Near and Deer
The day my husband and I moved into our home, the deer came like a neighborhood welcoming committee. We were unpacking boxes in the living room, which looked out on a gravel walk that bordered our yard. Suddenly three deer came into view, stepping by single-file, as if on a forest path. “Look,” Mau said, touching my arm. We both froze, newspaper wadded around our feet, stacks of bowls in our hands.
It’s hard to remember now, but I think we felt delight, seeing those animals brush past our windows. Our new house was on a cul-de-sac in a California wine-country suburb, surrounded by ranch houses and manicured lawns. We had picked the town because my mother lived nearby, and I was expecting twins. We were hoping to buy a couple of acres outside the city limits, with a rambling old house in need of repair. My parents had bought their two-acre riverfront parcel in 1977 for the kind of money people now spend on cars—very expensive, assault-vehicle-type cars, but still. Mau and I imagined that, adjusting for inflation, we could surely afford a fixer-upper on the outskirts of a rural village. Researching the move, I went to a real estate office in the area and asked what I could get for $200,000. The agent pulled out a snapshot of a double-wide trailer set on a dirt lot. A flea-ridden mutt was chewing his leg in the foreground. A two-lane highway ran past the front yard.
“How much extra for that junkyard dog?” I asked.
The realtor put the picture away and smiled thinly. “What exactly are you looking for?” I noticed he had a pile of salami on his desk—no bread, no plate, just a stack of greasy meat on a file folder. “I’m on one of those protein diets,” he said, when he saw my glance. I took a breath and described my dream house.
“You’re talking a million,” he said, rolling up a slice of salami and popping it in his mouth.
That was our big take-down. But we went ahead and emptied our IRAs, shook our wallets for spare change, and bought a three-bedroom ranch house in a modest development, circa 1985. And the truth is, we fell in love with the place, partly because it was only twice our price range instead of five times so, but also because beyond the low wire fence at the back of the lot spread ten acres of grass and cork oaks, open space required by the city when the development went in. This empty park gave us the illusion of the wilder setting we had hoped to afford. And so the deer seemed like a good omen. We watched them circle into the garden, glancing at each other in amazement. There were two does and a fawn, with shiny spring coats. They had those wonderful noses, so patrician, as thin as the spine of a book. We walked slowly toward the windows at the back of the house, so as not to scare them. The deer didn’t turn their heads. We looked at each other, eyebrows raised, then back at the deer. They were advancing deeper into the yard, and now I noticed a cold, oblivious sway to their hips. Mau slid open the sliding glass door and stepped outside. We couldn’t have been more than ten feet from them, but the deer didn’t flinch. They crossed the lawn like a family taking its usual seats at the dinner table. Then they bent their heads and began munching on the shrubbery.
I shot a quick look at the ground cover on the bank, and took in for the first time that those green spears jutting up everywhere were flowerless stalks—every blossom nibbled away. And those impossibly small bushes by the patio—how could I have missed it?—they were trimmed like lollipops. The realtor had described the half-acre parcel as “landscaped,” and when we flew down from Seattle to take a first look, I vaguely remember noticing that the plants had a stunted look. They weren’t dried out, just miniature. A pygmy garden. Too much clay, I figured, making a note to amend the soil. But now I understood: as fast as the plants sent out new leaves, they were gnawed away. It was an evaporating garden, never quite dying off, but never getting any bigger.
I wanted to rush out there and grab the deer by their delicate necks. For the past seven years, I had been pent up in city apartments, growing so many potted plants our living room looked like a mad botanist’s greenhouse. I had raised cacti in the windows—galleries of knobby heads, set on water-stained planks. I hung ferns from the ceiling, trained vines up the walls. I once took a picture of my sister in one of these apartments, and only when the film was developed did I see how far I had gone. I thought I was taking a head shot, but my sister is barely visible, a blurred figure lost in a jungle of drunken greenery.
When I chased those first deer out and shut the gate, I had years of bottled longing in my gut. I had just signed the papers on a house that very well might put me in a debtor’s prison. Now I owned my first patch of dirt and open air, and I was going to have a garden. That was all there was to it. I would find a way to drive them off. I’d heard that people used blood meal, bars of Irish Spring, panty-hose filled with human hair. Deer hated the smells. I’d go to the library and get a book.
While I was doing my research, my mother brought me several Early Girl tomatoes as a housewarming present. I moved the plants into the backyard, drenched them, and went to bed. In the morning, looking out my kitchen window, I noticed that they seemed wilted. I went out to inspect. The leaves were not wilted, they were gone. So were the first hopeful fruits. I looked around the garden. A few other plants looked suspiciously smaller. I went around to the front of the house, where the previous owner had caged up some roses. I don’t like roses, so I borrowed the wire and wrapped it around the tomatoes, hoping they’d recover. I went inside for lunch. When I went out front to check the mail later that day, there were denuded twigs where the roses used to be.
