I watched through the binoculars as he went across the inside fence to the horse run on our land, which was where the doe was, looking like something from a WWI movie, caught on the wire in No Man's Land. The doe struggled as he neared. It was obvious she was wounded and hung fast. It was her back right leg that was caught. He cut the wire in a couple of places and she bolted free. But she was only able to wobble a couple of feet, then fell again. Clearly worried, he backed away, watching her. She bolted a couple more feet, and fell up next to the fence. He thought he hip had maybe come out of its socket.
When he came inside, he said we should leave her there and wait to see what happened with her. All morning we kept getting up in turns to look through the binoculars. She was alert, lying down with her head up and ears forward. She seemed focused on the house. She broke my heart.
A few hours later, he had an errand to run and the doe tried to bolt away when he walked to the pickup. But she could only go a little bit and had to lie back down. It seemed to me that her problem was indeed in her hip. although I thought it might be broken. While he was gone I continued to keep the dog inside, much to her distress, and even called Daddy to tell him not to bring his dog if he happened to come by. He often will drop in on a Sunday. The doe remained in the last place she had fallen, but still in her upright-alert head position, looking around and soaking up sunshine.
My SO came home, and I could tell he had been fretting over the little doe the same way I had been. He said he'd thought it out and that we should go out as a team, throw a blanket over the deer, and lift her across the fence. On the other side, in the pasture there, she would be closer to better cover, water, and food, as well as the rest of her herd, and maybe she would make it. By this time she had moved down to the far corner of our property, behind where the SO parks the tractor. It's a low spot and the deer often go to this corner to leap over the fence into our yard. The doe was obviously familiar with this method of ingress and egress, and had moved down there to try to get over the fence. Of course, it was an impossible feat with her in her wounded condition, but she continued to try only to run headfirst into the wire fence. We had begun to worry that she would catch an ear in the barbs on the top wire. That's the only part of the fence that's barbed. The rest is wire mesh, or hog fence as it's sometimes called.
I was nervous about the whole prospect of doing this, not experienced with things of this nature like my SO is. He's a farm boy, has been around livestock all his life. I'm a city-slicker, good with dogs and cats, but not much else in the way of furry animals. I guess I had read but didn't believe the power of throwing a blanket over an animal. We took a big horse blanket out to her. She struggled up to the fence and collapsed. All the while, my SO was talking in soothing tones to her. He threw the blanket quickly over her, then knelt beside her with his hands on her sides. She immediately calmed. I spotted a place in the fence corner where it looked easy to unhook the wire, so we did that, and sort of guided her through it. She did her bolting wobble walk, collapsed a few times, looked at us so seriously. She had long eyelashes just like Bambi's mama. She blinked a few times and seemed exhausted by her ordeal. I choose to think she realized in some deep part of her brain that we were trying to help her. In a bit, she got up and was able to very shakily and in a wobbling lurch, make her way across that end of the pasture to the creek where we hope she will lay up and heal, near water and grass.
All of this has me thinking and reconsidering putting out corn for the deer the way we have been doing. It's easy enough to fill up bird feeders and enjoy them coming for a winter meal. They have wings. Fences don't affect them. The deer, on the other hand, have to jump the fence to get into the yard to get to the corn we've been putting out for them. They do jump the fence on their own even without the feeder, as witness when we returned from our trip to the mountains in October to a yard full of deer on several consecutive mornings. But the corn feeder is really almost too luscious for them to resist. It baits them in, and primarily for our enjoyment, so we can watch them across the horse fence in the little run part of the yard that we can see from the house with our binoculars. It now seems hardly fair to them to put them in harm's way. I think our little doe has taught me a lesson I won't soon forget.
Onward ....
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