Written as a part of an email home while working on a tugboat in the Arctic Circle of Northern Alaska.
We had an adolescent buck that would visit our backyard each night, and we’d taken to feeding the animal. There were other animals that came though as well – skunks and cats and possums and squirrels and birds – so there were a million noises outside the open bedroom window, and each had to be investigated. But we were waiting for the buck. Each of the other animals was of interest, but the buck was the spectacle.
When he arrived, I cut up apples for him in the yard while he watched me, and left them in one of our barren planters. He was a handsome animal, with a perfectly black nose and muzzle. He watched me with his large black eyes while I prepared his food and I imagined I saw something like sadness there: not out of concern for me – my presence or absence – but because he was no longer a master of the wild there. He was a refugee, creeping through the night.
I was amazed that the old neighbors didn’t like the bucks. If one were able to say that the animals ruined the gardening, or were dangerous, or that there was anything threatening about them at all, then I would have accepted it. But they just didn’t like critters. In contrast, the deer were one of my favorite things – majestic and kind of mysterious. They reminded me Joseph Campbell’s writing. Campbell described a prehistoric time, kind of an origin of myth, before humankind took for granted that they were the ruling species on the planet:
“In those earliest millenniums… men dwelt and moved about in little groups as a minority on this earth. Today we are the great majority, and the enemies that we face are of our own species. Then, on the other hand, the great majority were the beasts, who, furthermore, were the “old-timers” on earth, fixed and certain in their ways, at home here, and many of them extremely dangerous.”
It’s sad, I think, but the bucks are a vestige of that time. They’re kind of vagabonds, in hiding. They’re furtive, not owners of the world that was once theirs entirely, theirs to exist in utter deer-ness. But now they stalked through the night, strangers in an inhospitable world. Perhaps (I hope) our yard provides a tiny little haven for creatures beleaguered by humankind.
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