Blood and nasty green stomach matter gushed from her side. The Old Doe had been hit. The arrow flew from the old oak tree, just off from that feed plot where all the deer had been feeding all through the late summer and early autumn. It was aimed at her heart, and the doe was hit a bit far back.
And now she was running wounded. Death was coming, but it wasn’t fast enough. The agony of the deer was now replaced by the terror and panic that she must run from the predator, the danger that that revealed its with that swishing arrow sound and the thud into deer flesh.
She would not be long for this world, but it was not soon enough to remove her from the before the torture of this sort of death would set in.
For seven years, the Old Doe had run these hills. Her mother was a wise old girl, who had dropped the Old Doe and a buck fawn in her fifth spring, and she taught her young ones the ways of survival in summer swelter and through the hard snows of winter. She taught them many to walk into the wind, so they could always catch the scent of what lay ahead, and she taught them to be most wary of man. For man is the only animal that can kill you if he has you in his clear view of sight, and if man can see you, you’d better run like hell.
A pickup truck took her mother on a late March evening, when the doe took her young out to lap some vestiges of the road salt that had been dumped all through the winter. It was an ignoble death for such a wise creature, but it is a death that happens thousands of times on the highways every year.
And the Old Doe became an orphan, but she had her mother’s wisdom, and she had her mother’s band to hook up with. White-tailed deer live in little societies in which the mature bucks live in their own bands and the does and their growing offspring live in their own as well. The old does become really woods-wise, and they pass this knowledge onto their daughters, granddaughters, and nieces.
The buck bands split up when the autumn makes their hormones surge into a state of insanity, aggression, and just plain libido. They run the country looking for estrus does on their own, and this is roughly the same time that men with rifles and shotguns show up and drop them dead as the course the sweet sensual scents of the rut.
But the does stay together through most of this insanity. A buck might run a doe on her own for a little while, but she invariably returns to her sisterhood.
The Old Doe learned from her mother’s older sister, who died at the age of ten, when her teeth were all ground down to the nubs, and there was no way that she could masticate an acorn or beechnut to feed her gaunt form. She starved to death on a late February day, and when she passed, the doe band’s leadership was passed to the Old Doe.
And she ran the hills for four good years. Every hunter and homesteader in that part of the country knew her well. She was a big, stout doe, and she always dropped her twins in the sweet days of late May. They would follow her out into the pastures on midsummer evenings when the fireflies seemed to rise with the humid vapors of dusk.
Two daughters made it through the gauntlet of slinging arrows and firing guns and speeding cars. They were her lieutenants, and by their second years, they were both dropping twins along with their mother. Coyotes and mowing machines got some. A bobcat got at least one.
The hunters looking for tender meat always took the little fawns as soon as the hunting season started.
The Old Doe lived a life in which death stalked everywhere, and it was always just a matter of time before someone was shot or impaled or lifted from a sleeping form.
But she lived all through that horror, and her band thrived as well as deer could.
In the end, the Old Doe could only avoid a fatal error so long, and on that early October day, she led her band to her favorite food plot, and for whatever odd reason, she chose to slide in with the wind blowing behind her as she passed the big oak.
The steeping sun occluded the hunter’s form as he drew back and let the arrow fly. He was a young man, fifteen years old and learning to be a proper huntsman. He had spent hours practicing in the range. He thought he had that arrow flinging down, and I suppose he did. Even the best of them sometimes shoot a little too far back.
After the arrow thudded into her side and out the other, the Old Doe ran with her band for the coverts. But the loss of blood and the spurting green stomach matter slowed her advance.
And in panic she ran as hard as she could. She didn’t know the direction. She just ran and ran. The thorns from the multiflora rose pierced her legs. She just ran and hoped that all the terror and pain would cease.
And then she fell and fell hard. Her neck twisted the side. She flailed for about five minutes and bleated as if she were a lonely fawn calling out for her mother. And as she bleated, the strength sapped from her existence.
Her sides rose and fell and legs flailed a bit longer.
But she was gone.
And all that knowledge of being a deer in these hills was wiped away. Minutes ago she was animate fur and flesh, and now she was a pile meat, hide, bone, and organs.
The night began to drawn in around her body. A trio of roaming farm dogs caught her scent and trailed down to her final resting place. They tore at her hide, but not being experts at dissecting carcasses, they made a mess of the whole thing. Indeed, most of what they did was tear into her flank a little as they torn into each other as they fought over this bounty that they had suddenly discovered in this part of the dark woods.
And so the Old Doe died, and her carcass was discovered that morning when the young hunter and his father managed to pick up her trail in the early morning sun. The meat was not whole, and the stomach contents had fouled most of the meat as she decomposed in the early autumn warmth.
At least she wasn’t alive anymore to suffer, but her body would be left to rot and stink and feed the vultures, foxes, and opossums. They would live well off her body, for in death there can be promise for more sustenance, more life. And if nature’s rules are adhered to, all flesh goes to the carrion beetles and the decomposing bacteria.
And so we can think of the Old Doe’s death as a tragedy, a wasteful death that ended a lifetime of horror.
But the white-tail evolved to live lives of horror. They don’t have complexes about it. They simply live while they know of constant terror, and pass on what they know to their young. And they have done so for millions of years on this continents, millions of years before the first Siberian hunters came down from Beringia and took that first white-tail for a bit of meat.
Their bodies have fed countless numbers of humans, and they’ve fed such teeming multitudes of predators that it would be foolish to count them all. And in the hills where they once grazed among the Mastodons and fleeted away from American cheetahs, they now live in the oak woods, where the rifles crack and arrows fly.
They live their fleeting lives of constant terror. But they live them well and so nobly that few humans can ever approach their dignity, even when they fall in such folly as the Old Doe did.
But it is the way of these creatures. Their evolution as prey made them be this way, and we must accept that their deaths must come, if not by the hunter then by the speeding car or horrific starvation.
So it should be.
