Home Deer

It's amazing what you can do with a lot of heart and a little magic.

Dorothy makes her own rules. She doesn’t worry about what other people think. Once she knows what’s right, she’ll throw her whole heart into it.

And for Dorothy, helping the woodland creatures in her beautiful mountains escape from predators is the right thing to do.

Even if her solution is … unconventional. Even if it takes some effort, and some courage, and learning a little bit of mountain magic.

Home Deer

I understand not everyone would agree with me. I don’t care.

People have weird ways of trying to make it right.

They pray over their kill. They thank it. They say words they’ve read in old Native American texts. I honor you, Brother Deer, Brother Elk. And they still kill it. Makes absolutely no sense to me.

This summer I signed up for plant camp. Supposed to be a week of camping out in the woods, walking around with our notebooks while the Earth Mother herbalist from our little mountain town taught us which plants we could eat, which ones we could use to make special tinctures and salves, which ones would poison us.

The kind of thing Phil would have scoffed at. Would have called witchy, learning how to make my witch’s brew.

That’s right, Phil. Could have saved you, if I knew a few more things.

The herbalist was natural all the way. Didn’t believe in washing very much. Very … musky, let’s say. Fragrant. Not shy about her B.O.

Hair in her armpits, hair on her legs. Kind of exciting to see, frankly, since I was raised to shave every day ever since junior high. “You want your legs as smooth as a dolphin,” my mother used to say. And hairy armpits were just for European women, not for good old Americans.

Natural, groovy, peace-loving herbalist, right? So of course I assumed she was a vegetarian.

Yet first night’s dinner, she wanted to teach us a ceremony.

She led us into the woods where she had a little pig tied up there. Squealing. Even in the summer it gets cold at night. And that poor animal was cold and frightened.

No, I told her. HARD no.

I won’t even go into it.

I turned around, packed up my clothes and sleeping bag and tent, and I set out on foot. I’d carpooled out there with one of the other students I met online, but she was staying. They were all staying.

I walked all seven miles back to town, in the dark, over narrow twisty mountain roads. I didn’t care.

“But we do it in a sustainable way,” the herbalist told me about killing and cooking the pig. She said I was crazy to walk home, just wait until morning. “And we sing over it. Pray over it. It’s actually very spiritual.”

The things people tell themselves.

So I’ve had to study on my own. That’s fine. I’m a good learner. Once I get onto a subject, I go deep. Insanely deep. I follow the bread crumbs, one book to another, one teacher to another, and I sponge it all up. Night and day. For months.

And that’s how I found some ceremonies of my own.

But that comes in later. Let me tell this right.

I live in a quiet little subdivision cut into the side of some low hills, with some bigger mountains rising behind us.

Beautiful in every season. Covered in wildflowers in the summer, plenty of aspens to turn yellow and red in the fall, lovely in winter and spring with snow on the peaks and bright blue skies above. The kind of place you’d see on a postcard or a calendar, and I get to live here every day.

I’m not from here. I grew up in the desert, in a city, where everything was brown. The first year Phil brought me here, my eyes practically watered from seeing all the green.

“Think you’ll like it here?” he asked, grinning at me. Because of course I loved it right away. It was a childhood dream come true.

That plays in, too. Just wait a minute.

Phil wasn’t everything I wanted, but he was a lot of it. Very manly man. A smoker, not great. A hunter, but back then I didn’t mind it like I do now. Back then I had never seen a hunt and didn’t know what it would be like.

An outdoorsman in every way. And he turned me into an outdoorswoman. I took to it like static to electricity. Learned to hike, fish, ski. Camped out. Backpacked. Did all of it.

He taught me how to shoot. Pistol, shotgun, rifle. And it was fun. I was a natural. Steady hand, good eye.

And it fit an image I had of myself, you know? Good sport. Hardy. A good companion. The kind of wife a man would want with him all the time, not someone he’d leave behind to go off with the boys.

