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Peter Hensel
Blessed, Blessed, Blessed: To Live With Marin's Wildlife - Part I
Chapman Park, Corte Madera, May 2015 -
It was when I saw her eyes get soft.
Then I knew her time was near.
For two months I had worried about her.
And now I worried about her even more.
The big doe had a broken hip.
Probably struck by a car while trying to cross Tamalpais.
She was also pregnant.
Speeding metal car parts and soft deer hindquarters do not mix. The horrified driver, braking suddenly, just feels a thump. For the deer it’s a hundred times worse.
Courageously, for the last two months, she had been battling to recover from the blow.
She’d sought refuge in my big undeveloped backyard where in spring the wild grass grows tall and the bushes leaf out with new growth.
Despite her injury, she still had to eat for three. New life was growing inside her belly---new life soon to demand an exit into spring’s bright green world.
So the big doe---I called her, Momma Girl---was a worry.
Still limping severely.
Her unborn fawns were a worry, too.
Had the doe been able to forage enough to give them needed nourishment?
Would the fawns be able to pass through a birth canal constricted by a pelvis still healing from a major fracture?
I could only imagine the pain the big doe would have to endure.
Agony.
Her whole aching pelvis would have to expand---all joints, cartilage and tendons yielding together. Stretching in sync to let new life pass out and into the world.
I could only imagine…what a human could imagine.
In this case, the bad outcome.
But then one day when she came limping to drink at the water bowl, I saw her eyes were soft. And they carried a special light. Her sides, too, were swollen –big and full.
There was hope. A glimmer.
I told Jackie in them morning, “She’s very close---her time is near.”
“I hope she makes it,” Jackie said.
Sometime that afternoon, the big doe rose from her resting spot near the house, hauled herself past the pear tree and into the tall grass.
At dusk, amid gathering darkness, I saw her lying there on her side. With two small dark shapes wriggling around in the grass close to her belly. From her prone position, exhausted, she still had energy left to raise her head and neck. To lick her newborn fawns.