Devil’s Lake

Now that I spend a lot of my time in Maine, and have settled into the right sort of routine, I frequently see deer in the woods behind my house. There are families—a mother with two small fawns, a mother with three yearlings—and there are does alone. Every sight is thrilling, even the flash of a tail. Generally, deer travel parallel to the shore, criss-crossing the few driveways of tar and gravel, but they also, at some peril of fast cars, cross Ash Point Drive, the main road of our peninsula, to get to the deeper woods inland, which is where their yards must be (as well as the bucks, which I never see and which is just as well: I'd have a heart attack from happiness). I can't claim to recognize any of them year to year. My encounters, and the deers' lives, are too short.

Deer like edges, where they often stop to pose, beauty and grace materialized. I see one walking on the road or ambling across it, and she stops when she sees the miniature black poodle and me, a hundred yards or so away. The doe's body is pointed into the woods, her head looks back at us, and as we get closer, maybe within thirty or forty yards, I can see her large brown eyes and those big ears, slightly twitching, that would look comical on anything else but this perfect creature. She is upwind; I can smell her musk. When we cross her invisible comfort line, a line that seems to get closer to us every year, she bounds (the perfect word to describe what she does) away.

Of the three animals in that picture, it's hard to say which is wedded more to routine. The deer seems to be following the instructions of scent and stomach and doesn't ask why. The dog starts casting mournful looks at me each day at about 1:45; she doesn't particularly like the walk we take, so full of strange rural smells, but it's time so let's go. And the human: as I walk, I imagine the deer rising at daylight, nibbling some breakfast, checking her sites for news, working the woods, and stopping for lunch and a walk and some chores around the deeryard. Exactly my own life in Maine, except my work is words, and how terribly imperfect they are in re-creating miracles.

Deer like not only the woods, but also our lawns and gardens. The tender new buds of phlox are a particular favorite, but spring hostas get eaten down to the stalks, and the cedar trees at the end of our driveway are bare six feet up and resemble giant paint brushes standing on end. One evening my wife and I even had surprise guests for cocktails. A crabapple tree practically brushes the windows of our living room, and we looked up from our crackers and cheese to see two lovelies snacking on windfalls. If they would have permitted it, I could have reached out a hand through the window and stroked their supple necks. Soon they might permit it. They are bending to human destiny and will, our willful push into every corner of their lives.

And they into ours: this is evolution in our lifetime, I'd say, although humans aren't evolving, of course, we just “develop”—it's the deer and turkeys and rabbits and foxes and bears of exurbia, and indeed suburbia, who are braving the dangers of human musk for a swipe at our ornamentals. Soon, there will be two new classes of wildlife, one in yards nibbling fresh mint, thriving, a joy to some, a pest to others, and the other in forests, their habitat shrinking from logging and development, fearful, skittish at the sound of our guns. And after that? I'm verging on helplessness already; I can’t bear to predict.

In spite of suburban bounty, the life of a deer remains hard. An adult seldom lives longer than five or six years, and the infant mortality rate is high. Deer regularly stumble through sliding doors of houses, or crash through plate glass windows of stores, rampaging in panic among the merchandise. Speeding Volvos and sportsmen not interested in meat now kill what wolves and mountain lions used to. Just in the past year, I've seen a deer's leg bones on my front lawn, courtesy of a coyote, and a mat of fur, stripped of skin and meat, lying on the side of that lane I walk every day.

No small part of beholding beauty is to deny the brutality behind it.

But then I'm faced with it: I was walking the dog one afternoon when I saw a small brown heap in the grass just a foot or so from the road. It looked organic. I moved closer. The dog showed no interest at all. It was a fawn, clearly dead. Its shape was compact, legs bent, hooves tucked in, as if its mother had nudged it into a form suitable for burial. But why was it here out in the open, on the edge of someone's lawn?

A doe, Google told me later, often goes off to feed and leaves her newborn fawn alone for some hours. Predators miss it, as the dog did, because the fawn lies completely still, has no smell, makes no sound, and holds its feces and urine until mother returns. For a moment, I had a surge of hope. Maybe the fawn was still living, maybe the mother couldn't help giving birth in those clearly hostile circumstances of grass and tar and cars and humans, and she came back for it under cover of darkness and nudged it and licked it, and it staggered into the woods to lie low again. Against all appearances, it had lived. As if to prove hope, there was absolutely no trace of it when I walked past the next day.

Was it a miracle? I'd like to believe so. I was raised to believe so, to have hope, to fight for life. The death of a fawn is abhorrent. It couldn't have happened. There would be evidence, or a reason. Wouldn't a coyote leave a tuft of hair, a smear of blood, and wouldn't a human with a shovel leave a mark in the weeds? And if the fawn was still-born and nothing came to disturb it, yet it disappeared—it must have been resurrected. Miracles are supposed to transcend the existence of doubt. Parents and passersby, have faith, and your baby will live, learn, and adapt to the world.

Yet that poor body was only a faint blue shadow of a fawn, already melting back into earth. I know in my heart it was dead. And here I am, trying to explain this mystery in words, trying to make sense of a world in which change is speeding up and place is shrinking down, even in Maine.

And if the doe did not return, and the coyote was extremely hungry, or the neighbor fastidious, well, there are days that I'd prefer it that way, when I think rationally about death, when the only thing to do is to put life into fate's hands, when work and words don't seem sufficient to save the natural world, when it makes sense to lie down with the lion and trust in Mother Earth's billions of years. I'm not exactly accepting the cancers and wars and land grabs and all the big and little evils that humans practice on themselves. I'm ignoring them for a time, hoping the predators can't sense me. Those are the times I lie low, wordless, waiting for dawn. And when daylight comes, then I get up and stagger, one day even to bound, a little farther down the road.