I sucked it up, even when it wasn’t what I wanted. Like the time his friend Randy bought a tag to hunt elk, but Phil didn’t for one reason or another. Phil volunteered the two of us to help Randy haul out the elk if he shot one.

Randy shot one.

We met him up on the autumn hillside. Blue sky, yellow aspens, everything as potentially beautiful as always.

But ugly that day. Tragic.

I looked down at that poor animal. The light gone from his eyes. And Phil’s friend Randy whooping it up like it was the biggest accomplishment of his life. “Look at that rack!” Phil whooping right along with him. Smiling over at me, expecting me to do the same.

Experienced hunters know that an elk or a deer isn’t a one-piece problem. You don’t carry out the whole animal. An elk is as big as a horse.

I won’t go into it. But I was there for the … separation, let’s call it, and I hauled out my portion of the meat in a big black garbage bag, making Phil so proud that his wife was such a sturdy little thing, look at her go, never complaining.

But that was the beginning of the end for me.

It was the beginning of the end for Phil, too. He was some years older than me, and even though he was fit for his age, it puts a strain on the heart to hike those rugged mountains hauling all that weight. Then hiking back up and doing it again. Like I said, an animal that big isn’t a one-piece problem.

If I’d known what I know now, I could have done something to help him. I could have made Phil a special brew—yes, Phil, a witch’s brew, go ahead and call it that, my potion—and it would have mended the strain on his heart right then, that same night.

But instead it was like a little muscle tear that makes you limp just a little, and then the next time you try to run on it, suddenly your leg goes out and you’re down.

Only with your heart, you don’t limp, you just slow down. You feel tired. Your breathing is a little irregular.

And then one day, that’s it. Down. Out.

I’ve been a good widow to him. I keep his memory alive. I still love him. I think about him all the time.

I still live in our house, up here in the mountains, even though my family is still back in the desert, in the city, ready to fold me back in.

I have things to do here. Things to make. Things to try.

After the walk home from plant camp, I sat in my living room that night resting my sore feet, and I thought about what I really want.

More. I wanted more. More, even, then what I thought I might learn from that Earth Mother herbalist.

So I began my studies. I let my conscience be my guide. I didn’t have to answer to anybody, didn’t have to impress anybody anymore with being any particular way.

I was going to raise myself from scratch.

I learned about plants. I learned about weather. I learned about seasons and cycles of the moon. I cooked and concocted things in the privacy of my own little kitchen.

If I sometimes heard Phil ridiculing me, I took it in good humor.

“That’s right,” I’d tell him out loud. “This one will cure any headache. Wait and see.”

I started treating some of the ladies in the neighborhood. Women are always so much more receptive.

Cuts, aches, pains, they started bringing them all to me.

Then the broken toe. Healed that one. The sprained ankle. Did that. I pretended it was the salves and the wraps, because people aren’t always comfortable with the truth. As long as my heart was always in the right place, just wanting to help people with my new skills, I decided they didn’t need to know all the ins and outs.

Summer was nearly over. It’s always so short around here. By mid-August the aspen leaves were already starting to turn yellow.

By then, I had learned one or two special ceremonies.

You just have to know where to look for knowledge. Sometimes it’s in books that are a hundred years old.

You just have to be patient. And curious. And persistent. I’ve been blessed with all three of those all my life.

So by the time August passed, and then September, I was ready for hunting season in October.

When the weather turns cold, the deer start coming down off the highest hills. They walk through our subdivision. They graze on our properties.

“It’s not called grazing,” Phil corrected me the first time I said it. “Deer browse.”

I can say whatever I want now. I make up my own rules. Deer graze.

There was a little family I saw every dawn and every dusk. Two mamas, two babies, and one huge, magnificent buck. The kind of rack that would have had Phil and his buddy Randy hyperventilating.

That buck had earned his antlers. I didn’t know until Phil told me, but deer shed their antlers every year and grow new ones. That’s why the youngest males have just little spikes in the beginning. The older bucks grow bigger and bigger racks every year, until they’re past their prime, and then their racks get smaller every year. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in that.

