Critter watching

I've never really lived in the country until the last 31/2 years. Oh, I've been in a couple of places that bordered on "country," but always safely housed in a neighborhood, on a city lot.

Our 11 acres is five miles out of our little town's city limits. While we're in a subdivision, the property owners have parcels ranging from 5 to 28 acres, and in the summer we can't see them from our house. It may not be way out in the boonies, but it's definitely country.

We have critters here: deer, wild turkeys, raccoons, possums, lizards, frogs, snakes. We hear the coyotes singing their night songs -- and they're not far away. Our neighbors have recently seen at least one red fox. There have been past mountain lion sightings, and even tales of bear following the creek down from the mountains.

Mostly we have deer -- sometimes in twos and threes, but we counted more than 15 in the yard last winter. We watch the antlered bucks then, vying for territory, and in the spring, pregnant does. This time of year we have fawns, tiny spotted sprites bounding after mama.

They aren't afraid of us, although they're cautious. We can sit outside, a safe and respectable distance away, and watch them graze, or nibble at the pineapple cores and watermelon rinds or the baseball bat-sized zucchini and cukes that I leave in the yard "for compost" (even though there's a perfectly good -- and often used -- compost barrel in the garden).

We've never tired of watching "the buddies," as we call them. Sometimes they show evidence of run-ins with barbed wire, or maybe fights, with tattered or partially amputated ears, or scars evident in the brown hide.

Once we assisted a little buddy who'd gotten his back hoof twisted in the fence's top wire in an attempted jump. He/she was frantically churning the ground with his front legs, throwing his body high in an attempt to break free. Donning heavy gloves, we quietly stood at the fence and very carefully pulled the wire apart just enough that the bloodied hoof popped out, and the deer ran, limping some, but gaining ground with every leap.

It would have died there, in agony, had we not helped.

This spring, a doe often visited. Her front leg below the knee joint dangled uselessly, and she lurched awkwardly through the grass using the knee and her other three legs. She didn't appear to be in pain, and she always was accompanied by two or three other deer who seemed to watch out for her and move at her pace. She'd rest often, grazing on what she could reach, and eventually she'd wobble to her feet and move a little further.

I cried when I first saw her, reminded of my mother and how she'd adapted to her physical deterioration, time after time, until all that was left was her grace and dignity.

We haven't seen the doe for a couple of months.

Critter watching is a reminder that even life in a fairly sheltered area can be unpredictable and sometimes very hard. Nature is impersonal: the weak don't make it very long in the wild.

We're lucky, aren't we, to have friends and family who help us when we're weak, who watch out for us when we can't see, who tend to our wounds when we're injured. That connection with each other is our grace, that which saves us from the impersonal.