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Amy Bennett Williams Essays

Fawn Encounter

Amy Bennett Williams

In this week’s installment from News-Press storyteller Amy Bennett Williams, she reminisces about a fossil hunting trip with her son Nash that morphed into a remarkable animal experience that tugs at heart strings and challenges the ethics of how to handle human/wildlife encounters.

It was a bright, breezy winter afternoon — the perfect kind of day for fossiling — so Nash and I headed to the Caloosahatchee Regional Park.
 
It’s one of our favorite places for observing the region’s exposed past. The sprawling 768-acre park is loved by bicyclists and equestrians alike for having one of the rarest of Southwest Florida geographical commodities: topography.
 
Split in two by State Road 78, the north side’s rolling ridges exist courtesy of 20th-century dredging projects to deepen the Caloosahatchee. As the river bottom was vacuumed up, it was pumped and piped a mile away to what’s now the park, creating its characteristic humps and hills.
 
Along with muck, clay and limestone, the dredges sucked up fossils — mostly the shells of ancient marine mollusks, though we’ve also happened on the teeth and bones of the larger animals that lived here during the last ice age. Dinosaurs never roamed Southwest Florida, but there were extraordinary creatures here: giant ground sloths, sabertooth cats, camels, mammoths and mastodons, and Nash and I were hoping to see some of their left-behind parts.
 
Yet after walking about an hour, we hadn’t spotted more than hog and bobcat tracks and it was getting close to dinnertime. As we were turning to head back, we saw a crowd of vultures circling and squabbling just over the next small hill.
 
Would-be naturalist that I am, I always like checking out what’s died, so eyes trained on the vultures, I strode through the tall grass toward them.
 
Suddenly, Nash grabbed my arm, pulled me up short and hissed in a whisper: “Look.”
 
Not an inch from my boot, nestled in a hollow, lay a small form — a whitetail fawn that couldn’t have been more than a few days old curled like a spotted kitten in the long grass.
 
Tightly folded and utterly still, save a single flick of one velvet ear, its liquid obsidian eyes searched our faces as we stood over it, hardly daring to breathe.
 
I know whitetail does will leave their little ones hidden when they go to browse, but this one was in the middle of an open field. Given the fresh big cat tracks and the cloud of vultures, I had a sinking feeling about what might have happened to this baby’s mother.
 
Nash headed over to investigate. The scavengers scattered, quickly reconvening once he returned. There was indeed a dead deer in the grass, he reported, but not an adult: It was another fawn.
The vultures had worked it over so well, there was no telling how it had died. Now, we were wondering even harder where this creature’s mother was. Dusk was falling and there was at least one big predator nearby.
 
“We can’t leave it,” Nash gasped. “It won’t make it through the night.”
 
I explained that we mustn’t touch it, that its mom was probably watching us from the woods, but I had my doubts. Nash wasn’t at all convinced. “We can take it home and bottle-feed it,” he pleaded. At least that way, it’ll survive.”
 
No, no, no, I said, clinging to the wildlife ethics I’ve internalized over a lifetime of resisting the urge to meddle as nature takes its course. Tell you what, I told Nash; we’ll mark this spot, then go across the street to the ranger station and tell the park folks about it. Then they can decide what to do.
 
Nash didn’t say anything, but I know this child well enough to know how much will it took for him to get up from where he’d been kneeling at the fawn’s side, to leave it in the grass and walk with me back to the car. I squeezed his hand; he didn’t squeeze back.
 
We found the kindly woman who tends the park’s campground and explained what had happened. There were no rangers on duty and no one to look after it, she told us, though she’d certainly call the park’s supervisor and let her know. I left her with all my numbers so if anyone wanted to know exactly where the fawn was, I could send coordinates (thank you, iPhone), then we got back in the car.
 
Poor Nash was beside himself now, tormented by visions of cats or coyotes tearing up this little creature too, and I confess, I was miserable too.
 
“We can’t just go home,” he said. “Please let’s go at least make sure it’s still OK.”
 
So, back we hiked, up the trail, over the hills and through the field, to where we’d left a sabal palm frond pointing to the fawn’s hiding place. Which was still there, but empty.
 
No hair, blood or signs of a struggle that we could see. And much as we wanted to see a pair of deer tracks on the path, we didn’t, probably because the doe had come, collected her fawn and slipped back into the woods.
 
At least that’s what we told ourselves as we walked, arm in arm through the gathering dark.

Amy Bennett Williams Essays