Injuries Incompatible with Life

A letter of surrender and a plea for mercy.

Dear Blacktails and Cervidae et al.,

Please consider this letter my official notice of unconditional surrender.

It was a remarkable campaign, with many advances and reversals over the years, but my need for sleep, which you so brilliantly took advantage of, you ravenous ghosts that rule the night, has lost me the war at last. As I stand looking upon the morning fields of ruined rose bushes, injured beyond even spring’s hope, at my flowers eaten in the bud, at my Japanese maples stripped of everything below five feet, and only the weeds left untouched, I salute your cervine cunning and ability to exploit the fact that my generation was raised on Disney films.

Clearly my mistake was feeding you apples. You just looked so hungry that first fall when our neighbors invited hunters onto their land (“Heartless heathens!”) and you sought safety in our yard—all scruffy and scraggly and lying about shivering in the rain; and I mistook you for refugees, instead of seeing you as the fiends you are, ruminating even then over how to hustle the new neighbors for dainties by day, while planning to lay waste to our gardens by night. You tasted the sourdough I tossed out. You nibbled the berries. But you held your ground until I turned up with a bag of apples, and then you rose and ate from my hand and followed me around like a rangale court of ruminants attending their rightful king, playing on my vanity and allowing me to foolishly believe we were friends.

And to your matriarch, Momma Deer, specifically, I’d like to say that bringing those two newborn fawns to the back door and introducing them to us that first spring was a brilliant stroke of subterfuge. The strategic genius of endearing us to those tiny spotted toys with lanky limbs and black button noses that would eventually grow to devour a nursery’s worth of exotic plants should be taught at West Point. Were they in on it, little Rudolph and Rosie? I suspect so. Why else would they nuzzle my legs and lick my hands before returning to suckle while I peeled and sliced three times the normal ration of apples for their mother?

And just as I was awakening to your wiles, finally determined to feed you no more, misfortune swept in to turn me back. I remember coming upon her on my walk and standing there looking down at her broken neck. She was alive, but her injuries were clearly incompatible with life. “Can you shoot it?” the sheriff had asked on the phone. “Shoot it?” I had wanted to say. “She’s not an it, she’s Rosie.” Instead I told him I was a mile from my home and didn’t want to walk the roundtrip for a rifle. But the truth was, even if I’d been closer, I didn’t have the heart to do it. I couldn’t even stay and watch. I was nearly home when I heard the sheriff’s shot, and I’m not too proud to admit that I cried. There were apples aplenty that winter and the next.

If we could parley, I’d sue for peace and attempt to collect reparations for the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on deterrents. Who would have guessed that you could levitate over a fence? And when you sabotaged the motion-activated Lawn Defender sprinklers I suspected I might be sunk. But then the deer spray gave me false hope, and I drenched the property with gallons of it, suffering with the stink of rotten eggs because I believed I had discovered a new tool to finally turn the tides. Yet I underestimated your willingness to wait for an evening rain to wash the spray away, and your ability to make up for a month of lost browsing in a single night. How does one compete with an adversary who has the patience of moss and the appetite of locusts?

And to Rosie’s brother Rudolph, that little fawn that had first licked my hand, I’d like to forgive you now for threatening to impale me with the points of your antlers while your mother hid behind me for protection when you’d grown into a thick-necked buck. Was the wild look in your elaphine eyes due to your rut? I mean, you seemed to not recognize me then, to not remember that it was my hand that had fed you so many apple slices in your youth. But when those antlers got your leg shot off, you surely returned to me, didn’t you? You remembered me then. You hobbled in from the forest and took up residence in our yard. Did I not sit beside you and feed you apples in the sun? Did I not scratch your ear that your amputated leg could not reach? Did I not even occasionally deliver you a bouquet of roses since you could no longer hop the fence? And now you’ve stumbled off to some other forest to quietly die, not even leaving me a shed antler to remember you by.

Your mother, however, is immortal I fear. Even now her belly is swollen again, and I expect to see her any day at the door with another pair of twins with moist black noses, another Rudolph and Rosie, pleading with her glassy eyes for apple slices, and causing me to fall once more for feeding another generation of garden foe. And I will. I will because you were here before we were, before any of us were. I will because I hear the distant crack of autumn’s rifles and can’t help but wince at the thought of you gone to venison. I will because when you lost your leg you came home to where your life had begun, to where you knew you’d be safe. I will because I know in the heat of summer your brothers and sisters must brave the road for the moisture collected in the ditches, just as Rosie had done. And because I know I will, I know I’ve lost.

So, to Momma Deer, her descendants that remain, and those about to be born, I hereby do surrender. The roses, the flowers, the maples—it’s all yours. No more cayenne pepper, no more rotten egg and coyote urine spray. The fences have been torn down. The Lawn Defenders have gone to the landfill. I have laid down my arms. My only condition is that you stay off of the deck and leave alone the expensive new roses I’ve lovingly placed in the planters. I bow before you, beaten and pleading. I cast myself upon your mercy. Please, please, find it in your wild hearts to grant me this one small act of charity. My sanity and my happiness depend upon it. And quite possibly, if in my defeat I dare to even threaten such a thing, so does your weekly supply of apples.

An audio recording of this essay can be found here:

Audio: Injuries Incompatible with Life