It’s not unusual around here on the southern edge of the Ozarks to see some wildlife now and again. Every now and again you might see a coyote; fairly often you can see a deer or two; recently, some folks have spotted some bear; and over in Russellville, at the Bona Dea Trails, there’s an alligator that some have been lucky enough to snap a photo of.
Today was a little unusual for me. On my lunch break, I took a little bit of a drive and, not too long after I left work, I spotted a deer crossing the road. Naturally, I slowed down, because if you see one, there’s usually another not to far away, often just close enough to run in the front of your car, or even into the side of the car, before you have a chance to do anything about it. This time, though there was only the one doe. What was odd though was that as she was crossing a yard, there was a black and white dog coming out of the yard, looking like he had not even noticed the deer.
Then, on the way home after work, I took a bit of an extra drive through an area I hadn’t seen in a while. In one yard, I saw what at first I thought was some of the deer shaped lawn ornamentation that I really don’t care too much for, some of which is realistic enough that, in the right lighting, one could mistake it for the real thing. In this case, though, I momentarily mistook the real deer for lawn ornamentation, until I realized that the two bucks with their head and horns up in attention were slowly walking towards the road and the doe was bounding away in the opposite direction. Ironically, the road that I was on was Buck Mountain Road.
When I got home, just a little while ago, I took care of a few things outside, including picking up some tools that had been left out. I dropped a pair of pliers on a small porch out back and the sounded apparently startled something in the woods at just a little ways off. I started walking down towards where the sounds I heard had come from, flushing a cotton tail out of the grass, but I was pretty sure that it had been something a bit larger than a cotton tail. Sure, enough, after I went a few more paces towards the woods, a doe bounded away deeper into the woods.
