A Run in With a Deer, Almost Literally.

So I was out taking the dog for a walk. He was trailing along behind me, possibly feeling like going for a walk in the heat was pure madness. Or maybe he just didn't give a fuck where we went today. I dunno. Whatever. It's hard to tell with dogs. I however was engaged with that lovely and important human occupation of thinking about all the things I could have been doing today but totally was not doing. We were just tooling along, when we got to the part where our path runs through a little grove of hemlock trees. You know that kind of patch were everything looks all Grimm's Fairy Tales.

So I glance up and realize there is a deer like maybe twenty feet in front of us. Naturally I freeze as not to scare her. But I only get a bare second of that weird exhilarated feeling you get when you see animals in the wild and then we both hear a twig snap somewhere in the deep green beyond her.

And then she starts running.

Right at us.

And when I say running I really mean that thing where they shove their white tails in the air and briefly defy gravity by leaping along in great bounds. It was about that point I start getting a hint that maybe this isn't such a good super magical thing to have happening right now.

Then she looks up and our eyes meet and her eyes are as wide as saucers and my eyes are as wide as saucers and then it seems like time has stopped for a brief second where she is all ears and eyes and I am all bug spray and dog and floppy summer hat.

Then she does a fairly smooth ninety degree turn and runs off aways into the forest where she does that thing where she shakes her tail a whole bunch and looks irritated. As though I had caught her at home in the shower or something.

Then I look at the dog and he looks and me and we are both like “did that really happen?” And then he smiled sheepishly and then I smiled sheepishly and then we got the fuck out of the forest.

Of course all this really made me realize that oh-shit-WTF is a pretty universal expression.

So is holy-shit-did-that-really-happen?

So I suppose this is where I should close with how lucky I am to have my farm where I can get to see wildlife up close and personal and how I never would have had the wonders and beauty of nature available to me if I still lived in the city, but really all I can think of is her face.

You know, that time when me and a 200 pound female doe briefly shared the same facial expression.

At least I won't need any caffeine this afternoon, though.

So there's that.