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Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus), Araansas and Matagorda Island National Wildlife Refuge, near Hopper's Landing, Texas: photo by Alan D. Wilson, 2006 (via naturespicsonline)
On the cold late evenings after several heavy early season rains the black sky grew unusually clear and to the east the Dipper caught the night up and poured it back down in a shower of smaller stars, while the air, suffused with the grateful breathing of thirsty vegetation, felt for once clean and sharp and pure in the hours after midnight, when the city traffic had remitted; and in those hours I ventured out, loitering in the between-space; and so it came to pass that, as I approached the small arbour surrounding the quaint little local branch library -- which, in keeping with the general post-civilisational trend of things hereabouts, is, though perfectly useful in its present state, soon to be closed down and "deconstructed", to be replaced by some larger, wastefully tax-funded, concrete-bounded structure of twice the size -- that nocturnal sixth sense which connects the living with the living, and refuses to die, flickered into alertness; and a small internal voice commanded Stop; and in that moment I noticed four deer, a doe with three fawns, had also halted and were frozen in place upon the spot, amid the scrub growth around the silent and vacant library, where they had been furtively grazing until suspended in a paralysis of apprehension by their sensing of my presence, a danger; and then in the next moment my first thought, one of relief, in supposing for a moment that these beautiful fugitive creatures, with neither refuge nor sanctuary availing, had miraculously discovered a private place of their own, where they might come, descending nocturnally from the hills, to browse for sustenance, was supplanted by a second: that a month from now this temporary oasis will be what the deer, by now, a few hours later, have already become for me: nothing but a memory, fading, blurring, dwindling toward the extinction of the vanishing point.
Street view: a series of unfortunate events #2: photo by Michael Wolf, 2010
Black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus), with fawns: photo by Cs california, 2008