I probably should have had more sympathy for the deer—the hungry mother does, the growing fawns. I was seven months pregnant with my sons at the time, an overblown tick in capri pants. I could balance a plate on the top of my stomach, and I often assumed this pose, because I was always ravenous—eating, literally, for three. I had to keep apples in the glovebox, granola bars in my purse. I couldn’t even make it through the night without a small meal.
One night at 3 a.m. in our new house, my husband sat upright in bed. “I think we’ve got termites,” he said, switching on the light. He looked over to find me awake beside him, chewing Triscuits like a bored horse. This prompted a search for what he called “quiet snacks.” Banana bread was good, but the crackling of the wax paper made him toss and turn. Finally he was driven into the guest room. I sprawled out in gratitude, free to nosh when I pleased. Still, the walls were thin.
“I heard you having cereal last night,” Mau said, one morning not long after we’d moved in.
“I didn’t have cereal,” I said. I was a little defensive about my linebacker appetite.
Mau paused, coffee cup in hand. “I’m sure I heard you.” Then his scalp slid back in horror. “The deer!”
We rushed out to the yard. Sure enough, the newly planted yarrow and lavender (purchased at the nursery from a section marked “positively deer-proof”) had been decapitated.
Mau had never previously shown much interest in gardening, but this poaching business made him livid. “I wonder if your little brother has a slingshot,” he said. My teenage brother did indeed have a slingshot, and he dug it out of a drawer and handed it over. Mau took the wrist rocket out to a strange tree at the end of our lawn, a scrawny little thing that bears hard, unclassifiable fruits, which we have dubbed “aprinuts.” They taste like dirty pennies and have a pit in the center that will crack your molar. Mau used them for ammunition. He made a heap of fruit on the patio table, kept the slingshot in his back pocket, and when the first deer leapt over the fence, he took aim. He shot several pop flies high over their heads, and then went wide with the next bunch, making pock marks in our metal woodshed that would later rust. Finally he nailed one of the beasts in the flank. The deer stopped gnawing on the bushes, looked down at the fruit with something close to disdain, gave it a brief sniff, and ate it.
The next day there were six deer in the yard, double the usual number. I swear, they seemed to be looking expectantly toward the patio. It was as if the slingshot victim had spread the word: he hits you with these little things, but they’re really quite delicious! Mau threw down his weapon and stalked into the house. The next morning, his ammunition was gone. In its place was a casual pile of pits.
Within a week, we had a man out to give a bid on a deer fence. He walked our lot with a clipboard, telling stories: a healthy buck with a running start could leap ten feet high, so in addition to the eight feet of metal mesh, we would need to put up two parallel strands of barb wire, preferably leaning outward. This was sounding less and less like Fine Gardening and more like Penal Landscaping Today. The yard was going to look like Attica. “This is great,” I said. “I could get some striped gardening clothes. Work out here with leg irons and a pick.”
The fence man didn’t crack a smile. “Pick won’t help,” he said. “They don’t scare easy, and anyway they come at night. People think deer, they think Bambi. But these suckers are tough.”
I asked him about the blood meal and the Irish Spring.
“Someone’s already tried that,” he said, gesturing with his pen.
Following his glance, I saw whittled bars of soap hanging from the fence. They weren’t square any more, but thin and round, like sand dollars.
“Looks like they’ve been licking them,” he said.
You’d think the fence man would have gloated about this—easy options exhausted, his services even more necessary. But the truth is, he sounded dejected by his work. He allowed that he had just put in the kind of fence he was recommending at some wealthy man’s hilltop compound, and within days the owner found bucks hanging in the top wires. They were still alive, and when he tried to help them down they kicked like ninjas. The best thing, the fence man told me, leaning closer, was to use wood. “You don’t have to go so high,” he said. “Deer aren’t stupid. They won’t jump if they can’t see what’s on the other side.” As soon as he said this, I noticed that most of our neighbors had board fences. In fact, I was staring down the hill at one such fence, when a pair of hands cleared the top, and a bucket of food scraps flew over the side. Within minutes, a group of deer had scampered out of the woods to sup on the rinds. The bucket man soon rose into view on his elevated deck. His wife came out to join him, and they stood smiling and pointing at the deer, evidently pleased by their little private safari.
“Now that don’t help things,” the fence man said, making a note on his clipboard. I craned to see what he had written. Very motivated deer? Deer weaned on risotto and arugula? A week later, he sent us a bid for $3,000.