You can go out in the mountains in the spring and find the antlers just lying on the ground. There are places in town that will pay you to bring them in so that some artisan can make furniture out of them, like chandeliers and coat racks and headboards for tourists who want to feel rustic.

There are some hunters that even sell the whole stuffed heads with their staring plastic eyes and their big impressive racks so that some guy somewhere can mount it in his den and tell people he shot it himself.

One of the stores in town decorates a big elk head every year for Christmas, with strings of lights across all the horns. So disrespectful. That magnificent old elk would have preferred being alive and free, not covered in blinking lights above the storefront like a tacky lawn ornament.

But I had my little family of deer taking their time grazing across my property twice a day, weaving among the sage bushes, snacking on the vegetation. Then they’d head up a few streets higher in the subdivision and bed down at my neighbor’s house, right next to their garage, every afternoon.

The way Phil explained it, the deer migrate every year, coming off the highest slopes down to our neighborhood where they hang around for a few days, browsing, then they keep on moving down to lower country as part of their annual migration route.

“But you’d never shoot one of those deer we see here,” I said as I watched a buck strolling through our sage early one morning.

“’Course not,” Phil said. “Those are our home deer.” I remember him smiling tenderly and kissing me on the cheek.

The things people tell themselves. The things hunters tell their tender-hearted wives.

But it gave me a view of how the whole thing works. What the deer do. How hunters think.

So comes mid-October. The opening of hunting season, first period lasting nine days from Saturday to the following Sunday.

Parks and Wildlife gives out a limited number of deer tags in our area, but anyone can come from anywhere and buy an elk tag right over the counter.

The thought, Phil said, is that elk are really hard to find. So it’s no skin off Parks and Wildlife to say anyone from Pennsylvania or Oklahoma or Texas can come right in and give it a try. Please pay your seven hundred dollars, thank you very much.

But deer. Deer are easy. Deer are just trotting across the road when you’re driving out to get groceries.

Deer are ambling across people’s properties every dawn and dusk, driving their dogs crazy who are stuck inside barking at them from the window.

But those are my deer. My home deer. Each and every one of them.

I’ve got good equipment. Some of it was Phil’s, some of it was mine from when he was setting me up as the good-sport sturdy little wife.

I’ve got full hunter’s orange: bright orange baseball cap, long-sleeved orange shirt, thick orange vest with pockets for bullets, all of them making me visible from at least a mile away.

I’ve got a Browning A-Bolt 30.06 rifle with a Leupold scope. Very competent firearm.

I look the part. For a brief period, I was the part. And I think it gives all those hunters from Pennsylvania and Oklahoma and Texas a little chuckle when they see me hiking up a ridge, all decked out, my expensive competent rifle slung on a sling across my back.

All of us lighting the pre-dawn darkness with headlamps strapped to our foreheads.

One of them might tip his hunter’s cap to me. “Ma’am.”

Some of them look suspicious. Where’s my man? What am I doing up there all alone?

Some might look at me as an opportunity. Except I have that rifle and as far as they know I’m ready to use it.

I sing a little, low under my breath.

Sing words. Sing my ceremony. Quietly and continuously.

They don’t appreciate the noise. Think it spooks the deer off. But I keep on hiking past them, keep on heading up the mountain to the next ridge, and they figure I’ll be out of earshot soon enough.

But I’ve laid my trap. Laid my bread crumbs. They don’t even know.

I sprinkle a little this and that. Shake a little tincture out of a bottle.

My witch’s brew. My potions. My weapons.

There are laws on the books here and in a lot of other states saying it’s a crime to interfere with a hunter.

A crime to try to chase away game. Or to interfere with a hunter’s shot.

A crime to harass some poor innocent rifle-toting predator who has paid good money to kill a docile and majestic beast.

But I’ve never been caught. And I won’t be.

They might feel a little sick. Just a swishing low in their gut. And their vision blurs a little. Like they still haven’t drained out all the whiskey they drank in camp the night before.

