What startled me when I raised my glance

So there I was on May 1st on a path coming off Yaupon Dr. on the far side of my neighborhood. I walked slowly, gazing down at either side of the path in search of native wildflowers, when something at the top of my field of vision brought me to a standstill: not far in front of me, lying right in the middle of the trail, was a fawn. I remembered reading that a fawn instinctively stays put and doesn’t move when its mother leaves it alone, and that was the case with this fawn. During the several minutes that I took a few pictures, it never budged an inch. Had I been a coyote or an off-leash dog, the fawn’s immobility would have been useless.

A few minutes earlier, before advancing this far, I’d looked ahead and spotted an adult deer that stared at me for five or ten seconds from farther down the trail, then moved away. That must have been the fawn’s mother.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman