Squirrels and Rabbits and Deer, Oh My!

I don’t know if Mina ate something that disagreed with her, or if she slept too much during the day, but yesterday night after dinner she was asking to go outside every hour.

“I think this is one of those nights where she’s going to bark at us in the middle of the night to make us take her out,” Chris remarked gloomily.

Sure enough, at about 2 AM, Mina began to bark. I was asleep and dreaming about a dog barking when I suddenly woke up mid-bark and realized the noise was coming from a real dog.

I lay on the bed, feigning sleep, and hoping that Mina would either stop barking or that she would bark just loud enough to wake Chris up. Neither of those events occurred, so I got out of bed and headed down to the dog room.

When I opened the door, Mina was sitting upright on the blue chair that she likes to sleep in, staring at me. Most mornings we have to dig in the blanket and pull her, cross and sleepy, out of the warm nest she’s created. If we put her on the floor, she will scramble to get back into the closest bed, so we usually have to carry her all the way outside to pee while she hangs limply from our arms pretending to be dead. At 2 AM, she had no problems walking outside by herself.

As soon as she got outside, Mina rushed to the edge of our chicken wire fence and started barking. She’s been doing this a lot lately, because the rabbits have become bolder and will hop just far enough out of range so that they can watch Mina fume at her inability to chase them away.

So I glanced up, expecting to see the usual white flash of a rabbit tail as a rabbit bounded away from our fence, and instead I saw three giant gray shapes at the edge of our yard.

I nearly screamed, and for some reason, my first thought was that these were coyotes. I had never seen a coyote but I knew there were some in the neighborhood. I was terrified that one of them was going to run toward us, leap the chicken wire, and try to snatch Mina away as an appetizer, and here I was in my pajamas and fake Crocs. As coyote-fighting gear, it left a lot to be desired.

Meanwhile, Chris would undoubtedly continue to snooze peacefully away upstairs while the fight went on, just like that time when I’d called him about twenty times to pick me up and he slept through all of the phone calls, and eventually I had to call the dogsitter and instruct her to run to our house and bang on the door to disturb the dogs so that they would bark, and that she had to keep banging on the door until Chris got up. Chris actually tried to just ignore the noise, but the dogsitter, determined to earn the $5 I’d promised her for this task, was a real trouper and didn’t give up until he staggered to the door, at which point she said, “Jane wants you to call her,” and left.

Then one of the shapes moved, and I saw that it was a deer.

Two of the deer were standing motionless, staring at Mina. They didn’t move even when I stepped out of the doorway to make sure Mina couldn’t get out of the fenced area. I had thought deer would run as soon as they heard a noise, but these deer seemed both terrified and mesmerized by Mina. The third deer was apparently accustomed to distractions while foraging in the suburbs, and completely ignored us as it bent down to nibble at something on the ground.

Mina was incensed by their continued presence. Though just one deer’s head was as large as Mina’s entire body, she was ready to take on all three of them. While she barked, she kept glancing over to me. “Just let me out to take care of them! Are you stupid, woman?”

The third deer kept eating. And possibly pooping; I saw the tail lift up a few times although I couldn’t see if it actually pooped.

Eventually, the third deer had enough to eat, and moved through the trees at the back of our yard and into the yard of the house behind us. Clearly, this deer was the leader (certainly in pooping prowess), because the other two sprang into motion and crashed through the branches of the trees to follow it.

Mina was still barking so I picked her up and brought her inside. Good thing we were moving soon — I was pretty sure my neighbors didn’t appreciate her deer alerts at this late hour, but I’d been so surprised by the deer that I had just stood and stared at them the whole time Mina had been barking.

We went back to the dog room, and Mina immediately got into bed. It was hard work, protecting our territory.

Posted by: Supersonic Jane | April 27, 2008 | 9:25 pm
Posted in: This Life