Part Three Sanctuary

No doubt it was a silly name to give a deer—“Leonard”—but Brother and I named him on the spur of the moment, and, probably because we did not know the Indian word for “fawn,” we resorted to the 48prosaic title to which our woods friend learned to respond.

Our acquaintance with Leonard began in such a dramatic way and with such suddenness that we had no time to think about a suitable name—although we did remember to name him even in the first chaotic moment of meeting. It was a habit that came to us as naturally as breathing.

It was during those days of licensed killing known as “the deer season.” All day long, from across the bay, a mile in width, came the long-drawn-out baying of hounds and an occasional shot. On our side of the bay, too, high up in the wooded hills, we could hear the hounds at chase, and our hearts were heavy, being weighted with fear for the hunted things of the woods. We wondered if the hunters would find the salt-lick which we had stumbled upon in our wanderings and where we 49had spent many breathless hours watching for the slim-limbed does and the antlered bucks to come and take refreshment.

We stood outside the little log cabin, our faces raised to the hills, our hands clasped tightly together, listening shiveringly to the hunting cry of the dogs. They were in full chase, we knew, after some luckless deer. We felt so helpless, yet so eager to help protect our friends of the wilds. I wonder if our unexpressed prayer did not have something to do with what happened.

The baying of the hounds alternated with the crash of the underbrush where they were running, men coming close behind. The dogs were skirting the top of a hill. All at once their baying became a series of whimpering barks. They were for the moment off the scent.

50And then, down the hill, with such flying leaps that he scarcely touched the earth, came a little deer, a fawn, heading straight for the cabin. Was he mad with fear that he sought the home of humans? Or did he know by that unexplainable power which animals have that we were friends, that we would protect his life with ours—did he, I wonder? For he cleared the four-foot fence with a bound and trotted up to us, then stood trembling, his soft eyes glazed with fright, white foam at the corners of his mouth.

This is not a fiction story; I am telling it as it happened.

The little fawn thrust his hot, dry nose against my hand, and when Brother and I, recovering from our petrified amazement, put our arms around his velvety neck, he did not shrink away, but pressed against us as if mutely begging protection.

51If you have never had a wild creature throw itself upon your mercy, if you have never known the feeling of a soft, brown deer body pressed against yours in pleading and in confidence, you can not realize the wild thrill of ecstasy that went through us.

“His name is Leonard!” I found breath to say, my face against the velvety neck of the little deer.

But Brother, being a man in embryo, was thinking of sterner things. The hounds, he reminded me, would shortly find the scent of the deer. If they came baying down the hill, the fawn would take fright and dart away before we could stop him.

It was not a pleasant picture, but what were we to do? The short, whining barks of the dogs had already changed to the long, triumphant cadence of the hound in full cry. They would come down the hill, the hunters 52would claim Leonard as their game, they would—

“Meat!” whispered Brother tensely, and cryptic as it may sound to the reader I understood perfectly. I wondered that I had not thought of it myself. Brother outlined a plan of action in a few brief words while the baby deer, with knees wobbling sadly, turned terror-haunted eyes up the hill, his delicate nostrils quivering, yet made no move to leave us.

It took my best efforts to lead the little fawn into the shelter of the brooder house. The scent was foreign to anything he had known before, and the darkness terrified him anew. He could not have known that safety lay within that strange place, but he did know—of that I am sure—that he could trust himself with me, for he came, hesitatingly, urged always by my voice and my hands gently caressing 53him. He went with me, even through the door, into the semi-darkness of the frame brooder house, and though when I swung the door shut he nervously leaped away from my side, it was to return an instant later, as if begging my pardon for his involuntary action.

Brother, in the meantime, had dashed into the kitchen and emerged as quickly with a juicy steak—it was to have been cooked for dinner that night—which he hacked into chunks with his jackknife as he raced up the hill.

With my eyes against a crack I could see him panting upward to the point where Leonard had emerged from the underbrush of the woods.

