This photograph is from an altogether happier encounter with a muntjac deer in my garden:
An unexpected garden visitor – Animal Wild
On my way back from RSPB Pulborough Brooks* however, I and a deer had the nearest of misses.
*RSPB Pulborough Brooks Nature Reserve – Animal Wild
On a busy dual carriage way, I and everyone else were doing a steady, legal 60mph. To my horror I watched as a roe deer somehow made its way at great speed through four lanes of traffic. Before I had had a chance to absorb what had just happened, let alone begin to think that there might well be another one following and what I might try to do about it, a second deer flashed in front of me. It was matter of inches. The body of the deer filled my windscreen and yet was a glimpse, almost a ghost, a shadow, a glance, a silhouette, a retinal afterimage, an image so fleeting as not to have existed. Then she was gone, out of sight in an instant. Shaken though I was, my God, I thought, the elegance of the sheer turn of speed of these beautiful animals – which some choose to exploit by hunting them with dogs. I sometimes wonder if I will meet my end by being killed by an animal, just out of a sense of irony.
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