Deer Encounters
By Cynthia Staples
16 Jul 2007
I saw them my first night in Yosemite Valley in a tapestry hanging in a room at the Ahwahnee Hotel. The tapestry depicted deer feasting in a forest. It was a beautiful, if familiar, sight. Having grown up in Virginia, where white tailed deer can be as plentiful as blades of grass in a lush field, I'd seen deer numerous times. I used to draw them in elementary school, wearing down the white crayons to paint in the sunlight dappling on the babies. A deer was just a deer with no comparison to park giants like El Capitan, the sequoias, or even the bears. Or so I thought until the next morning.
They crossed the parking lot nibbling on apples and berries. Later I learned that they were mule deer which are larger than the white tailed deer of my youth. That morning I simply thought of them as deer with a capital "D," an archetype of nature, and royal in their bearing. They brushed by close enough to stir the air around all of us who watched with mouths open and cameras clicking away. Only the youngest children reached out to touch them.
It seems near impossible to convey through static images and words the majesty and grace of these creatures. They moved as if they walked in two worlds, theirs and ours, and they did so at a pace that evoked calm not only within me. Cameras clicking and whirring stopped as people simply reveled in the presence of something unique.
After a long while the deer raised their heads to the sky. Velvet-covered antlers glowed with morning sun, and brown hides appeared golden. Solid yet ephemeral at the same time, it seemed quite fitting when they crossed the street and melted into the meadow.
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