hidden beauty

Nature is filled with surprises.

Like this skipper who thought it had found sanctuary from predators under a heliconia leaf. I would have completely missed it if I had not been trimming the vines in that planter. If we do not look closely, we often miss the little grace notes of beauty that shuttle through our lives.

I thought of that skipper last night while I was on my walk here in Bend. My mother's house is in a development with a street plan designed for walking. Walking the perimeter loop and crossing over on each street garners me about four miles of my daily fifteen-mile goal.

There are no street lights in the development. This is Bend where people try to avoid light pollution that obscures the night sky -- one of central Oregon's tourist attractions.

As I rounded the loop, I saw a large dark object on the sidewalk. It was far too large to be a dog, and the wrong shape to be a cougar -- even though both were possibilities in this part of Oregon. As I walked closer, the shape did not move. But I could then see two smaller black forms.

I was probably twenty feet away when I stopped. It was a doe mule deer and her two fawns. And they showed no inclination to move from the path. That seemed odd to me. Mule deer are not as skittish as our Mexican deer, but these were almost like lawn ornaments.

Because the doe was with her fawns, I thought she was using the old bottom-of-the-food-chain ploy. If I do not move, you will not see me and kill me. Or maybe they had found friendly sanctuary in the neighborhood and the people here had essentially Disneyfied them.

So, I walked into the street and gave them full quarter. When I looped around a second time, they had bedded down in a front lawn.

I had not thought of one possibility for their odd behavior. But that option made itself clear during my afternoon walk today. They were still there. No more than two lots away from where I had first encountered them.

In the daylight, I could see that one fawn was clearly smaller than the other. A larger percentage of twin fawns become an only child when winter sets in. And it was quite clear which of the two would not win the survival lottery.

While I was shooting them, the smaller fawn tried to move a couple of steps. Not out of fear, it was just moving toward a snack of Mountain Ash berries. But it was limping badly. And I quickly diagnosed the ailment. Its left front leg is broken.

When I returned to the house, I called the Game and Wildlife office. They will undoubtedly dispatch an officer to, as the language of modern sterility goes, "harvest" the fawn. That may sound cruel, but a lingering death from starvation would be far crueler.

There is always the possibility that local coyotes could quickly put the fawn out of its misery. One way or other, it will not suffer long.

I have no idea if there are any agencies that nurse fawns to health to give them an opportunity to grow up to be a hunter's trophy to help feed his own family through the winter.

I have always found mule deer to be magnificent creatures in the wild. It is one reason I have never been an enthusiastic hunter. But these three would have looked far more awe-inspiring in some other setting. In a housing development, they look as out of place as tourists from Des Moines in Kabul.

After all, nature may hide some of its beauty from us. But every life is a cycle that comes to the same conclusion. Death.

And that is a promise nature will keep. Ready or not.