It happened the 19th of December 2011. It was maybe nine o'clock in the morning when I looked up to see a buck looking down at something orange. It was a fox. The two were much closer than in this picture and standing side by side, one looking down at the other, and one looking up. I froze. Then I ran from the kitchen window to find my camera. By the time I returned, here's what I was able to snap.
Seconds later, I photographed them (clearly this time), but each apart. Was this like the lions lying down with the lambs?
The phone rang. It was my friend Rosa's daughter. She was crying hysterically. I could make out that she was saying they had given her mother chest compressions, but she had died while her daughter was listening, on her way back from spending the night in the mountains. "I would never had gone," she said ruefully. No one had figured on this turn for the worse.
I called my friend Helen, also a friend of Rosa's. I told her about the deer and the fox. "Rosa was telling you good-bye. You know how she loved animals." But, I protested, we only talked about cats and dogs, never wild animals.
A cat or dog wouldn't have gotten your attention, Helen pointed out.
I don't much believe in this sort of thing, but I don't think I'll ever look out my kitchen window and see this combination again. Whether or not there was any meaning here doesn't much matter. I will forever look at this picture and feel comforted.
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