Author: Judy Hanawalt (Page 18 of 23)

Wildflower Baby

It’s a rainy day, and I’m sitting inside with a cup of tea. Im feeling a little itchy after finding a tick in the cabin. It must have hitched a ride in here on our clothes when we took a walk to the meadow earlier.

On the way down to the meadow, we stopped to mourn a little baby deer that lay dead near our path, stretched out on its side like it was sleeping. My son had found him on an early morning walk, when he also saw a big doe with a living fawn hiding in the tall grass near by, maybe the twin of the lifeless one on the path. He felt the doe watching him, trying to distract him from her concealed fawn, whose perked ears peeked from behind a sage bush.

This boy wanted to stay behind as we continued to the meadow, outlining the fawn’s little body in purple asters, putting Mariposa lilies on his side and over his eye, and few yellow sulphur flowers over his tiny heart. I joined him on our way back up, plucking blossoms and handing them to him as he worked.

Nothing is obviously wrong with the lifeless fawn, out in the open alone. It’s a perfect little deer with bright white spots. small shiny black hooves, wide white-tufted ears, and long lashes. His open eye stares blankly, his tiny muzzle, its nostrils still, looks velvety soft. I wonder what happened? Did he get lost, separated from his mama when he ran away, startled by a noise? Was something wrong with him when he was born?

Now it’s raining so hard, soaking the little baby and the flowers around him. Sadness hovers at the edges of my mind. Just a baby, so still and sweet. It seems like a waste of a perfect little creature. I wonder if deer mothers mourn their lost fawns? It was right, I think, for us to mark his loss, even if he was just a common mule deer. Maybe his mother was watching.

A few days later, some of the kids pass by the place we’d seen the baby deer. He is gone, and they follow drag marks a few yards away, where they see a matted spot, the impression left by some large animal–a bear?–who had camped out and eaten the small deer, leaving only a few bones and a large pile of scat behind. The fawn is gone. I’m glad his life wasn’t wasted, decaying slowly in the grass. It nourished another life.

The world outside the cabin has its own rules and rhythms that seem harsh to me, but also clean and right somehow.  I am separate from that wild, natural world–but I’m also part of it.