Deer

Life has a way of throwing you curveballs; it drops you into the most random situations and leaves you to work it out. When we go through troubling or confusing experiences, we often learn things about ourselves that we wouldn’t otherwise realize, and sometimes learn those special things about other people as well.

I have always loved animals, and as familiar as I was with my own feelings towards them, I couldn’t have realized the emotional importance of an animal until something that happened a month ago.

One evening in August, my dad, my brother, and a friend of his were firing bottle rockets in the backyard. We don’t normally do that, though--it was a random, one-time thing for my dad to have bought fireworks. He hasn’t bought any since, and probably never will again, because our family dog was accidentally let outside when they were lighting them, and he ran away. The story isn’t about my dog (don’t worry, we found him later) but about another animal we found while looking for him. Our house backs up to untamed woods, and my brother and his friend started their search there while my dad and the rest of the family called for the dog around the neighborhood. My brother Jack and his friend Matt came back to find me not long after they’d left. What they reported back to me was so unexpected and bizarre that I didn’t believe them at first.

“I don’t know if you knew or not, but there’s a dead deer at the edge of the woods.” Jack said.

What an odd thing to hear. All I could respond with was: “what?”

He repeated himself, and I asked if he was sure it was dead.

“I didn’t get close, but it looked pretty dead.”

They didn’t seem nearly as disturbed as I imagined I’d be if I stumbled across something like what they were describing. They brought me to it. It was getting dark by that point, but from a distance with my phone’s flashlight, I could see that they were right. It was certainly not alive, although there was no blood or wounds on it. It was a fawn, it still had speckles on its coat. I felt obligated to stay with the deer while my brother and Matt went to find my dad and a shovel.

Once they returned, even though I had demanded we bury it (because the alternative was leaving it for the foxes, and who knows what sort of mess they would leave), my dad and brother were the ones who took turns digging the grave. It took them a half hour to dig something reasonably deep--at least enough that the fox couldn’t dig it up. I stood by with my brother's friend, holding a flashlight.

When I pass by roadkill in the car, I always cringe and look away from it. As upset as it makes me, you can ignore roadkill. You can drive right past it and never consider it again. You didn’t hit it, so it isn’t your responsibility. I didn’t kill the fawn, but it was on my family’s property. And I felt incredibly responsible for it. I was sad but satisfied when we finished its burial. I had a feeling that it was actually “put to rest”, if you can even say that about wild animals. I wouldn’t have been able to do it by myself, not without my brother, his friend, and my dad. I don’t know anything about how deep to make a grave, besides not having the strength to dig one even if I knew all about them. We could have left it alone and not intervened on nature’s processes, but something about a burial feels more dignified. We felt like that poor animal deserved that dignity.

Through that experience, I realized the depth of my affinity for animals. It’s not uncommon; almost anyone would be upset by finding what we found, and almost anyone would feel sorry for the deer. The way we all felt obligated to give that fawn a nice, final resting place is something that amazes me. In that moment, I saw a kindness and sensitivity from my brother, my dad, and even my brother’s friend--who was roped into this bizarre family bonding experience essentially against his will--that I’ve never seen before and probably won’t forget. Strange, troubling experiences have a way of showing you sides of yourself and those around you that you wouldn’t fully understand otherwise.