More than Reading Blog

“When a pine needle falls in the forest;
the eagle hears it,
the deer sees it, and
the bear smells it.”
…an old First Nations saying.

“Look! Down the end of the road,” shouts our neighbour.
Straining our eyes and peering into the distance we see a smudge of brown against the grassy slope.

Suddenly a car noise. The deer turns sharply to take off back into the forest.
It’s hard to focus the camera.

A few minutes after the car passes, the deer reappears. Crosses the road towards the opposite green belt, stops.

A long way away. Three hundred metres at a guess. I steady the camera against the big, blue spruce at the front of the house. Try for another photo. Digital zoom. Focus.
Not perfect. But the best I can do. The deer moves off. Into the trees.
I walk down the road. Quietly. Slowly. Optimistically. Hoping the deer may stop to browse on willow leaves.
No luck. No deer. Maybe she saw me, smelled me, heard me.

Later that day, a neighbour asks if we saw a fawn running up the greenbelt next to our house and I wonder if the fawn belonged to the deer we saw earlier at the end of the road.

No. Missed it. I was inside folding laundry!