The Deer

I felt the need to write this story down in its entirety, just because it ended up impacting me in such a way. This happened a little under a week ago, and it just about broke my heart.

Caution: this story is not really a happy one. It features the pain and death of a young animal, as well as descriptions of a wound.

I spotted her walking home from church. A little deer, larger than a full-on baby but much smaller than an adult. She was lying on the lawn of an apartment complex just a street over from mine, next to the busy main road. I’ve seen lots of deer in my life: I grew up with them wandering in large groups through my backyard. So, at first, I just decided to mind my business about it and not go near her.

Except for the fact that she had this terribly shell-shocked expression, and was lying in the bright sun during the heat of the day of an unseasonably hot October. So I set a timer and resolved that if she was still there in an hour, I would bring her water and try to get her back on her feet.

The hour passed.

I headed back, feeling a little foolish with a plastic bowl shoved into my now-bulging messenger bag, and my hydroflask filled up with lukewarm water. (I read Black Beauty as a kid, and was always struck by the seemingly constant dangers of giving an ungulate cold water.)

There was someone else sitting next to the deer, on the stairs by the scrubby grass where the deer was resting her head. That’s what tipped me off to something really wrong going on—this person was less than a foot away from the poor thing, and she made no motions at all.

The person (I got their pronouns; they/them), told me that they had found the deer on their way out from their partner’s apartment, and had tried to call animal control about it, but it was a Sunday and they were closed.

The deer was injured. Badly.

I felt so stupid for not seeing it sooner, except I knew that wasn’t my fault. The deer was curled up on top of her badly broken back leg—I couldn’t have seen it unless I got as close as I was now.

It was gashed open badly enough that I could see her bone, and though it wasn’t bleeding, that wasn’t much of a comfort: the amount of flies that were covering the wound didn’t give it enough space to bleed as they swarmed the bone itself.

The deer didn’t make any motions when I set down the bowl of water nearby, which was more of a sign of her lack of energy trying to stay awake than it was about my incredible animal skills. Don’t get me wrong, animals like me a lot, but the natural response from a deer that young should have been to bolt, if not to at least look at me.

And she was young. Like I’d thought, certainly not a baby, but there was no way she was any more than a year old. Her fawn spots were still visible, faded into a shaggy almost-adult coat.

With animal control unable to visit, the stranger (they had a name, but I forgot it in the heat of the moment I’m afraid) called the police.

We waited in the sun, occasionally shooing the flies off of her wound and awkwardly trying to strike up a conversation. They had some views about Utah that I didn’t share (warrants a post of its own, frankly) so it was hard to get anything other than a few sentences at a time going.

About thirty minutes into waiting, we decided we felt bad calling her “the deer”, so I opted to call her Wishbone. It was a horrible attempt at levity with her broken leg, but I also sincerely meant for a little bit of magic behind it: I wanted that wish to be that she could get up and walk away from this. Deer have better survival rates than animals like horses or cows do with three legs, but the truth is that a broken leg is often a death sentence for hooved animals because they aren’t meant to have weight distributed in any way other than four legs.

It’s not impossible, but unlikely.

When the police finally arrived, Wishbone had worsened significantly. Her eyes were tired, her ears were drooped, and she was breathing much more heavily than she was when I had showed up the first time.

The officer didn’t have much to offer, either. It wasn’t like he could pick her up and get her somewhere else; she wasn’t from the canyon. I’d had a sinking feeling that I knew Wishbone. She belonged to a deer and her two babies I’d seen wandering around campus. She was an urban deer—by all accounts, she was already as close to her natural habitat as she had ever known.

In the end, the officer simply said that he couldn’t put her out of her misery because he wasn’t supposed to fire in a residential area unless there was an emergency. All he could do, he said, was try and move her into the bushes to give her some privacy. If she was able to get up, she would. And if she wasn’t…he said he would have animal control pick up her body in the morning.

Wishbone didn’t like the officer—he was a big man with a deep voice and a mustache, and when he first approached us she made a move to try and get up. All that happened was she jerked violently and made a sharp bleat of pain before curling up tighter than before. That just about shattered my heart in two: deer almost never make noise.

But, there was nothing to be done. I couldn’t help. In fact, the small crowd of the officer, his two volunteer officers, the stranger, and myself was just stressing her out more.

So…I left.

I wrote a little poem for her, just as I blearily stumbled home from over two hours of trying to comfort a dying baby deer.

I named you Wishbone, darling,
because there was nothing else to be done. 
And I hope that name has enough magic in it, 
You'll wake up soon and be able to run.

She wasn't there the next day when I walked back to campus, but any hopes I had were dashed, because the night after that I spotted the mother deer...and just one of her babies. 

So, all I can say now is sleep well, Wishbone. I hope you woke up in a big field, and I hope that you stood up on all four legs.