Sika Deer Rescued

Yesterday morning, on our way to work, we spotted a sika deer lying on the side of the road. She was alive, but not moving.

We swung the car around to check her out. As we approached her, she struggled on wobbly legs to get up. I reached out to touch her and she slowly took a few steps to the woods and stopped. She was too weak to go any further.

I scratched her behind the ears and she started to go to sleep, swaying back and forth on her wobbly legs. Except for a touch of blood around her eye that appeared to be from a scratch, she wasn’t bleeding. Her hind legs, though, were weak. We figured a car must’ve clipped her hindquarters and bruised her pretty badly. Fortunately, her legs weren’t broken.

I gently nudged her towards the car. In her condition, we couldn’t leave her unattended on the side of the road. Our biggest fear was a car speeding through might hit her or, being helpless, dogs in the area might find her. She would be safer in our yard.

(For our readers who may not be familiar with sika deer, sikas are actually small elk from eastern Asia that have naturalized in the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland. They are about the size of an overgrown Great Dane, weighing in at around a hundred pounds.)

I lifted the deer into the back of the car. At first, she tried to kick, but immediately calmed down. It was as if she sensed we wanted to help her, not harm her. I put her in the backseat. She knelt on her knees, but refused to lay her rear end down.

I got behind the wheel and slowly headed towards home. She got a bit nervous and shuffled in her seat. Her head poked between the two seats so I told Keith to scratch her behind the ears to calm her. He did and she closed her eyes.

We took her behind our house and placed her on some dry reeds in a small clearing behind a thicket of bushes and briars. She calmly lay there as we headed back to the car. We didn’t know if rescuing a deer would be a valid reason for being late to work, but at least we knew she would be safe.

That night, on the way home, we stopped and bought a couple of apples. Our hopes were that Elly May (yes, we named the deer after the Beverly Hillbillies character) would have rested through the day and be gone before we got home. Our worst fear was she would be dead. Our second worst fear was she would’ve wandered a little ways from where we placed her and then collapsed and died.

We got home after dark. I grabbed a pocket flashlight out of the house and one of the apples. So as not to scare Elly May, we slowly and quietly headed to the back of the house where we left her.

She was gone.

We scanned the light around the surrounding area to make sure she hadn’t crawled off a ways and died.

Nothing.

We had Thistle with us. I figured she would find Elly May if she were still in the area. Any doubts of Thistle having hound dog mixed in with her boxer blood were quickly erased.

She sniffed the whole bedding area where we put Elly May that morning. Thistle used her nose to push some of the reeds aside to get a better scent, then, with her nose still to the ground, she’d head a few paces away from the bedding area, only to return again to reinforce the scent she wanted to follow.

After the third bit of sniffing and circling, she quickly arced her way through the woods following the strongest scent. We were convinced Elly May was gone and headed back towards the house. We weren’t paying attention to the fact that Thistle wasn’t following us.

We barely entered our yard, content with knowing Elly May was safe and running with her kind, when our conversation was interrupted by a loud crash as if a tree fell and a single yelp from Thistle.

We quickly headed back towards the woods, calling Thistle.

Nothing but silence.

I told Keith to wait in the clearing as I penetrated deeper into the woods. Navigating through the woods in pitch blackness and avoiding all the briars with only one pocket flashlight isn’t easy for one person much less two.

I called Thistle and scanned the woods with the flashlight.

Nothing.

Keith yelled out that he could hear Thistle yelping. I heard nothing. I returned to where Keith stood to try to pinpoint what he heard. By the time I joined up with him, he couldn’t hear Thistle anymore.

I headed into the woods with Keith in tow. He couldn’t stand there alone doing nothing for Thistle. As we entered the woods, I told Keith to take my hand. Since I had the only flashlight that shone slightly brighter than a candle, I knew he wouldn’t be able to follow me and avoid the fallen logs and briars.

Slowly, we snaked our way through the woods, stopping every few feet to scan our surroundings in the dim light of the flashlight and calling Thistle. We got almost to where the marshy part of the woods begins. I knew we couldn’t go any further and Thistle still wasn’t responding.

Images of Thistle lying in the mud with a broken leg or crushed under a fallen tree that gave way filled our heads. “Let’s go back and circle around to the path I made to the sanctuary. Maybe we’ll find her back there somewhere,” I suggested.

The sanctuary is a clearing in our woods near the edge of our marsh (the one pictured in the sidebar). A couple of weeks ago, I cut a path through the thickets of briars so we could easily reach the clearing. Until I did that, the only way to reach the end of our woods was to wear hip boots and trudge through the swampy part. Through the sanctuary, we can come up on the back of our property without the hip boots.

As we came out of the woods, Thistle came bounding up to us, crashing through all the briars. Her body was a mass of electrified excitement – and covered in wet mud. She smelled like the marsh, a smell that rivals a skunk.

But she showed no signs of injury. Whew!

We’ll never know for sure, but we’re fairly certain she found Elly May and the chase was on. Anytime she chases a deer, she yelps in her excitement. Apparently, she went well beyond our property line and far into the marsh.

Elly May must’ve outran Thistle meaning she was healthy and back on her feet. The car must’ve bruised her and sent her in shock that morning, but caused no major injury.

Thistle, on the other hand, was a swampy, smelly mess. I immediately marched her to the bathtub and gave her a double bath and doused her with perfume. Usually, after a bath, she runs around the house like a nut trying to shake all the sweet smells off her.

This time, she plopped down on her bed with bloodshot eyes and went to sleep. She’s not a young pup, anymore, and the chase plumb tuckered her out.

© 2007
Mark Darien
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Please include this copyright notice if you share this article

Early Spring Snow Storm Whimpers Out

This morning, we woke up to a light snow. The quarter inch is a far cry from the one to three inches forecasted.

It ended by ten in the morning, but the rest of the day was mostly cloudy, windy, and the temperature didn’t make it to forty. The rest of our plants we dug up from our garden in Baltimore and didn’t finish planting yesterday are sitting in the yard waiting to be planted. Tomorrow is supposed to be nicer, so maybe we’ll finish up.

For the life of me, I can’t figure this out. Back in the winter, when it is supposed to snow, it rained. My thermometer registered 25 degrees, but it rained. Spring is here, my thermometer registered 38, and it snowed the whole time. The spring trees are in flower and the first leaves are unfurling, and it’s all covered in a quarter of an inch of snow.

Go figure.

I really need to make a list of the backwardness of Toddville. It rains in the winter, snows in the spring. Damp wood won’t burn, but marsh grasses dredged out of the water glow like lava all night. Mosquitoes are almost winter-hardy, sticking around clear into January. And our favorite bar, Carolyn’s Stone House, closes at ten pm on a Saturday night.

I can handle the winter rain and spring snow. I can tolerate the winter-hardy mosquitoes. I won’t ever understand why damp wood won’t burn, but sopping wet marsh grasses become glowing lava flows.

But Carolyn’s better damned well be opened tonight. It’s just not natural to close a bar on a Saturday night before one am.

© 2007
Mark Darien
All rights reserved
Please include this copyright notice if you share this article