The Nature of Summer Jim Crumley

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The doe walked from tree shadows, where dusk had begun to gather, into the one patch of that small clearing where the last of the sunlight caught her, and there she stopped and there she stood and there she glowed. But the reddening sun was only on her head and neck and spine and the top half of her left flank. The rest of her was dark. She presented an almost eerie illusion, as if the top half of a deer was swimming through the trees and the woodland understorey. When she stopped, she floated.

How long before she would see me? She was still then, apart from her ears, and these flickered with a restlessness that belied her outward calm. The ears looked too big for the size of her head and they were pale grey, almost white, when they turned towards me, and trimmed with a sharp lace of black. With these she tested every airt of the woodland and far beyond. But I knew the wind worked in my favour. So did my stillness and my woodlandshaded clothes, yet something gave me away and her head swung round and I was pinned to the oak tree by her double-barrelled, black-eyed stare. So I had the answer to my own question – how long before she would see me? – and that answer was about twenty seconds. Despite all the care I routinely take in such a situation, the deer is better attuned. She is of the woods and I am not. Each time I come back here, I have to re-acclimatise, shed influences from beyond the woods that – inevitably

– I bring with me. And I am willing to bet that she will have known that I was here long before she trusted my stillness enough to cross the clearing and pause in that last scrap of evening sunlight. ■