They feel tired. Natural, since they were up at four in the morning to be out here on this ridge with their headlamps in the dark before the deer are stirring for the day.

They have some muscle weakness. Their legs don’t work exactly right.

They feel a little off-balance. All part of the brew.

But they wouldn’t know it was me, hiking past them singing a little song. It’s not like I gave them spiked coffee or a muffin or anything they can pinpoint.

The problem with trying to warn off the deer is I might actually chase them right into some hunter’s view. Backfire. I might kill what I’m trying to save.

But there’s a ceremony for that, too. One I found in a half-page reference in a book I bought from a used book site. Something donated probably when kids cleaned out their parents’ or grandparents’ old farmhouse. The kind of old text that people who used to live close to the land knew very well spoke the truth.

The opposite of killing something while you tell it, I honor you, Brother Deer, Brother Elk.

The kind of ceremony that says, I protect you with my magic. I honor you with your life.

When I was a little girl, back in the dry brown city desert, I used to read obsessively from this book someone gave me for Christmas.

A book about a little girl who lived in a cottage at the edge of the woods, and every day she would go out in the forest and talk with her animal friends.

Woodland friends like chipmunks and squirrels and deer. She sang to them. They loved her. She loved them.

In the autumn when the hunters came, she hid them in a magical cave. She stood watch every dawn and dusk. She made sure all the deer got away.

Her father wanted to kill animals to feed his family, but the little girl would never let him. She didn’t cry, she didn’t beg, she just made sure she protected her friends with her secret magic.

A book like that makes an impression. On me, anyway. Some other little girl might forget it, go on to reading grown-up novels and textbooks and fashion magazines, but I am still that same little girl in my heart.

I found the magic that protects my friends.

My home deer. My home elk. Anything these hunters think they might kill.

I get tired, sure. Those are early mornings, hiking in the dark, hauling my heavy rifle. And I’m out there all day long, every day of the hunting periods, until after dusk when I hike back down.

But the hunters I pass, the ones I sing my special song to, the ones who catch a whiff of my witchy potion—they’re a lot more tired than I am.

They surprise themselves by wanting to lie down in the frosty grass and take a little nap. Even more surprised when they wake up hours later, not feeling so great, just wanting to sleep some more.

If the snow falls, as it often does this time of year, they might find themselves cozy underneath it, sleeping their heat away. I haven’t seen it happen yet. I just assume that’s possible.

I’m new to this. But I’m learning. I’m practicing. As anyone who wants to master a skill must.

Hunting season lasts into December. There are both rifle and archery seasons. I get lots of practice. I’m getting quite good.

So far, not a single animal lost.

So far, I’m the little girl with her magic cave.

What would I do if some hunter slipped through and shot one of my woodland friends?

There are ceremonies for that, too.

Not all of them very gentle when it comes to the hunter.

But I won’t go into that.

I’ll just say that in my own way I’m praying over them and singing over them, and just like the Earth Mother herbalist tried to convince me, it’s all actually very spiritual.

I honor you, Brother Hunter.

It just depends on who you’re rooting for, the predator or the prey.

Phil wouldn’t have approved of any of it, but I wouldn’t have told him if he was still alive. He just would have found himself strangely unable to get off a clear shot. His hand would shake. His vision would blur.

His sturdy, sporty wife who was out there with him in her hunter orange and sporting her own rifle would have patted her man on the shoulder. She would have cracked open the thermos and poured them both some coffee. She would have unpacked the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that she made. For whatever reason, she wasn’t serving roast beef anymore.

“It’s okay,” she would have told her husband. “Better luck tomorrow.” Or “Better luck next year.”

But the home deer would be safe in this vast backyard that reached all the way to the top of the mountains.

And the grown up little girl in the cottage at the edge of the woods would make sure they stayed safe in her magical forest for a long, long time.

"Home Deer” is free on this website for one month only. It is available as a standalone story on every retailer, or you can purchase the ebook on this website here. This story also appears in the short story fiction collection MOUNTAIN TOUGH.

This story is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.