This was three times what we were willing to spend, and for a while the deer grazed undisturbed, until an ad in a gardening magazine caught my eye: “Deer Net. Invisible! Invincible!” Beneath the bold type was a line drawing of a buck peering sadly at daisies through a strict grid. I called in an order (only $300), and when it arrived, Mau and my brother spent an arduous day in the blistering August heat, rigging up the mesh above our low existing fence. Once installed, the netting was not quite as invisible as promised. It faded away at a distance; up close, it looked like an eight-foot wall of black chicken wire. But my aesthetic qualms disappeared the day after the last stretch was hung. I stood at the window, surveying the yard. Normally, it was packed like a truck-stop diner at dawn. Now, it was deserted. There were no deer snacking in the fruit trees. They used to lean their legs against the trunks and shear the branches from below. Now the limbs were still. I swept my eyes over the rosemary hedge—empty—and up to the lawn. Not a deer in sight. We would have to buy a lawn mower! I felt a deep flush of territorial satisfaction, ranging my eyes over the lot. No deer on the steep, eastern slope. Ha! No deer on the—
At the highest point of our yard, just beside the gazebo, was a stately four-point buck, lying on his side like a raja surveying his harem. He stared right back at me.
“Jesus Christ!” I ran through the bedroom and took the stairs like a boxer. Never mind that I was eight months pregnant by then, carrying nearly twelve pounds of babies, and that I’d been ordered by my doctor to take it easy. No deer was going to sit in my yard and give me a look like that. I raced out the back door, pregnancy blouse flapping, and started to shout. When I was halfway up the bank, the buck pushed himself up with a kind of lazy, bothered air and trotted to the corner of the lot. I followed him, snapping a stick from a tree. “Get out of here! Shoo!”
He started to trot faster. I pressed on his heels, waving my switch and ululating. This seemed to put the fear in him! But soon I would regret it. The buck got white-eyed with panic and started leaping at the netting, bending the flimsy metal fence posts and shredding the mesh. “Stop, stop!” I shouted, throwing down the stick and holding my palms out. I had my very own suicide jumper. I eased open the gate to the meadow and tried to coax him out, keeping my distance, keeping my voice low, but over and over he raced past the opening, like the birds that flew into the sun porch and flung themselves against the glass. Now that I had calmed down, I noticed that the deer had one mangled antler. It was smaller than the other and the points were more wavy than erect, like wilted asparagus.
All of a sudden the buck turned to me, as if he could sense my pity, and made a furious leap at the netting. His hooves struck well short of the top. He leapt again and slid back, but on the third try, the stronger antler snagged, so that he hung there for a second until his body dropped with a sickening rip. There was now a new doorway in the mesh, but instead of stepping through it, he ran in the other direction and started flinging himself at a new section of fence. Stupid malformed deer! A huge flap hung down from the netting, like a giant lolling tongue. I was already bemoaning the work this meant: I’d have to root around for a scrap of mesh, and get out there in the frying sun and rig up some kind of patchwork with cable ties. Or rather Mau would have to do it. I was by now so large, and bending was such a production, that when I dropped something, I burst into tears. Meanwhile the deer was still leaping frantically at the fence, bending the T-posts like drinking straws and opening a new gash in the mesh. I pictured us mending it over and over, like a bunch of mad Amish quilters, until the yard looked like a Christo exhibit. I swear, if I had had a shotgun, I would have hoisted that thing onto my belly and taken aim.
It was this vision that stopped me short. The gun going off. The deer freezing, then collapsing into a bloody heap. The neighbors gathering, and staring at me with their hands over their mouths. I felt a little shiver as I pictured myself: the smoking barrels, the carcass at my feet. They might even press charges. Discharging a firearm in a suburban neighborhood. Hunting out of season. There was probably a law. I could already see the front page of the local paper: Doctor’s wife, weeks from delivering twins, takes a shotgun to a cornered deer. They’d think the heartburn had driven me over the edge.
I started to laugh. There I was, so malformed by pregnancy I couldn’t have pulled a weed to save my life, all worked up in a righteous lather because a deer was trespassing in my yard. I hardly recognized myself. I had grown up on the outskirts of a town so small the cows outnumbered the people, where we found rattlesnakes in the garden, deer in the hills, and raccoons in the garbage. But after fifteen years of living in cities, I had turned into someone who expected the local fauna to behave like figurines, set in the distance to enliven the view. I stood in the middle of my lawn, hands on the small of my back, still breathing heavily from my crazed dash. I pictured what this place had looked like before it was bought up and developed, before the houses and the cul-de-sacs and the surveyed plats. Back then, it was a seamless oak savannah, miles of dry rolling hills set with trees that could go all summer without a drop of rain. The deer had had the run of it, and survived on what fresh shoots they could find. Then we came, and watered our yards until they were lush as banquet tables, and then put up fences so they couldn’t come in. I felt like Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake!”
I thought of all that, and then I chased that sucker out of the yard and started hunting for the leftover mesh.
Lisa Michaels is the author of a memoir, Split, and a novel, Grand Ambition. She has been associated with The Threepenny Review, as an editor and then a writer, since 1992.
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