Seed Across Snow

Deer

66 Deer asleep for an hour or more, I had not heard his key enter the lock, nor the door creak open, but his voice wakened me and I lay listening. It was formal, but fretful, into the telephone. on the way home, a mile away, he’d come round a corner, a hard sharp curve, and almost run over a deer, still alive, still living in the heart of the road. as my husband essed to a stop, the animal’s head raised, eyes lit by the headlights of the truck. Its muzzle quivered when he approached it and knelt, his shoes entering the soft current of blood. its hindquarters crushed, it lay caught there in the mercy of oncoming traffic, which at that time of night could be scant, but also precarious. “I have no way to dispatch it,” my husband apologized into the phone. He asked our sheriff, “can you send someone out? It’s suffering.” when he came into our bedroom to find me awake and as we lay under the gray moonlight covering our bed, he described what he had seen. Its calm. It must have been in shock, seemed to be waiting for him to help, though the only thing left to do, he couldn’t have done, for we had never owned a gun. we lay there, 67 wheeling our conversation slowly to other things— the children’s schedules, what time we’d be getting home from work, while I tried to abandon the image of the deer. we talked on softly and then heard, off in the dark distance—a shot. The next morning, as I drove by, taking the children to school, I noticed the stain in the road; and every time I drove into the curve, I began to see the deer, the animal I’d never seen at all. as I approached, it turned its head toward me: I looked into its eyes. It looked into mine. and somehow, I remembered— I was sixteen—had just begun driving and was with a car filled with other girls. we roamed the back rural roads of our county heady as huntsmen (though the truth was we were afraid of what we were stalking and trembled when we thought of them). and once, on a foggy night, we drove out of a curve and found a figure looming ahead in the road. we slowed, coasting toward it, headlights useless too far into the fog, but still it was a shape, erect, a small man, I thought. no, a child! all voices finally quieted in the car as we coasted toward it; we were frightened! we dreaded that we were going to—at last— 68 see something! and then, the car rolled to a stop in front of a colossally feathered owl. Gray feathered! stormy white-brinked wings. Tall as we had been when we began school! In the road, like a sentinel it blocked our way home to our parents who were at the windows, looking down the long farm roads for us. It blocked our way to the party in the field, where bonfires would keep us safe if we stood near, safe from the things that invited us to the edge of the woods. The owl would not move, would not move, but only blinked its amber eyes. It gulped and a ripple moved through its body. a girl whispered from the back seat. Honk at it! But I couldn’t. wouldn’t for some reason. I could open the door and I quietly shooed it. nothing. My best friend, the girl who would not live at home, who went into the woods every chance she could, stood warrior pose in the road. “Move along!” she commanded, arm lifting to levitate, but even she scrambled back into the car when the willows began to twitch, the forest reaching out for us. The wind raised and we all wanted to go home and a girl in the backseat began to weep, but she laughed, too, knowing 69 it was silly. and it was. It was only an owl. How many times had we lain in bed at night and heard them ask us our names? It was, only then, when we all began to think of ourselves as ourselves that the owl finally grew tired of us, though to punctuate that it would only move slowly and of its...