The Deer Outside the Kitchen Window

You abide. Kind of.

The little house you’re living in is in the woods. On one side there’s a former fireman from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Canarsie, and on the other side a hunting club. The former fireman has long put Canarsie behind him and is now a valued part of this upstate New York community that you hope will enfold you. He has, indeed, welcomed you and makes you feel that he will guard you and your little house better than the old dog that barks at him every time he sees him.

The other day he told you that in a week or so you shouldn’t be concerned about the comings and goings next door. There will be pick-ups driving into the lot, sometimes at night. Over the owls and the coyote whose den is within boulders across the street (others say it’s a fox den, but it’s all a mystery to you), he says you’ll hear some laughter and smell something cooking over a wood fire. He’s a member himself, so nothing to be concerned about. Maybe they can use your driveway when you’re not around? Of course, you say. You are becoming good neighbors, perhaps on the way of being fond of one another. Fitting in pretty quickly, you hope, right up until you see, outside your kitchen window, the carcass of a deer dangling from a metal hook next to the shed in back of the clubhouse.

You are not at all against hunting, and you pride yourself in believing you are not of a squeamish nature. In fact, the first thought that comes into your head upon seeing the change in scenery is whether it would be polite to go over and see if there’s any chance you might be able to buy some meat. Once your neighbor finds out your family lives in a neighborhood not far from Canarsie, he tries to elicit where you come down on hunting by recounting the horrors of overpopulation and winter starvation. You totally agree with him—it is a horrible thing to let an animal suffer. But then, you have a current view, about 20 feet from your kitchen window, of the body of a good-size buck, upside-down, belly slit. You close the curtains and go lie down.

A while back, you sat beside a 15-year-old boy and listened to him explain how he was raising fallow deer on a farm outside Portland, Oregon. He was a veteran by then, having started his business when he was 11. While other boys his age were off doing 11-year-old things, he got it into his head that he could start to make good money by supplying the thriving restaurant scene in the city with top-quality all-natural meat. He thought of different animals to raise, but his dad rightly pointed out that docile fallow deer are a whole lot easier to handle than, say, steer. Also, they’re small and wouldn’t require a big portion of the family’s orchard farm.

Fallow deer doing what they do on their own.

At the time, you had two hulking twenty-something-year-old sons back in Brooklyn who prided themselves on their considerable tough street smarts. You thought of them as you listened to the boy tell you about the ins and outs of fallow deer husbandry. He had 110 deer under his care by then, a good dozen of which pressed their soft snouts against the fence, waiting for a handout. He picked up one watermelon and then another from his mom’s vegetable garden and hurled them over the fence. The deers went prancing off, thumping against each other’s butts for bigger treat shares.

“I love them,” he said. Then he pointed out a beautiful buck off by himself on some rocks. The boy said the buck was anti-social and having problems mating, and his share of feed was starting to make a dent in the bottom line. He planned to shoot him the next day after he came home from school.

You told this story to the sons upon your return, and they each said a version of “that’s heartless.” That’s street-smart Brooklyn boys for you.

Another thing about the boy in Portland—he sold you three pairs of antlers that you then FedEx back home because you couldn’t imagine explaining their presence in your overnight bag to a TSA agent. You gave one pair to an artist friend, who stuck them through one of his paintings. The other two have pride of place in your home—one on the hall table and the other poised above the dining room door. You think they’re beautiful and impart a graceful, somehow potent presence in your home. Over the years you have been given to understand by people who roam about your house that cherishing the antlers the way you do is a little weird. This has been studiously ignored.

Now there is the buck hanging upside-down right outside your kitchen window. It is getting on to dusk, and you can’t quite see what the two men beside it are doing. They’re doing something, though. Meanwhile, the clubhouse is alight with a warm glow of fellowship. Your old dog decides there’s something outside he really should see. When you open the door, he does his best portrayal of his hunter breed with an arthritic gallop up to the fence and barks. One of the men gives him a hearty “Hey there, buster!” and the other reaches across the fence and scratches his nose.

You go out to retrieve him, and they ask what’s his breed. You say he’s a pharaoh hound mixed with pit or something.

“Should take him with us next time,” one of them says.

You laugh and share with them his pitiable hunting dog record. He may pick up the scent of your neighborhood possum and the squirrels that cavort up your tree, not to mention the equally old cat he lives with, but has never, ever, come close to nabbing them.

“That so?” one of the men says.

Your vet called yesterday to go over your dog’s last visit. His arthritic back knees are the worst she’s ever seen in an animal, so she’s prescribing the opioid tramadol, but then there’s his troubled liver. You know what she’s preparing you for.

The men scratch his head again, and you remember the 15-year-old Portland boy and how this old dog of yours is costing a ton of money in feed.

“You do right by them, don’t you,” one of the men says, and you can’t argue with that. They return to whatever they were doing, and you guide your dog back inside.

When you look out your kitchen window later, you don’t see the buck. The men must have taken it inside for the night so as not to invite the resident bear to visit. The rest of the night passes reading with the heavy head of a snoring dog against your leg. Soon, the lights of the clubhouse are extinguished. The headlights of the last pick-up brush across your little house’s walls. You and your dog take yourselves off to bed.

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What’s the view outside your kitchen window? Inquiring minds would love to hear what’s the view outside your kitchen window!