Greetings and salutations,
Bleatings and salivations,
But mostly just welcome to your Friday Open Thread posted for Prophets and any other tired wanderers seeking a quiet corner to get away from the roar and the hustle.
I have four little photos to share with you this week from an incident that happened last week. We had a little visitor to our yard...
Can you see it?
A closer look can be obtained by peering through the orange scrying squiggle:
A tiny fawn-- not much bigger than a house cat.
Like all proper lycanthopes I live my life between two worlds and there's a few metaphorical world pairs to choose among when I get to thinking about all the ways that lycanthropy has shaped my life. For instance, the photos in this diary were taken at our chalupa-- a 200ish year old farm house tucked cozily in the foothills of the (not so) Giant Mountains that form the border between the Czech Republic and Poland. It has belonged to my Czech family for only 40 years or so. And last week I wrote my weekly diary to you from there, while this week I'm writing to you from our apartment in Prague.
From the country I wrote about my dental adventures in the city. From the city I'm writing to you about a quiet moment in the country.
Last weekend I had taken a break from planting rows of slug food in the garden to walk through the orchard and see how the clever Mrs. the Werelynx was progressing with the lawn mowing and just generally looking around to see and smell all the growing things. I rounded the corner of the house and nearly walked past a tiny, dappled Roe Deer Fawn laying silent and nearly still (twitchy ears), curled up in a shallow depression against the wall of the house.
My dear Favorite Female had mowed within a few feet of the critter without noticing it. And we had noticed a female Roe Deer jumping around the field nearby the day before. Was the mother of this little one still close by? Had the roar of the lawnmower chased her off for good? I hurried over to Mrs. the Werelynx and signaled for her to cut the motor.
The little fawn stayed there the rest of the morning and afternoon with no sign of her mother returning. We called a local animal rescue shelter for information and advice and they told us that as long as the little one wasn't showing any signs of distress it's best not to do anything.
In the early evening, I stepped outside to distract a weed-pulling Mrs. the Werelynx and happened to notice the doe and her wobbly little fawn walking together, through the edge of the orchard, toward the field, perhaps 50 feet away from us. I tapped my darlin' on the shoulder to get her attention and as she rose and turned the doe noticed us and in three quick bounds had hidden herself in the tall, dense wheat grass of the field. The fawn just dropped to the ground like a marionette that had suddenly had its strings cut-- and froze.
And, other than me reaching into my pocket for my camera, we froze too.
The doe hopped around for awhile and ventured back onto the lawn briefly to encourage the fawn to follow her into the tall grass and eventually the gangly mite made a couple of very awkward jumps...
And then paused briefly to look back before struggling through the high, dense grass at the edge of the field...
We watched the doe, whose head was barely visible in the wheat field as she jumped around, showing the fawn the way forward. And then, after we'd lost sight of the fawn for a couple minutes, the doe stood still for several minutes and we figured that her little one was finally getting some milk after a long day of patience.
11:28 PM PT: More about deer and their habit of hiding fawns can be found in ban nock's diary: "Baby deer, "if you care, leave it there"