The doe places its hooves between moss-filigreed rocks with the delicacy of a wish. Silent, nose twitching, it bends a long, swooping neck to forage amongst the rich rot of fallen leaves. The sun filters through a pine-clotted canopy, knitting lacy carpets of light over the forest floor. Idle, glancing rays streak the doe’s dappled pelt russet. A creek burbles in the distance, where it makes a glimmering silver half-circuit around the grove. These are deep woods. They reek of pine and soil, and between the towering trees, the damp, green air holds still, long and meditative like a diver’s breath. Beetles squirm through the deadened trunks of giants that have been magnificent corpses for decades.
The iron taint of blood sits in the hunter’s mouth like a premonition. Spring is a hungry season, but in her stomach, a companion to hunger writhes like a knot of eels: guilt. She knows it will be quick—the doe won’t have time to be afraid. The animal never stops its methodical chewing of whatever tender greenery it can find, its ears never flicker in alarm: it doesn’t sense what’s coming. But the burn of the bow string cuts into the hunter’s two fingers. Her breath flutters over chapped lips. The hunter tries to calm her heart, let it throb a patient rhythm, steady, slow, assured. Out here, the deep sea light and the thrumming world is the kind of scene poets write about. And, even as she cordons off the thought with the necessary cruelty, she can’t help but wonder: what kind of poem would a doe write? Would it be the startling fear of a shadow or a snapping branch? Or would it be the texture of a maple bud or her mother’s nuzzling touch? And it is too late for her to unthink now, of mothers and of sweetness, so the hunter eases the string of her bow, and goes to where the wild spring onions squelch in the creekbank mud.
And the doe, whether she ever wanted to write a poem or not, does not realize she has already composed one of mercy. She flicks her white-striped tail and goes to where the grass grows thick and the evening shadows thin.