Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

The Yearling with the Broken Leg

148 The Yearling with the Broken Leg We watch her, right leg collapsing with each step, she leaning down, hobbling onto her knee. Lying behind the snow-covered woodpile, the mother, her head high, her eyes wide, her tail white-flagging in the flakes. In this winter—the most snow-filled in half a century—the deer paw into the drifts, chew what the books say deer will never eat. They tear the leaves from rhododendrons, shear the grasses along the walk, pull the ivy down in strings from the beeches and maples, off the pockmarked bricks on the south-side wall. Our cats lie along the windowsill, watch, tails twitching. Our dog runs howling through the dog door out into his acre where he leaps against the chain links. The deer look up, but stay. Are they too hungry to be frightened? We don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to say, something dumb and sentimental. Does the yearling know her leg is shattered? When she lifts her good leg, the other hoof 149 gives way in the soft snow, her knee settling into a drift— this now her own hideous walk within the world. Is this a kind of love we cannot know, the deer spared our ignorant pity? She stumbles to another bush, the dog barking, the cats’ tails twitching, our words dumb, lost without a sentence to make sense in. ...