And scarcely had he arrived when a lean hound, with lolling tongue and nose to the ground, burst from the shrubbery, uttering a long-drawn-out 54bay. The little deer beside me shook in every limb, and I was trembling, too, as if it were I, not Leonard, whom the dogs were trailing. We crouched there in the darkness, the wild thing of the woods and the child who loved the wild things of the woods, and in those tense moments I felt the heart of the baby deer pounding against my body. Can you wonder why now, when I see the body of a deer killed in the hunt, I can not congratulate the hunter on his prowess? I know how the deer at bay stood still and trembled! I know how his soft, brown eyes grew wide with helpless terror. I know how his heart pounded suffocatingly. And I can not be glad for the hunter; I am only sorry that he does not understand.

And up on the hill Brother was acting his part in the drama. When the first lean hound swung into sight, he deftly tossed a chunk of red, juicy 55meat in his pathway. The dog ignored the first piece, so intent was he on the fresh scent of the deer. But another chunk aimed just ahead of him was a temptation not to be withstood, and he gobbled it up, pausing a second in his chase. Another dog followed him out of the underbrush, finding the first piece of meat Brother had thrown.

It did not take long for the two hounds to finish off the entire steak so obligingly tossed to them by the small boy almost hidden in a clump of tall ferns. And when it was gone, Leonard was safe, for the dogs, with the smell of fresh meat in their nostrils, had lost the lighter scent of the little deer’s flying hoofs, and they sniffed shamefacedly and with befuddled yappings, until the hunters came cursing down the hill and crashing into the open, to berate the dogs soundly for having lost the game—as they supposed—in the woods.

56They could not know that the little boy in the clump of ferns, looking on so innocently, was responsible for the hounds’ failure, nor that their game was at that instant held tightly in the arms of a little girl who was shaking with excitement as well as with fear, lest something happen to betray the refugee’s hiding-place.

But nothing did. The men stamped back into the woods, taking the hounds with them, and that day at least we heard no more baying on the hill.

And Leonard—we were afraid to let him go back to the woods until the deer season had passed or until he was of a size better able to care for himself. The grown-ups helped us, and we contrived a pen with wire netting over the top and sides as well, with the brooder house as shelter for nights. And here we kept Leonard a willing prisoner, while the hounds bayed on the hills 57and shots echoed across the water. How we wished, when we heard them, that we could make a place of refuge for every hunted thing in the world to come to and be cared for. But Leonard at least was safe, and he seemed to know it, too. Though he trembled whenever he heard the long hunting cry of the dogs, he did not take refuge even in the brooder house. He knew, I think, that he was in sanctuary.

As the days went on, we released our little deer from his pen, first with a collar and a rope, and then with nothing to hold him. He followed us like a dog, trotting beside us with dainty, mincing steps, sometimes leaping ahead of us, turning to look back at us, his large ears at an angle, his slim young body silhouetted against the green of the woods.

He soon learned his name and 58would come bounding out to us when we called. We fed him things his ancestors probably never tasted—cookies, apples, lettuce leaves, and candy, in addition to the grass and tender leaves we brought him before we allowed him to accompany us. But best of all the dainties we gave him was the chewing gum that Brother in a playful moment tendered him. Leonard accepted it daintily, as was his wont, and chewed it, as Brother and I remarked, with an actual expression of surprise coming into his brown eyes. He chewed and chewed. Perhaps he thought it a new variety of cud. At any rate, he gave it his hearty indorsement, and after that he would nose in Brother’s pockets to find the stick of gum that was always there for him.

So Leonard became one of our happy family, and though we knew 59that sometime in the distant future we should have on our hands the problem of what to do with an antlered buck who had forgotten the ways of the woods and accepted those of civilization, we did not feel sorry about it, being content to dwell in the happy present, while Leonard seemed content as well.

