Reverse Bambi
Do you want to hear a sad story? (I think by now you can guess what happens.) I was on vacation earlier this week with some friends, and while we were sitting on the deck we heard a noise from the bushes out back. We looked over the fence and saw the tiniest baby deer we’d ever seen, slowly and carefully trying to walk on its perfect baby legs. We cooed and grabbed our cameras (this is a cropped photo, we didn’t actually get that close), and generally freaked out about how amazing it was. Babies!
It staggered around adorably for a while, and then we began to wonder where its mom was. Evidently it wondered the same thing, because it stopped moving and made this screaming/crowing that … ahhh, it was not a good noise. It did that for a while, and then lay down to rest. Several hours passed, and we didn’t really know what to do, so we put out a bowl of milk (“what do deer eat? leaves?” “yeah, but it just got born, so, milk?” “but would cow milk kill it?” “it’s better than nothing?” “no, it’s not?” “yes, it is?” “oh my god I don’t know, is it dying?” “no, its mom has to be around somewhere?” “but where?” “will we contaminate it if we get too close?” “yes” “no” “no!” “yes!”). In town, we talked to some rangers about animal control and who we could call, but they said animal control had little say over this kind of thing. (“This kind of thing” being “a baby deer is dying behind our house.”)
It was pretty grim until we got some good news: Someone knew someone who hunted and was therefore familiar with deer, so we called him — not because we had a hot tip — and he explained that it was actually pretty common for mother deer to abandon their babies after giving birth because they’re so tired and hungry from the pregnancy. And then they come back after eating for a couple days, and everything is fine, and everyone lives happily ever after. Which was relieving, because that appeared to be what had happened, and the mom came back!
Or, it was presumably the mom. The baby screamed/crowed at it for a while, and the mom just stood there staring. We backed off to give them some space, and when we came back a few hours later, they were both gone. Phew!
But — and I’m going to wrap this up, because this story is awful — later that day we realized that the baby deer hadn’t actually left with the mom at all, and was instead lying in a tidy, Rupert-esque bundle in the grass out back. “It’s sleeping,” we said, and it was, its little chest rising and falling. We kept checking on it every few hours for the next two days, but it never moved, and then it died. Life is horrible; never go on vacation.