Sage Advice

By MARK SAGE

That sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Everyone I’ve asked says so.
Grown up deer leave their children, usually hidden, while they go off and do whatever it is grown up deer do in the few hours before bow season begins. They don’t leave their children with human kids and dogs. It just doesn’t happen.
But it did.
Now I’ve heard all the stories about the well-meaning and blindingly stupid hiker who finds a baby deer and certain that some Elmer Fuddian character has assassinated its mother grabs it up into his arms and runs off, feeling exactly like a real good person. Sooner or later, usually when some official with a gun and flashing lights shows up, that errant hiker realizes what a mistake he made and that though he may have been well-meaning, as blindingly stupid as he is hiking might not be his niche. The mother, it almost always turns out wasn’t dead. She was probably nearby even, watching and fuming about how yet another blindingly stupid, yet tearfully well-meaning, human had kidnapped yet another baby deer.
This wasn’t like that. I promise. For starters, there aren’t any hikers, blindingly stupid or otherwise, in this story. No abandoned baby deer star, though a baby deer of the unabandoned variety makes an appearance. That’s about the most sense I can make of it.
The deer’s mama had run to the woods when she spotted my boys out in the side yard playing with our dog. Her baby had ambled over, possibly because of the chocolate that’s more or a less a permanent part of my youngest’s face. He won’t allow a bite of meat anywhere near his face, yet he’s never met a bar of chocolate he couldn’t cram full into his mouth.
Maybe the baby deer, still, to use that son’s description, wearing polka dots, didn’t come for the chocolate, but it did take a taste before heading down the small hill to where the apple tree in a wetter year might have been busy dropping its fruit. My sons walked with it, petting it right to the line of overgrown grass, brambles and assorted weeds that mark the end of our property. There they stood with all but their toes in our front yard and hollered, yes hollered, for the baby deer to come back. It did, which shouldn’t be surprising, especially after, and I swear both boys swear this is true, the baby deer licked my youngest on the face and my eldest on the hand. I know for a fact, because I saw it, that the deer nuzzled the boys, much the way our goat nuzzles them whenever they take him food, water or decide he might be fun to use as a pillow.
Then just as quick as it had started it was over. The baby deer turned from the now-chocolateless faced son and his older brother and waded through the tall grass that keeps the road from our front yard.
My sons turned to my wife, a camera in her hand, and told her in that nonchalant way that only someone who has no idea how magical the moment just before was that the baby deer had gone back to its mommy.
I know somewhere in the woods that night there was a gathering of deer. The old ones, with antlers, chuckled nervously and told one another over and over again that that sort of thing just doesn’t happen. People don’t let deer lick their faces. They kill them. Hang them from the neck up on walls. The baby, the one in polka dots, laughed and said in that nonchalant way that only someone who has no idea how magical the moment just before was that chocolate isn’t half bad.