I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails,
idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.
Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the
shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower. The air
had that peculiar lack of taste that presages the latest hot day in a famous series of hot days. Birds that had maybe cowered all night just as we had done now began to
twitter self-importantly. A wren landed on top of the deadfall from which we had
taken our firewood, preened itself, and then flew off.
I don’t know how long I sat there on that rail, watching the purple steal out of
the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. Long enough for my butt to start complaining, anyway. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and
saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me.
My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand
in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot, dry
excitement. I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to. Her eyes weren’t
brown but a dark, dusty black–the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewellery
displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly
lowered in what I took for curiosity, seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuffs and a brown khaki shirt
with the elbows mended and the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day.
What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was
appalling.
We looked at each other for a long time… I think it was a long time. Then she
turned and walked off to the other side of the tracks, white bobtail flipping
insouciantly. She found grass and began to crop. I couldn’t believe it. She had begun
to crop. She didn’t look back at me and didn’t need to; I was frozen solid.
Then the rail started to thrum under my ass and bare seconds later the doe’s
head came up, cocked back towards Castle Rock. She stood there, her branch-black
nose working on the air, coaxing it a little. Then she was gone in three gangling leaps, vanishing into the woods with no sound but one rotted branch, which broke with a
sound like a track ref’s starter-gun.
I sat there, looking mesmerized at the spot where she had been, until the actual
sound of the freight came up through the stillness. Then I skidded back down the bank
to where the others were sleeping.
The freight’s slow, loud passage woke them up, yawning and scratching. There
was some funny, nervous talk about ‘the case of the screaming ghost’, as Chris called
it, but not as much as you might imagine. In daylight it seemed more foolish than
interesting–almost embarrassing. Best forgotten.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not
doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. I’ve never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was
trouble in my life–my first day in the bush in Viet Nam, and this fellow walked into
the clearing where we were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand
away there was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us our youngest son might be hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an oversized
head, thank God); the long, crazy weeks before my mother died. I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail. But five hundred million Red Chinese don’t give a shit, right? The most