But one night I woke to find Brother’s hand tugging at mine. He was whispering to me that something was outside Leonard’s pen—perhaps it was a bear or a wildcat trying to get at him.

Foolish children we may have been, but we were not cowardly. It never occurred to us to rouse the grown-ups. Leonard was our friend and our responsibility. From my window the two of us crept out on the roof, white nightgowned figures, shaking with cold and excitement. From the roof we dropped easily to the railing of the 60picket fence at the back of the cabin and from there to the ground.

Like two little white wraiths we crept along in the shadow of the fence until we could see the outlines of the brooder house and the pen which enclosed it. There was a moon, but it was thickly hidden by clouds. All we could distinguish was a dark form against the wire netting, a shape that moved restlessly, now away from the pen, now back to it.

As our eyes became accustomed to the darkness, we saw that Leonard was in the pen outside the brooder house, and we questioned each other silently. Surely no deer would come thus to meet an enemy animal that wanted to destroy.

And then, as if in answer to our question, the clouds parted and a pale moon turned the darkness into half-shadowed light. With the sudden effulgence 61came the weird gleam of four eyes turned in our direction—for our scent had carried to sensitive nostrils. Brother and I, for an instant, caught each other’s hands and gasped.

Then two of the luminous lights vanished, as the slim animal outside the pen sprang away in great bounds that carried her into the shadows beyond our ken—but not before we had recognized the slim, fleeing form for a doe. We knew it was Leonard’s mother, who had found her baby.

We climbed back into our window as silently as we had left it. Brother in his cot, and I in mine, stared up into the darkness, trying to tell ourselves that ours was the right to keep the fawn we had befriended, yet knowing that the mother heart was calling for the little brown deer whom we loved so well. And we knew that in the end we must relinquish our claim—Leonard, 62after all, belonged to the woods, and the mother heart of the woods was calling.

Because we loved him so, we tried to pretend, the next day, that the deer we had seen was not Leonard’s mother—that it was merely a friend from the woods who had come down by moonlight to pay a nocturnal call. In our hearts, though, we knew better. Leonard all the day was restless; he pricked his ears continually as if waiting for a voice from the forest. We could scarcely coax him out of his distrait mood, even with a double ration of the chewing gum he loved so well.

The next night sleep was impossible. Though we heard nothing, we knew, somehow, that outside Leonard’s pen was a slim brown body pressed close against the wire netting. We rose, at last, and crept out over the roof and 63down to the ground. The doe was there, as we had foreseen. At our approach she bounded away with only the faintest rustle of leaves and snapping of twigs to mark her progress. But knowing that she would not go far—that she would come back to her baby—Brother and I went quickly forward and opened the door of the pen.

Leonard came to us and thrust his nose against my hand. We knelt on the ground, putting our arms around him, pressing our faces against his soft, brown neck, telling him with tears behind our whispered words that he must go with his mother, that the danger season was passed, and that he was free to go back to his kindred.

We stole away, but Leonard followed us, as if asking where we went and why he was not to go with us. For the first time we pushed him away 64from us, though you can not know what it meant to us to do it. He stood still then, as if wondering, perhaps a little hurt, and we, not daring to look back, ran for the fence, clambered upon it, and gained the roof.

Once there, we could not resist watching a bit, and it was not long before the two luminous eyes gleamed from the underbrush. Then we saw a shapely, dark body come slowly into the open, and Leonard, with light, springing bounds, had rushed to meet his mother. For an instant we saw again the glowing orbs of two pairs of eyes. Then the lights vanished; two dark bodies moved side by side into the blackness of the woods; we heard the light crackle of underbrush; and then silence.

Silently we crept into our beds, and long afterward I heard Brother’s choking whisper coming through the 65darkness—my own face was buried in the pillow:

“I know—Leonard’s going to miss—his—gum—”

We cried ourselves to sleep that night, thinking of an empty pen and of a little brown friend gone from us forever.

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He questioningly sniffed the breeze.

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