seeing deer

this morning before breakfast the sweetie calls someone down the street with a snowplow to see if he can do battle with our knee-deep mess of a driveway. the guy shows up a few minutes later and parks his snowplow down at the foot of the drive. he gets out and i can see him through the window as he walks across the front yard, looking at something after something after something down there in the snow. a trail of something. the sweetie goes out to meet him and they stand there together, looking into the snow, talking, then the sweetie calls me out to see what they’d been looking at.

there are hoofprints in the deep snow, coming up from the road into our yard at the northwest corner, where the chicory grows out of the low rock wall and the sumac and wild roses fight for a small patch of ground left over by the daylilies. the hoofprints are pretty likely deer say the sweetie and the man with the plow. the prints follow the edge of the yard, run parallel to the road but are up above the steps and the daylilies, four or five feet above the road. they run all the way to the driveway at the southwest corner of the yard and disappear. and all around the footprints, bright like cherries, are bloodstains. in places the blood has seeped into the snow and in other places it is frozen on top. little scatters of jewels. rubies and garnets glittering in the sun.

the man with the plow, a bowhunter, figures the deer has been shot. the sweetie agrees. probably last night. something about the way the blood is there on the ground tells them this, i suppose. the sweetie points out a place about halfway up the embankment, right below the wild roses, where the stain is much larger, where the animal had stopped a moment to consider how wise it would be to move forward, head toward our front porch light, run right under our bedroom window with us sleeping up there.

then later on in the afternoon the sweetie and i are driving into the little town a mile over, taking the back way to check out the wildness of the snow, and we see what look like mules, two of them, stomping along single file on the right side of the road, on the pavement side of the guardrails, just along the edge. they look straight ahead and might be tame horses looking for their riders, they are so calm and purposeful. but our car moves closer and they see us. ears flap wildly and monstrous white tails unfurl. not mules at all. whitetail deer. antlerless, but massive and shaggy. they bolt over the guardrail and zigzag through flat riverbottom land. but they don’t just light out. they don’t disappear. they run a while, then stop together, turn those long necks right around over their backs and watch us. they do this twice, maybe three times. they are in a hurry to put distance between themselves and us, but not in that much of a hurry.