Those Big Brown Eyes

Those Big Brown Eyes

It was a cool September evening. The trees were turning gold, and the light was growing dim as the sun began to set. I was getting ready to put my arrows and my bow back into my case and call it a night when suddenly, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. There were three deer, two does and a year-old fawn, walking out on the meadow about fifty yards upwind from where I was sitting. While grazing, they began slowly to walk toward me, when I dropped an arrow and their heads popped up.

The two does must have seen me, because they bounded into the woods. The fawn, however, exercising either stupidity or curiosity, started to walk directly at me. Her tail was twitching back and forth almost like a dog's, and her head was bobbing up and down while checking the air current for scents. She knew that something was hidden in the bushes along the fence line, but she couldn't tell what it was.

My heart was pounding faster and louder by the second. The pounding became so loud in my ears that I thought surely the deer would hear it and bound into the woods. She didn't, but instead kept coming toward me. She stopped about fifteen feet from me, still not being able to see me completely because of my camouflaged clothing. She just stood there, staring at me. She then pawed at the ground and snorted. Since snorting is a deer's way of checking the wind for scents and to tell other deer that something isn't right, it was clear that she knew something was there that shouldn't be.

Her nervousness spread to me, and I thought that at any moment she might just run away. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and sweat beaded up on my face. A lump that felt like an orange welled up in my throat, and the sound of my heart's beating became unbearable. I was struck at how close she was; I could see the hairs on her mouth move as she breathed. She was so alive. She looked at me once more with those big, shiny brown eyes and then bounded away. Her white tail, waving wildly, was the last part I saw as she disappeared into the darkness of the trees.

I will never forget that evening and the change that came over me. I was close enough to a deer to distinguish the individual hairs on its nose, and even though the incident lasted about three minutes, I hadn't even thought about raising my bow to shoot the deer. I've