I am in Chicago, walking outside.
The noon daylight shines crystalline through the shrubbery at the front of the apartment building, highlighting the peculiar length of the deer's coat. Redgold and white hair, in shaggy, irregular lengths of four to five inches, rippling and cascading across the brighteyed, alert creature's flanks as it tenderly picks among the leaves of the bushes. I stare at it in intense wonder, never having seen such an animal before.
I feel a curious kinship with it-- but I have felt this curious kinship with every wild animal I have met & observed:
Experiencing a stillness and internal silence like unto peace. Existence minus the clamor of word.
As I watch its careful, cautious harvest, a clutch of loud young people across the street shout to me, asking whatever in the world it is I'm so interested in. They're blind to the deer in its celerity as it shifts from the bushes somehow through the black fenced enclosure, out into the road and to the other side, across from them.
In my astonishment I can only point. I gesture at it, dumbly, jabbing with my finger toward the curious neighbors, and they shout back, asking "What are you pointing at?" Quite literally blind to the nervous, panicked animal maneuvering behind them. It circles them, stepping daintily, hooves leaving the grass undisturbed. And pauses.
It must feel safe, because it drops its guard, slowing just enough to amble. It moves to their left. The three young men see it, finally, struck as I was, mute, gazing into its shining amber eyes.
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