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You are here: Home / Daily Life / Captured Doe

03/01/21

Captured Doe

Before the first light of dawn, I see her black silhouette along a neighbor’s back wire fence. Her back legs caught and twisted, she drapes across the top of the metal fence at an impossible angle. A graceful leap cut short, her nose now angles down, only inches above the snow banked ground.

I suck in the chill air lingering in our upstairs bedroom windows.

How long had she been there?

How long has she waited in torment?   

Had she dared hope for rescue?

Heart pounding, I hitch up my nightgown.  In the darkness, I find dirty sweat pants, pull on a wool sweater, tie up heavy boots. No time for coffee. Where are the wire cutters, leather gloves? Knocking over shovels, rakes, I find them in a cold dark garage.

How to approach a desperate doe? Envision a technique to avoid her sharp-hooved kicks against my attempts to set her free?

I slide down the icy back steps. Boots puncture a hard pelt of snow. As I leap and slip across a shallow creek, the first morning light illumines the true contours of the captured deer.

Her tail, nose, and hind legs are the wind-ruffed coils of a slick black tarp blown against the metal tines.

Eyes blinking, I stand against the frigid cold, white globes of breath hanging in the air. There was no trapped doe 

That doe was inside of me.

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Kathy Swearingen has been a high school teacher in the Bay Area, a hospital chaplain, and currently serves as a community member of MSU's Biomedical Review Board. Read More…

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