Friday, October 22, 2010

And Another Enchanted Encounter

      Enchanted encounters seem to happen quite unexpectedly. Out of the blue something occurs and it is most memorable. I had one such occasion with my daughter when she was about eleven years old.

     Our city has excellent bike trails and we had gone on a rather long ride. We had ridden about 9kms when our interesting encounter occurred. We were riding through a reclaimed gravel pit as I wanted to take her to a place were each evening I would see a mule deer buck. Sometimes from a distance of 200m this buck would snort loudly and toss his head. This was quite a show and I had told her about it and she wanted to see the buck.

    As we were getting close to the site we began moving slowly and quietly. At that time off to our right we saw a doe. The doe quickly left the area and that was exciting. Then all at once we saw two very young fawns in the area the doe had left. When my daughter saw the fawns she instantly tensed at the magic of seeing these two beautiful creatures. I think she stopped breathing as she realized that she didn't want to disturb the two little beauties. We needn't have worried. The fawns were not going anywhere and after a couple of minutes the one little fellow laid down and the other one moved out of our sight. So watching a fawn lying down for a nap isn't going to hold your attention for long. We quietly left the area and went looking for the buck. This was one of the few evenings the buck was not in the usual place. We turned around and went by the sleeping fawn.

     So in my previous post I was the little child who was mesmerized by the mallard drake and in this post I was the parent who enjoyed sharing the excitement of a youngster experiencing  a very important encounter.