The Fawn Twins

Reflections | The Fawn Twins

The fawn twins pass by every evening now, although I always see their mama first. She pauses 10 feet away from our screen door, poised like a ballerina in first position. She tosses her head back as she finds the scent from me, or maybe my Peet’s coffee, or possibly the whiff of my cat Zekey who’s crouched behind the screen door.

Zekey is a viper of a cat and by that I mean he holds the speed record for recoil and lunge. He’s a creature of the long wait time. His brother Rocco can’t help himself. If he sees even a flutter of a moth wing on the other side of the screen, Rocco flings himself full force, sometimes dislodging the door entirely. He’s a hunt saboteur … if there was a chance of a hunt … which there isn’t and won’t be. I protect all moths.

With the deer, though, the boys just watch. And the deer watch them back. We live on a semi-circle between forest and town, a popular passageway for deer heading to the park. They stop for the wild forage that grows behind our kitchen window.

One fawn is a miracle of resolution. When he was a speckled baby, maybe two months old, I spotted the swollen ache of an abscess under his eye. It was modest at first. He could eat and he could nurse. And, even while lugging this bulbous wound, he had that happy hop and skip that little fawns do.

(I say he because even though I didn’t know it then, our fawn soon grew the head bumps, the pellicles, that a spry and hoppy young buck grows.)

I watched mama lick the wound. I searched the internet for all manner of “do fawn abscesses heal on their own.” I reached out to a deer advocacy to learn more about fawns with abscesses.

I didn’t get any answers, just possibilities. “He may heal on his own. That happens.”

Early stages of the fawn’s injury

One day, I saw the fawn as usual, expecting my heart to sink over the growing abscess. He was in silhouette.

I grabbed the monocular and I couldn’t find his swollen side. I thought it must be the other fawn. But I looked again, and then saw his big bulb deflated — concave. Mama was cleaning the remnants of his abscess. I thought if he ever had a reason to hop and skip, this was it.

That happy day was in May. The family of three still comes almost every evening into November now.

There is no hunting here, and if there were, I’d have to move. Hunting was a war for me. Years ago I struggled to drive, to sleep, to work, to photograph, to venture out against the cracks of October shotguns. But that’s a sad story that these deer don’t need to hear.

These deer bed down next to Halloween witches and inflatable Santas. They wander down the appropriately named Forest Avenue, onto the middle school lawn, and past Captain Stoker’s coffee shop. These fawns won’t know the shotgun cracks of October.

As the leftover Halloween pumpkins slump into rot, the fawn’s spots give way to a lush, chestnut coat. His eye, where the abscess used to be, is bright and curious.

One late night as the fog soaks up every lumen of street light, I’m trekking up our stairs from the laundry when I surprise mama in the driveway. She skids to a stop, probably not expecting a human this late, in a town that knocks off at 9pm.

Mama poses again in first position. She exhales and does a quick jig, just a two step. Then, with a head pivot, she seems to signal “let’s go” to her fawns.

The three of them trot off. The fog is a brocade now, a drape, muffling little hooves. It folds around them … my chosen family that can never be, of deer and owls, and corvids and mustelids … and the trees and rogue jade plants that cup the mist and hold it for the forest’s morning.