A Black-Tailed Deer

"At first light I'm woken again, this time by footsteps right outside my bedroom window. The crunch of stepped-on madrone leaves, madrone leaves brushed aside by a slowly lifted foot. I lie stiff as a board, waiting. The sound gets closer and closer, and a face suddenly appears in the window: a black-tailed deer, picking through the briars, eating grass. It's so quiet, I hear his chewing."

~~ from Breaking into the Backcountry by Steve Edwards

Breaking into the Backcountry

"And I realize my own culpability here--I don't want to spend the time and energy figuring how to solve my own rodent problems, so instead I nuke them. The irony is that, ostensibly, I have to come to this remote homestead to learn about Nature, with a capital N. To meditate on wilderness, on wildness. Only instead of apprenticing myself to the most basic concerns of such a life. . . I'm cheating myself of any real learning by opting for short-term solutions to long-term problems. It's a poisoning of the mind and the imagination, and what hemorrhages is a sense of responsibility to anything beyond my own comfort. But I do it, time and again. When the bait is gone, I put out another."

~~ from Breaking into the Backcountry by Steve Edwards