The Deer Woman - A Snippet Story
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Artwork by John Henry Dearle
He was a farmer, hands cracked and calloused from working on his family’s farm since he was small. The family farm he had inherited in his late twenties sat in a valley a short distance from one of the tiny towns that dotted central Ohio, those little blink-and-you-miss it single street towns that barely made a pinprick in the quilt of cornfields and soybeans covering endless miles between the occasional woodland borders. Once upon a time he had also been a hunter, but that ended on the day he would forever keep a secret: the day he looked magic square in the eyes.
It was bow hunting season, and he crouched low in the foliage at the edge of a meadow where deer were known to graze. The sun reflected against the orange of his hunting vest, making him squint. It was early autumn, but a hot and sticky day – the sort where winter still seemed like it would always stay a million miles north. He batted at the insects flying around him, and swore quietly when a stubborn wasp plunged its venom into the pad of his palm.
She arrived at that moment.
On the other side of the glade, he saw a beautiful deer, hidden by the tangles of a raspberry bush. Her eyelashes were so long, he could see them from a few hundred yards away. She ducked her head down behind the foliage, raising it cautiously. He silently reached down to his feet for an arrow, swearing again when the wasp bite throbbed as he brushed his hand against the arrow shaft. He saw the deer cautiously moving out of the thicket, still obscured by a tree. Quietly she bent her head down, and moved from the shade of the forest into the sunlight.
She stood on two legs, the shape and proportion of a woman’s limbs. Though her body was covered with soft, dun-colored hair like the hide of a deer, her naked breasts and graceful arms and legs were that of a woman. A young woman, apparently, he somehow managed to rationally observe, because her hindquarters still bore the dapple marks of a fawn.
He would have sworn he was in a dream, but he could still feel the sweat dripping down his neck and back, the throbbing pain of the wasp sting in his hand. But he couldn’t breathe as he watched her gracefully step across the meadow. As she moved further into the sunlit green, another deer stepped out behind her, and another. Although the other animals were ordinary-formed creatures, they gathered around her, and she stroked their backs, leaning her cervine head against theirs one at a time, in a gesture of ritual or affection. He slowly lowered his crossbow, but he was a stumbling human man, and one very much in shock, unable to keep quiet. When his crossbow hit the ground, her head jerked up quickly, and she looked across the field, straight into his eyes.
One moment stretched into an eternity as he looked into the eyes of magic, and then at some invisible signal, she darted back into the forest, all of the other animals jumping and leaping into the trees with her.
From that day forward, he would never hunt an animal again. He sold his guns and crossbow, never went into the town bar he once frequented, where deer heads adorned three of the four walls, staring down at him with their cold glass eyes.
He wasn’t afraid of what had happened to him…the memory reminded him of the books he had read as a child of minotaurs and centaurs, Pan and fairies. But no one would ever believe his story if he had told it, nor was it a good idea to start talking of deer women in a small town where everyone knew each other. So if anyone thought it odd when he stayed in his house during deer season, they only murmured about it to each other quietly.
They didn’t know that he looked from his window with binoculars across his corn fields, wondering if he’d ever catch a glimpse of her again. They didn’t know that sometimes when he saw deer from a distance as he drove his truck to town, his palm itched where the wasp had stung him, like a reminder. Like a message.
Occasionally, I will be sharing what I call “A Snippet Story,” a little captured short story fragment anywhere from a few sentences to a few paragraphs long, inspired by a photo or artwork I’ve seen.
