Today I recalled walking our long access road through the woods to Balmoral Road fourteen years ago, my mind filled with nothing but an image of breakthrough. One doe on the lawn is what Vilis spotted that morning from our upstairs bedroom window. Then something shifted – a faint movement in the dawn – and a fawn was at her side, tall and sturdy, graceful. We watched the duo there in open view and saw no other until again something shifted in the dawn and a second fawn appeared, right there on the lawn, flowing from invisible stillness into eye-catching motion. How often in life does something shift, something change, and we suddenly see what was there all along? Love. Envy. Betrayal.

This year, the whitetails have visited our lawn not only at dusk and dawn, but in broad daylight as well. During late winter, a doe and her two fawns grazed on patches of grass revealed by receding snow, sometimes approaching as near as the edge of my porch, less than five metres away from me as I sat inside, writing. The doe and her young were regular visitors, as was a small herd of five deer. As beautiful as they were, and as much as I enjoyed observing them at close range, the deer wreaked havoc with our young fruit trees, browsing heavily on lower branches, and on higher branches, too, as the snow depth increased.

Needless to say, the whitetails left plenty of sign in and around the yard – trails that snake through meadows and woods like tangled strands of a chaotic web, footprints or tracks resembling paired peaks imprinted by split hoofs and frequently accompanied by the much smaller imprints of the dewclaws at the back of the deer’s legs just above their hoofs, scats deposited as loose concentrations of dimpled, oval pellets in shades of blackish-brown (new) or mid-brown (old), and chewed branches ending in shredded, woody fibers, the result of the fact that deer possess no upper incisors or canine teeth and thus must tear rather than snip off twigs.

I can say without a doubt that I’ve never before seen as much deer sign on our property as I have this year, a fact that has prompted Vilis and our son Janis to begin constructing a single-wire electric fence around our yard in an effort to protect fruit trees, gardens, and flower beds from the ravages of hungry deer. I hope it works.