Moah calmly lays in the cool evening grass contemplating nothing. Looking at nothing. Thinking nothing.
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The front porch at my adopted
Looking up from my front porch rocker.
I had finished watering the garden around 8 pm and a gathered up my harmonica and penny whistle and settled into the porch rocker to welcome the night. For about twenty minutes I played for the mountains surrounding me. Most of my tunes are my own creations. I don’t really know what they are; they just feel right to me. I’d start one and play it for a while until the mood passed then I’d sit and wait for inspiration for another tune. My whistle can vary from Celtic to Native American influences. Sometimes, just for grins, I’ll hum and whistle at the same time netting an Ian Anderson flute effect (Jethro Tull). My harmonica tunes tend toward a traditional American sound. I play several traditional tunes like “Wildwood Flower,” “Elvaton,” and “Shenandoah.” But most of my stuff on harmonica would best suit an old-fashioned country square dance.
As my music trailed off, I found myself staring into the trees and just listening to the approach of night. I’ve written about that unique time of day many times before (recently on this blog). True to form, shadows crept across the ridge and things began to be bathed in the twilight glow.
Sharply out of the normal evening chatter of birds and such, I heard a branch snap by the end of the drive in front of me. I knew from experience that this was most likely a deer coming out of hiding from the day. Over the past two weeks at my private villa, my feelings for the creatures have changed from awe at their beauty and cuteness to anger at their destructive powers. Already, deer had raided my sister-in-law’s beautiful hosta bed and ravaged it. Other perennial flowers showed the telltale signs of deer invasion, gnawed off stalks and shoots. I was determined to keep this evening visitor from another destructive attack.
The deer was very busy with clover and had no clue that I was watching every move she made from the safety of my front porch perch. I knew that in order to scare her away, I needed a weapon of some kind. Just shouting at her would have little effect other than to move her a little along the driveway. As I looked around, I saw no rocks, bricks, or heavy objects. There was a broken kitchen chair there, and I thought about tossing that at the deer, but it was too clunky. My eyes fell upon a corkscrew apparatus on the small table beside me. My brother, being a wine distribution manager, has many of the waiter-style corkscrews lying all over the place. They typically look a lot like a pocketknife with a corkscrew that unfolds, and they have a foldable bottle opener. In fact they usually have a small knife blade to assist in cutting the outer wrapping from a wine bottle.
I decided that this was my perfect weapon. It was made of heavy and hard plastic, and when I threw it at the deer, it would make an impression on the beast. Sitting there watching that monster move closer and closer to valuable flowers and plants, something inside of me snapped. I looked again at my corkscrew apparatus and unfolded the small knife blade. Suddenly a wild idea went through me…that deer wasn’t paying any attention to me and was munching around three huge boxwoods that would provide me excellent cover. The wind was blowing gently into my face, so the deer-out in the drive in front of me-wouldn’t be able to smell me. Perhaps I could take her. Maybe I could slash her, make her pay for all of the destruction she had inflicted upon my adopted home.
I carefully and silently opened the wooden porch gate and stepped onto the pea gravel walkway. I thought the crunch of my feet onto that surface would spook her, but she was oblivious. So I moved slowly and cautiously to my left and onto the driveway. Soon, the bulk of the boxwoods shielded her from me, and I felt that I could move more quickly. I crossed the drive then stealthily sneaked along, careful to keep myself shielded from the unaware doe.
Three boxwoods flank the drive as you pull in. She had walked between the first and second from the road. I moved into a position between the third and second. Now all that separated us was one huge boxwood. There had been no sign of her moving from her munching zone. No sign of recognition. I carefully peered around the bush, but I couldn’t see her. I then carefully focused through the bush and thought I caught glimpses of something brown through the green branches. So I crouched a little and brought my weapon up into an attack position. Within seconds, I would leap around the big boxwood and fire my weapon from my hand and at my evil target. I was ready. My mind was made up. I was in attack mode.
Just as I was about to leap into action, I heard the deer slam a hoof to the ground. She obviously had been startled into action. I didn’t think I had made any noise; perhaps she smelled me. It didn’t matter. Things happed in a moment. The deer instead of running away from me was running right past me. I didn’t have time to think, but my arm cocked, and I launched my weapon at her as she flew past me, missing by a wide margin. She was so fast and was past me before the corkscrew tool was even out of my hand. It settled somewhere in a tangle of weeds under a Magnolia tree. The deer flashed past me by two paces and leaped over the barbed wire fence that guarded neighbors from my brother. In her panic as she leaped, I saw her back leg get gouged by the fence, but she kept running at full speed through the field. Somehow, I had really frightened her.
I ran to get a better view of the field in which she ran to and a saw her stop about a hundred yards away and start looking down at her hind leg. Then slowly she turned away and began limping badly away from me and into the woods. I felt horrible that I had caused this fine, beautiful wild beast to become injured. She was so delicate and vulnerable as she walked into the descending night.
I turned back to the driveway and began walking back to the boxwoods to investigate exactly what she had been eating when I heard a large commotion a few paces in front of me at the end of the drive. Where, the deer’s initial limb breaking shattered the quiet of the evening, this new intrusion sounded like an explosion of noise. Then from just in front of me I witnessed a first in my life. A very large black bear bolted out from the tall grasses at the end of the drive and darted across the road away from me at full speed. He slipped past their mailbox and somehow managed to wedge his massive body through the wooden horizontally slatted cow fence immediately behind the mailbox. He looked proportionally like a mouse squeezing through a tiny crack under a door. The speed at which that bear disappeared from sight was simply amazing. It was just a flash before my eyes.
Moments later, a 4x4 truck slowed in front of the mailbox. The driver didn’t stop, but obviously he had seen the bear, too. The driver then slowly pulled away without saying anything to me. I guess I looked too stunned.
After a few moments, I rationalized that that bear was no doubt long gone. It dawned on me that the deer wasn’t spooked by me but by that bigger beast. I went down to the mailbox to see if the bear left any tracks or broken any fence panel. Then I walked a bit along the road to the nearby creek to see if I could catch another glimpse of the bear in the cow pasture there. Either he was indeed long gone or it had become too dark to spot him in the shadows which were as dark as a wolf’s mouth.
I returned to the porch and spent the remaining moments of failing light trying to convince myself that I wasn’t crazy, that I really did see a bear at the end of the driveway.
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