Normal Wild Deer

Yesterday on my mail route…On a back road, off of a 'main' back road, I stopped to bring a full tray of mail up to the passenger seat.  I had left the driver's door open, gone around to the back of the jeep, and was about to set my tray of mail down and across the passenger seat and in my driver's door, was a deer looking at me.  

He wasn't big, but big enough to just be sniffing around the steering wheel.  I said, "Hey buddy…."  

I then recalled delivering a package to a house on this road in the fall, and small fawn was just inside the yard and the man who was accepting the package had explained to me, that it was an orphan.  I don't recall now how it had been separated from its mother, but the man said it would take food from his family.

And, now here I was with this human fed deer… and he wastrusting I had something for him.

All I had left was a few Ritz Crackers, which I hand fed him.  His little black button nose grazing my gloves as he nibbled the cracker. I didn't have my camera along…or you would have a picture to look upon.

I will carry carrots with me (and camera) in hopes of seeing him again.  I wonder if he waits to hear or smell humans on his road…like meals on wheels.

What I also thought, how interesting the nurturing process was in his case. How he grew to trust humans by the act of survival; for he was too little to forge for food on his own…when his mother disappeared.

In his deer mind, we are kind and giving people a food source, not the perpetrators (hunters) many deer know us by.

I truly didn't believe, believe you could take a 'wild' animal and domesticate it…and yet they are lured into trusting us out of survival.  

And, I also know the same is true in reverse, how we will endure awful treatment for food and shelter…as children without a choice.

Just interesting to witness the unusal deer….who came towards me, instead of fleeing like normal wild deer.