The Fawn Who Lived

The deck in question.

Several weeks ago, a mother deer and her fawn took up temporary residence in our yard* here in Springs. Deer are a big problem in this part of Long Island (signs throughout East Hampton proclaim the deer death count from the year before, numbers in the 500s or 600s) and I’ve learned to adopt the local custom of scorning these garden-eating, tick-carrying creatures, no matter how cute they might be.

But even my hardened heart began to soften at the sight of this fawn. We saw him (I don’t know whether this fawn is a him or her, but I’m going with him to differentiate from his mother) for the first time in late May. As we were standing in the kitchen, making dinner, he and his mother walked through our yard, a dozen feet away from the deck. The fawn looked no more than a few days old: white spots stippling his back, wobbly legs, sticking close to his mother’s flank. The magic seemed unlikely to repeat itself. We took pictures, and a video, and felt lucky that we’d been looking through the window at that precise moment.

Apparently, though, the mother had been in our yard for a reason. The next day, the fawn was back. He was bedded down right outside my office window, nestled up near the oil tank. Curled up, he was no bigger than a kitten. He was also alone—the mother was nowhere in sight. After an initial burst of panic (was he okay, was he lost, was he hurt?!?), the Internet reassured me it was common for mothers to leave their fawns in safe places while they’re out feeding. And he looked safe—this tucked-away part of the yard was sheltered and cozy—but every once in a while, he would stand up on his shaky little legs, and he would peer around, and I imagined him wondering where his mother was, and it nearly broke my heart.

I knew that it was imperative to keep our distance. You never touch a fawn: fawns have no scent, which protects them from predators. If you touch them, and give them your scent, you’re making it that much harder for them to survive. But, even from a distance, we grew attached to this sweet little fawn. For a few days, he became the center of our world. I texted my family with pictures and constant updates. We had friends over for drinks, and we took them into my office to show them the fawn through the window, which was very impressive to their eight-year-old son. (And let’s be real: if you have something that impresses an eight-year-old, you have something good on your hands.)

The mother came to visit a few times. Whenever I saw her through to the window, I was relieved, and part of me hoped that she was here to pick her baby up from daycare—my little heart couldn’t take the stress!—but part of me hoped the fawn would stay. I tried to catch her eye through the window and silently transmit my reassurance: her baby was safe, she had picked a good spot, we posed no harm. But at some point on Thursday night, she was ready to move him, because when I woke up on Friday morning, the fawn was gone.

It was sweet while it lasted, I thought. And I assumed that was the end of our fawn saga.

**

I was out and about on that Friday morning. It was a beautiful sunny day, but when I got back to the house around lunchtime, the vibe was kind of … iffy. That Mercury-in-retrograde kind of energy. Despite the clear weather, the power had temporarily gone out, though now it was back on. Friends of ours, who were supposed to visit that weekend, had just told us they had a medical emergency and couldn’t make it. A family member had just gotten Covid. A bunch of emails had piled up in my inbox, and I felt an urgent desire to triage those emails, to restore some order to this funky afternoon. So I sat down at the dining table with my laptop, and had just started triaging those emails when I heard an awful screaming from the yard.

Our fence had been neglected over the years. (Much about our house, we’ve learned, had been neglected over the years. Are you interested in learning about the all the ways a boiler can malfunction? You’ve come to the right place!). In the back corner of the yard, where our fence meets the neighbor’s fence, some of the boards were warped and weathered, leaving gaps here and there. When I ran outside to see what was happening, I saw the mother deer near that back corner, alert and highly agitated. Then I looked closer and saw the source of the terrible, agonizing sound. There was the fawn, his head on our side of the fence, his body on the other side.

His head was stuck in one of those gaps. He was yanking and wrestling desperately, trying to get free, screaming all the while. The mother deer was helpless. The only thing she could do was to shield him, to stand guard. When another deer approached, drawn by the noise, she charged and chased him away. My heart was pounding. I felt just as panicked as her. I ran upstairs and, not remotely caring that Andrew was in the middle of a Zoom, barged in and told him we had an emergency.

That screaming—I can’t tell you awful it was. A certain kind of agonizing sound spurs you to action, causes instinct to kick in. I put on my shoes and went outside, and though I wanted to run, I forced myself to approach very slowly. I took one step. A long pause. Then another step. I held my hands high above my head, hoping that this gesture of I mean no harm would be legible to the deer. I held the mother’s gaze, too, trying to tell her that she could trust me, that I wasn’t going to hurt her baby. But how could she know that? Her agitation increased as I drew closer. I’m a human being, after all, and human beings are known to carry guns. It was going to be a choice between sticking with her baby and saving herself, and in the end, when I was about ten feet away, she had to save herself.

