Written real fast; but this was fun and it’s been too long since we’ve had anything new on cognoscenti
- finite
There are moments when I love my town; tonight I got to experience one of those moments.
I was walking home from work, it’s just after eleven o’ clock and I’m mostly relieved to have survived another Monday, smoking a cigarette and kicking up my heels a little bit as I head down the road, thinking about nothing much in particular.
I like to think of myself as being fairly perceptive person, but I didn’t notice the deer until I was less than thirty feet away from them. Two of them, standing on the sidewalk, ears splayed out, wide eyes fixed right on my person, they probably hadn’t spooked because I hadn’t noticed them, but that’s mere speculation.
My town is neither big nor small, just your nice sized hamlet with a few cultural amenities and some small town charm. It does have a nice swath of green space that runs pretty much from one end of it to the other though. You can cross the city via woodland without having to cross too many roads.
Anyway, there they are, right in front of me, and so naturally I slow, try to steady my breathing and my walking pace, trying to project an air of peace and tranquility to see just how close I can get. I’m also fairly conscious of moving towards the street-end of the sidewalk so that when I ultimately spook them they should head into the undergrowth as opposed to the road.
These two female deer had me fixed in their sights, and ten steps later the one closest to me spins about, kicks up that white flag of a tail and trots maybe another fifteen feet down the sidewalk, pushing the younger, smaller doe before her as she goes.
Then, the thirty-foot rule reestablished, they both turn and spread the ears, fix me with the eyes.
Gets me smiling. I don’t know how to make non-threatening hand gestures to a deer, but I go for it anyway, advancing nice and slow, smiling and still putting thought-cycles towards the idea of radiating calm.
Five feet is about right, and almost directly in the halo of a streetlight. Was I ever grinning when they spooked again. This time into the road, and in my focus I hadn’t noticed the car coming.
Before I concern you, the driver was paying plenty of attention, but in hindsight this is what was fun for me.
Two beautiful creatures, such unexpected gifts on a Monday night in the city were suddenly in what could have been peril thanks to my passing through, and what do I do?
I started talking to them – obviously.
I took a dozen quick steps past the scene where the deer had spooked, so that I was past where they had last been stationary as they contemplated me, pivoting as I went, casting out my arms to the side and attempting to apply reason to the situation.
“Hey! Get out of the road! Pick a side there folks and get going,” I said. Besides Hey and Get out of the road, I’m not sure what it was that I was talking, but after I walked away from this moment this is what strikes me . . .
As the driver of the car comes to a stop, they are suddenly confronted by two deer straddling the yellow line and dividing the fixation of their wide-eyed attention between them and some man doing some traffic-conductor routine for the creatures inspection, his breath certainly visible as he said who knows what exactly in an attempt to talk them down from their hasty decision . . .
I’d have loved to have seen such spectacle from the other side of things, just for that quick and perhaps deeply surreal moment before the deer bounced back into the overgrowth alongside the small creek leaving the man to take a bow (yes, I’m enough of an egoist, because by then I’d recognized the whole thing for another piece of theater and am still proud of the part I got to play).