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Birthday
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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35 Birthday. “Deer coming through,” Richard calls out from the kitchen. Eight deer in a line walk slowly through the snowfilled yard in back just before seven in the morning. The dark is vanishing, and the scene is lit by the night’s fallen snow, heavy on the trees and shrubs. I’ve just gotten out of the shower, my head wrapped with a towel. I rip the towel off so I can put my glasses on to see, grab my bathrobe off the hook, and run downstairs to get my binoculars from their shelf. The last deer in the procession, the smallest, a fawn, isn’t moving like the others, although none is moving fast this early morning at the end of a long and cold February. It’s been one of the snowiest months on record, so cold we haven’t seen the deer much. They tend to huddle somewhere in the woods, I imagine, burrowed into hollows together to collect their heat against the winds. When it begins to warm up at the beginning of spring, the deer appear across the river. But here they are in the cold, looking for forage they missed in several prior passes through our yard. The hind legs of the fawn are reedy, stiff, and dragging, while its companions are more elastic. And he’s falling behind. It’s my birthday, and after wishing me a happy day, Richard says, “I bet five years ago you didn’t think you’d be watching deer passing through your backyard on your birthday.” He 36 knows I love deer and says it to mark the occasion as happy. And it is happy. Yet these deer are not perfect figurines, complacent in my yard like statues. They are not postcard deer, not decoration to my new rural life, exhibits for observation. They are real deer who are emaciated from months of little food, and they are cold deer from living in conditions we humans devote ourselves to avoiding. And the hindmost fawn is moving haltingly. I want to feed the deer in the winter, I want to spread grain on the snow, sprinkle corn and apples. Our neighbors feed the ducks, which struggle up the icy banks of the river and scrape across the snow to the feeder. On the less cold winter days an old warrior raccoon, whose back legs have incurred some challenge , a fall from a tree or blow from an automobile, warily eases his way down the tree where he nests by the river. He drags across our yard to our neighbors’ feeder, scattering the ducks. Richard thinks it’s wrong to interfere with the ecosystem around the river house, that we humans do more harm than good wading into matters we don’t understand, and I restrain myself. I don’t feed the wildlife, not the ducks, not the deer, not the emaciated fawn with legs like dry wild grass. ...