A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [80]
Lindsay slumped against the screen door. “Can you believe this?” she demanded.
Cici backed slowly down the steps. “Not unless I’d seen it with my own eyes.” She dragged her gaze from the deer to Lindsay. “How did you . . . ?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Lindsay returned sharply. “It just followed me.”
The deer turned and wandered down the steps, coming within inches of Cici’s wide-eyed gaze, and began to nibble the azalea bushes. “It’s not afraid of me,” she said wonderingly.
“Or of the dog,” added Bridget.
Lindsay said, “It’s not afraid of anything.”
By this time Noah had wandered up, hands in pockets, to better observe the developments. The deer, losing interest in the azaleas, meandered a few feet away to help himself to the remnants of the half-shriveled apples that were left beneath the apple tree.
“Maybe if we go inside,” Lindsay said in a stage whisper, “he’ll go away.”
Cici came quietly up the steps. Lindsay opened the screen door, and the deer had bounded up the steps after them before the hinges stopped squeaking. All three women yelped with surprise and pressed themselves against the wall, and Noah doubled up with laughter.
“It’s just a little ole deer,” he said. “It ain’t gonna hurt you.”
“Well, how are we supposed to know that?” Lindsay demanded, shrinking back as the deer wandered closer.
“It don’t hardly even have teeth!”
“It has hooves!” Cici pointed out.
“It’s just a yearling.” Noah scooped up an apple and came to the bottom of the porch steps, making a smacking sound with his lips. The deer turned, spied the apple, and came delicately down the steps to Noah. To his evident delight, and the women’s amazement, the deer began to munch the apple from his hand.
“It’s tame,” Bridget said in amazement, coming out onto the porch to join Cici and Lindsay. “It’s adorable! Do you think it escaped from a zoo?”
Noah gave her a disparaging glance. “Ain’t no zoos around here.”
Bridget, with the love light already shining in her eyes, came down the steps as the deer finished the last of the apple and nuzzled Noah’s hand for more. “Oh, let me try!”
Before long, all three women were sitting on the steps, taking turns feeding the young deer apples and carrots and bits of lettuce from the kitchen. “Are you sure it doesn’t have rabies or anything?” Lindsay said, although she wasn’t nearly as uneasy as she had been before. “I never heard of a deer that wasn’t afraid of people.”
“Probably somebody found it as a fawn,” Noah said, “raised it, let it go when it got too big to be a pet. Happens all the time. The mama deers, they hide the young’uns in the tall grass when they sense danger, then some person comes by and thinks it was abandoned. Think they’re doing it a favor by taking it home and feedin’ it, but what they’re really doing is stealing it from its mama.”
Lindsay glanced up at him, a little surprised. She had never heard him speak so many sentences in a row before, nor had she ever seen him quite as relaxed as he was at that moment, squatting on the ground between Bridget and Cici, breaking off chunks of apple to feed to the deer. He looked almost like a regular teenaged boy.
Cici said, wiping her hands on her jeans, “Well he can’t live here.”
Bridget insisted, “Why not?”
“Come on, Bridge,” Cici said. “Sheep are one thing. The dog is another. But a wild deer is not a pet.”
“Remember Mrs. Livingston’s hostas?” prompted Lindsay.
Bridget looked torn.
Cici turned to Noah. “Do you think you could take him back to the woods and let him go?”
Noah stood and shoved his hands back into his pockets, his face growing shadowed again. He shrugged. “Ya’ll got any rope?”
Cici got to her feet. “In the workshop. I’ll get it.”
“ ’Course,” he added, his tone neutral, “huntin’ season starts this weekend. Critter like that, no fear of man . . .” He brought one hand out of his pocket, cocked an imaginary gun with his thumb and forefinger, and pointed it at the deer. “Bound to make good eatin’ though, young as it is.”
Bridget looked stricken, and even Lindsay drew in a breath, ready to protest. Cici looked at the deer.