We’re still adjusting to cyber school, and a walk after Silas’s last assignment of the day has helped us both this past week. While I prefer a quiet, non-academic stroll, Silas has insisted on toting along our tree identification book, and stopping us every few feet.
I’m not sure if it’s me, or the quality of the guidebook, but I can never seem to help him zero in exactly on what kind of tree we’re staring up at. At least for now, he seems content with painfully general classifications. “Well, I guess it’s some kind of birch,” or, “Well… we know it’s a pine.” While he is interested in trees, I suspect a bid for my attention is at the root of the field guide expeditions.
On one such walk this week, we stood about a half-mile from home, under a towering pine, thumbing through the guidebook’s illustrations.
“Look!” Silas shouted as he pointed. The exclamation made my heart thud to my stomach, and that’s where it stayed as I peered into the forest, unable to see what startled him.
“There,” he said, pointing under the giant pine.
Nestled on a bed of brown needles, her legs folded delicately under her large body was a doe, chewing a mouthful of pine needles and staring at us. Lances of late afternoon sun pierced the boughs and melted to dapples on her tan coat.
“She has whiskers. I didn’t know deer had whiskers,” Silas whispered. He was right, she did, and I didn’t know that either. They twinkled silver in the sun and flicked up and down as she chewed and blinked at us. Here we had stood, with our book, in our straw hats, thinking we were studying nature, when nature was studying us.
Being that Silas is 7, he stared at the deer in complete wonder for just a few moments, then tapped my hand to get me to open the field guide again and get back to work.
“Well, I think it’s some kind of fir, Silas. I really don’t know,” I mumbled distractedly, not wanting to give up the eye-to-eye connection with the doe.
With another woodland giant vaguely identified, we both looked up from the pages to the hidden den. She was gone. She’d made not a sound, and not a single bough even bobbed. Her pine needle bed was pressed into a cozy bowl. Only speckles of sun warmed the spot now. I was disappointed she was gone. That we’d missed it with our noses in the book. But she never wanted to be seen in the first place, and was surely relieved to be a ghost in the woods again. ~ Stella