Saturday Morning
Sleeping In
It was seven in the morning, and I began to stir. My wife kissed my forehead and quietly encouraged me to sleep a little longer, reminding me it was Saturday. Saturdays are my day for sleeping in, usually until about nine o'clock. Like most people, I wake up early for work during the weekdays, but at night I am generally up late writing until midnight or one in the morning.
Peeky Blinders
I have a daily ritual I conduct upon waking. Once I am vertical and before anything else, before going to the restroom, brushing my teeth, or letting the dogs out, I first walk to the bedroom window, slide one of the blind slats up, and peek outside. I utter the same thing every day, not in an insincere monotonous way, and although the words are usually the same, they fall cleanly from my mind and exit my mouth as if it was the first time I looked out this window, "This place is so fucking beautiful."
Golden Sun
Most days, when I peek out of the blinds, I see gold. A large pine grove is on the property's east side. East of the grove is a large tract of farmland used to grow tobacco and soybeans. In the wintertime, however, it is just left to rest, with its green and gold grasses blanketing the rich soil.
When the sun rises over the farmland, it is still relatively close to the horizon. As a result, the sun shoots a golden light that hits the pine grove. The pines cut the sun's light into hundreds of beams, giving the illusion of gold rays piercing through the forest and onto the side of my home. Every morning, I am impressed.
Cloudy Day
Today is one of those rare days, however, when thick clouds block the sun. There was no gold to be seen. It's funny how your patterns start to merge when you live with someone. Her habits become yours, your speech becomes hers, and so on. As she got out of bed, I heard the sound of the blind lifting, that familiar rubbing of wood on wood that starts my day.
The blind lifted, and I heard a gasp that prematurely went quiet. I inherently sensed two things as soon as I heard the noise. First, something outside was interesting; second, she was torn on whether to wake me since it was still early.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I crawled out of bed and shuffled toward the window, eager to see what was going on. As we both looked out of the window, I saw a small herd of deer feeding in the front yard.
Familiar Herd
Five deer were within 50 meters of my window; three does and two young deer. I was familiar with this small herd, remembering last year, the two fawns still had their spots. One of the two caught my attention about six months ago when I saw it running around the horse pasture, playing, and acting crazy, stopping from time to time to spin and kick its back feet in the air like a wild stallion.
The end of Winter is here, but the deer still have on their warm winter coats. I have photographed many different herds, including this one, on my property. I have several shots of this small group, but their coats were noticeably darker this morning than the last time I saw them.
Food Sources
The temperatures are starting to warm, and I see signs of Spring all around. While on a recent walk, I noticed budding trees, one with open blooms on the outside edge of the pine grove. The walk also revealed several trees whose green leaves had turned bright yellow. My suspicions were confirmed when I shook one of the branches, and the yellow color turned into a puff of smoke. It was pollen.
With these changes, the deer must have found some new delectables growing in the horse pasture. This morning, they were grazing, eating an early meal.
During the Spring and summer, my property has a ton of natural food. Wild blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries are along the pasture's edges. There are wild pear and cherry trees everywhere. The deer certainly love moving through this area during those seasons. Today marked the first morning the deer were in the pasture since the end of last fall.
During Winter, I maintain several feeding areas for the wildlife. There, I place deer corn, protein pellets, salt licks, and seed blocks and discard any old fruits from my home, such as apples and pears. These feeding areas routinely draw deer, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, foxes, and a large variety of seed-eating birds. These birds, in turn, attract raptors such as hawks, buteos, vultures, and owls. And yes, there are lizards, snakes, and bats. I try to keep a safe haven for the wildlife so they have a place to feed and bed.
Travel Patterns
It was interesting to watch the deer feed and move across the property. The paths they follow are counter-intuitive to humans. If you think about it, people use grid patterns for almost everything. The dirt road leading to my house runs perpendicular to another dirt road. That dirt road meets another road at a ninety-degree angle. That small road meets a main road, forming a perfectly square grid. While there are exceptions, most of our movements follow this pattern, whether driving on country roads or walking through an office building. We move on grids filled with ninety-degree turns.
At first glance, this habit of moving on grids might seem insignificant, but it reminds me of when I worked as a tactical operator on a special unit for the state police. All of my life, I shot at a gun range where you always fire down range and never pointed your weapon in any other direction. Those are the safety rules, and so you inadvertently develop a mindset of shooting down a single neat and straight line.
Tactics on a traditional range make gunfighting seem exponentially more straightforward than it is. In Texas, we trained at a shoot house at the ALERRT Center in San Marcos that allowed shooting in all directions. We also practiced with simunitions (detergent-based rounds fired out of actual weapons converted for training) at a specially modified building in Dallas maintained by the US Marshals. Moving from a one-way shooting range to a 360-degree shoot house is an eye-opening experience. Suddenly, you have to worry about shooting in different directions, including above, below, and all around you. It takes hard work to address threats without accidentally engaging innocent people or teammates in the real world.
Similarly, the deer move independently of our imagined and constructed grid patterns. They are free to move in any direction, cutting across roads and fields, sometimes using trails and other times moving through thick brush.
Constricting the way we move is not where self-imposed limitations stop. While dependence on manufactured concepts like moving on grids is a physical endeavor, these restrictions also exist in the cognitive world. Seeing the world in a certain way and developing habits in how we interact with it starts to cut us off from original ideas and fresh ways of seeing our environment. Breaking free of these habits becomes difficult once our thinking becomes accustomed to a trained behavior.
The deer have no such constructs and move in harmony with the environment. They might be headed one way and find a new food source that draws them to a different path. They might see a threat, run away from it, and move toward a location they had not intended to visit. Humans lack this cognitive freedom, so we inhibit our ability to act freely.
Predator-Prey Feeding
Watching the deer graze and move through the front yard, I noticed how differently predators and prey experience feeding. My dogs, while domesticated, still possess predator drives. They become very excited when feeding time arrives, barking, drooling, and running around like wolves.
When I first moved to this house in the woods, the dogs quickly became accustomed to hunting rabbits, sometimes waking me in the middle of the night, so I would let them outside to hunt. When a dog is "switched on," it becomes a powerful animal. Even my hound, which tends to be clumsy, suddenly transforms into a super-dog, able to perform impressive physical maneuvers when he spots a raptor in the sky. If a large bird is flying high above, you had better stay out of his way.
This physical drive comes from the dog's past need to kill prey to eat. Once the meal is dispatched, the dog suddenly stills and eats in a frenzy. This change from hunting to eating takes the dog from complete situational awareness to disregarding its environment in a matter of seconds. Deer are different.
While eating is a type of reward for the predator, feeding is a vulnerable time for prey animals like deer. Deer eat on the move. They hang out in herds for added protection and are ready to abandon their food at a moment's notice. I regularly place food out for the deer, and it always amazes me how the deer eat only a small portion of the food and move on. My dogs would eat an entire bag of dog food if they found one, but the deer are satisfied to trade safety and mobility for a full stomach. I suppose the deer would rather be hungry than dead.
Early Text
Within 20 minutes, the small herd moved across my front yard and into the tree line. I snapped a couple of photos to document the herd and then went to the restroom to wash my face and brush my teeth.
I had been reading for about 30 minutes when I received a text. It was wifey from the next room asking me how I felt about having breakfast before our normal eating time. I texted back, "Hell yeah," and within half an hour, we were seated, drinking freshly brewed coffee and eating eggs cooked over medium, covered in Sriracha, with thick-cut mesquite-smoked bacon, and English muffins topped with peanut and apple butter.
The weekend had officially begun.