His mother now gone, the fawn was screaming even louder. At my approach, he began to buck, his tiny hooves scrabbling against the other side of the fence. “It’s okay,” I said, kneeling down, trying not to sob, raising my voice over his screams. “It’s okay! It’s okay!” I grabbed one of the fence planks and pulled as hard as I could, hoping to widen the gap enough for him to get his head through. Don’t touch him! I reminded myself. I kept pulling, and he kept screaming, and it seemed to last forever, and I thought: Please make it stop, just make it stop!

And then, at a certain point, he stopped screaming. He had squeezed himself free. Or at least I thought he had. He had gone quiet, and sort of … slumped down. His little head was now back on the correct side of the fence, our neighbor’s side of the fence, but he was just lying there, totally frozen. By this point, Andrew was with me, Zoom be damned. (There are many reasons I love this man, but his willingness to blow off his clients in order to help a trapped fawn is one of the top.) “He’s still breathing,” Andrew pointed out. But maybe his neck was injured? Or maybe he didn’t realize he was free? His little body was slumped against our neighbor’s side of fence, in an awkward contortion.

We conferred. Andrew stayed on our side of the fence, and I drove around to the next street, to help from the other side. By the time I got there (I was so panicked that I managed to get lost, which is impressive when you consider how small our neighborhood is), Andrew had fetched a beach towel. He handed it to me across the fence. I knelt down again, and this time it was easier to get close to the fawn. He wasn’t screaming, wasn’t fighting back; he had given up. He was utterly and completely still. Oh God, I thought, as I loosely enclosed his body in the towel, careful not to touch him. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. Gently, very gently, I tugged the towel away from the fence. And then, like magic, in one blessed moment of awakening—

The fawn stood up. He was free! He was free, and realizing this, he fucking booked it. His gait was a little wonky at first, but by the time he reached the edge of the yard, it was clear he was okay.

**

That was our happy ending. (A week later, there was further relief when Andrew spotted the mother and fawn in the neighborhood, together again.) But the rest of that day, despite our successful rescue, I felt weird. My mood was brittle. I was snippy, I was stressed, I was nervous, I was overwhelmed. It was like I had no skin; as the afternoon and evening went on, the smallest hiccup could, and did, make me despairingly tearful. (In retrospect, the adrenaline was probably taking a while to clear my system.)  

When I woke up the next morning, I did my usual thing. I meditated, I made coffee, I took my coffee out to the deck. Sometimes it takes a while for a feeling to settle within me. It’s like a plane, circling high above a city, waiting for a clear patch of runway. That morning, looking up at the trees stirring in the breeze, the beauty of this blue-skied morning making itself known, I felt an aching but welcome sense of sadness. The catharsis had been patiently waiting for me, until I was ready to greet it.

Nature is red in tooth and claw. Death is a reality. It’s the way of this world. I know this—but there are moments when this knowledge really lands. The fawn was okay, and thank goodness for that, but he, like all of us, moves through a world filled with hazard. (What if we hadn’t been home? What if the plan hadn’t worked?) I sat on the deck, looking up at the trees, and the saddest part occurred to me: often that hazard is not the result of ill intent. We think we’re doing the right thing. We perform an action not knowing what the ripple effect might be. We chop down trees and turn them into fences, and we have good reason for this—we’re protecting our families, we’re protecting our food—but we don’t know what might happen in the future.

A few months ago I read Bittersweet by Susan Cain. She writes about the longing, universal among us, for a more perfect and beautiful world, for a world that is fundamentally whole. It’s a book that stuck with me, a book I can’t stop talking about. I was thinking of Bittersweet that morning on the deck. I’m a human being in the natural world, and I’m familiar with the Heisenberg principle. No matter how lightly I tread, I cannot be in the world without altering the world; none of us can. We bought this house* in January, and as we spend time here, I feel myself growing more attached to the landscape. And I want to lavish my love upon it, I want to show my appreciation for this world by moving through it, by walking through the woods where the deer walk, and swimming on the beach where the piping plovers nest. But this, I am realizing, is the challenge of loving a thing. Because, though you might try to love it just as it is, even your love will change it; even your purest action will have invisible consequences. And this isn’t a reason not to love it—not to walk, not to swim, not to live the life you’re meant—but this awareness, I think, is exactly what bittersweet means.

**

(*And look at this: the lessons that come from a change in environment. Yes, we bought a house! A little saltbox near the beach in Springs, out in East Hampton, which we’re gradually getting into shape. We’re still in New York City, though, and we’ll be splitting our time between the two!)