Morning
I wake to the sound of hooves on the frost-crusted ground, their cadence soft as heartbeat drums. From the kitchen window, I can see the deer standing in a semicircle, their heads low, dipping into the grass. I didn’t ask for this—I didn’t plan for a herd to adopt my backyard like it was an open field. But I remember the first one, the doe with the nicked ear, her ribs taut under her skin like the strings of an unused violin. Carefully, I offered an apple.
She took it, then stayed.
Noon
The scent of their damp fur lingers like pine sap as I crouch among them, scattering corn and prickly lettuce. I can feel their breath when they come close, warm as my own. A buck lingers farther back, his antlers curved and shadowing his dark eyes. I’ve never touched him, but he watches as if he already knows the shape of my hand. I wonder if this is how trust feels—fragile, a balance that could tip with one wrong motion.
Neighbors shake their heads when they pass. “They’re not pets,” they say, but isn’t anything that lingers our own?
Evening
As the sky fades to purple, they leave one by one back into the woods beyond the fence line. The first time, their leaving felt like a loss. Now it feels like a ritual. The quiet they leave behind: the absence of their crunching hooves, I’m ready for it.
My breath echoes against the chilly, black stillness.
The yard is empty, but their shapes remain—pressed into the earth. The doe with the nicked ear, the black-eyed buck’s shadow, the skittish fawn that never comes too close–do they think of me when they disappear? Do they remember the scent of corn on cold mornings or the curvature of my hand?
Maybe it’s simpler for them. Maybe what lingers isn’t thought but instinct, a pull toward what feels safe.
But for me, their presence stays longer. It’s in the flattened grass where they often lay, the soft prints in the dirt, the quiet ache of watching something wild accept me, if only for a moment. Isn’t that what it means to belong to something?
To let it carve out a place in you, even if it vanishes into the trees?
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