Bleary-eyed and stiff in the cold morning rain, I walked the asphalt path—entirely uphill both ways, I’m certain of it—to the rec center (where I would participate in vain exertions on the treadmill to eliminate all traces of the preceding night’s peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies), when I turned a blind corner on a doe and two spotted fawns. The fawns hopped in tandem down the path and out of sight, their hooves clicking on the asphalt, while the doe moved confusedly, first in the opposite direction of the fawns, then pausing to look at me. I looked back, and took a few steps forward. She gazed down the path after the fawns, then turned, then trotted with her lopsided left-right gait into the woods. I expected her to be more graceful somehow. Her belly seemed more rotund and her legs shorter than I might have hoped. Her hooves clattered in an embarrassing way on the manmade asphalt.
By the time I walked to where they had entered the woods, they were far out of sight. It unnerved me to think they could appear and disappear so quickly. I wondered what else lurked out there, and glanced nervously from side to side, taking little solace in the yellow emergency stations evenly spaced along the trail. At least there would be surveillance video of my untimely demise at the claws of a surprised bear.
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