ocean, the rhythm of the waves, and the buoyancy of the water restores a primal sense of well being inside me.

Yeah, it would be a very difficult choice to have to make...

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
to feel so much
intensely

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Anja Geitz's picture

@QMS

That very kind of you to say. Sometimes, though, feeling so deeply about things is not a blessing...

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
inner feelings
avoiding pain
is hard

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Anja Geitz's picture

@QMS

Ironically, though, letting yourself be vulnerable and trusting people is where the greatest intimacy and connection can be found in building authentic relationships.

Funny thing about that, eh?

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
Funny in a way. The potential intimacy shared is bartered by the willingness to accept both the threat of exposure and the responsibility of honesty. Few are willing to venture out that far on the limb. Maybe I cross too many weak resolves? I agree with you.
Thanks for being open.

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janis b's picture

@QMS

for the intimacy and honesty shared here.

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WaterLily's picture

@Anja Geitz Hecate, I wish there were a way to hug you from afar.

You've survived so much, with such grace, and such unselfish concern for other beings of all stripes.

This likely sounds pathetically corny, but you make me want to be a better human.

Thank you for sharing your stories. And please know that we're reading, and we care.

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Anja Geitz's picture

@WaterLily

The tenderness and concern with which Hecate describes the animals, the people, and the natural world that has been hurt all around him is profoundly beautiful and sad.

And it makes me want to be a better person too.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Lily O Lady's picture

household goods wrecked twice. The first time we lost over half the weight of the shipment. New furniture became toothpicks for somebody else. A year or so later we were having brunch near the site of the wreck and heard a guy tell another that he’d found a nice piece of solid cherry wood at a truck wreck nearby. Our new dining set had been solid cherry. The second wreck wasn’t nearly as bad.

But those were minor inconveniences really. It was just stuff, and mainly our stuff. Not houses. Not nature. Not lives. Not everlasting burned.

I tried growing artichokes in Georgia. The deer loved them to death before they could even grow up. Ditto my alpine strawberries I bought at KMart (now defunct). They leave the oregano alone as well as the mint, rosemary and thyme. Our yard is one of the few unfenced in this part of the street. We figure the deer need ways to move around. It’s not surprising they would stop for a snack.

There was a big to-do in local paper about our “killer” deer which were getting out of hand, though not that we’d noticed. We leave the deer alone and they reciprocate. We don’t allow the dogs to harry them. Live and let live. Our neighbors apparently don’t subscribe to such radical, socialist thoughts.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

janis b's picture

I hope the paths that you travel in your mind and in your life take you to places of comfort and love, where you can be as nurturing and nurtured as your nature is.

Thank you for the beauty of your writing and all that it inspires.

[video:https://youtu.be/L9KvlZWQzRA]

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Anja Geitz's picture

@janis b

I hope for the same for Hecate.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@janis b
Thanks Janis
The things we've given up
are hard to be found
things we've handed down

very nice

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orlbucfan's picture

Rec'd!!

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Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.

mhagle's picture

Thank you for sharing this story with us.

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo