Chance encounter

Today at lunch I stepped out into the cold under a cloudy sky. I walked through a brown and gray world full of knobby trees straight out of German folklore. Under the ever present rush of traffic from the highway was the whisper of wind moving through mostly bare branches.

I had stopped by a bend in the trail to listen to cardinals chipping when I noticed the thick brush moving independently from the wind. Out crept a deer as gray as the trees. She stopped not fifteen feet from me and began browsing a shrub while two other gray ghosts appeared behind her. She was barely bigger than one of my dogs, which made me wonder if she was a fawn who'd lost her spots. I could see her coarse winter coat in my binoculars, which earned me barely a glance. The trail is in a wildlife sanctuary so the hunting season is marked only by distant gunshots. Fattening up for the winter is a higher survival concern here than unnecessary fear.

We stood together for a while as they foraged and I bird watched. The male cardinals whose chipping had drawn me appeared in their bright red coats. A blue jay flew up with a mouse in its beak. I watched it hammer at the mouse the way a nuthatch hammers at sunflower seeds. A goldfinch sat on a branch fluffed up against the cold.

Suddenly a man carrying a scope rounded the corner and hustled straight towards us. The deer looked up and froze, and then I did too. We watched him fly by with a quick acknowledgment for me and no indication that he had seen or cared about the deer he had passed right in front of.

When he'd passed, the deer lowered their heads and, after a pause, began to work their way through the bramble away from me. Their movements were slow and delicate. Occasionally one stopped to nibble on something. Then they crossed the trail and faded into the more open woodland on the other side.

After a few minutes I wandered away in the other direction.