Season of Change

by Lisa Williams Kline

  “Yeah, I found her in the woods and brought her home, but then took her back and waited almost a whole day.”

  Kirsten nodded, looking at me with kind brown eyes. “See, usually the mothers will have two babies. And they will stash them, a little distance apart, at dawn. They put them in a different place every day. And the does will be gone for most of the day, and then come back at dusk.”

  “Her mother didn’t come back. I waited.”

  “Maybe something happened to the mother.”

  “I hit a deer when I was driving the day before I found her. It was near where she was. I thought it might have been her mother. It didn’t fall down when I hit it. It kept running.”

  Kirsten’s eyes widened. “That could be. It might have had a lot of adrenalin in its system and been able to run a long distance with injuries.” Kirsten smiled and ran her palm over Star’s head. “But she didn’t make it back. You probably saved this fawn’s life.”

  A warm feeling coursed through me.

  Just then Grandpa and Grandma came out onto the porch, and I introduced them to Kirsten.

  “She’s been giving the fawn a bottle of goat’s milk every three hours or so, just like we read online,” Grandpa said.

  “Great. She looks good. You’ve done a good job,” Kirsten said, with a smile that crinkled the skin beside her eyes.

  I wanted to stall for time. “So, how many fawns have you taken care of?”

  “Oh, dozens and dozens.” Kirsten went to the back of the truck and pulled out a large dog carrier and set it on the ground. “Sometimes I’m taking care of as many as eight or nine fawns at once.”

  “How long do you keep them?”

  “I keep them about a week. Then I pass them on to another rehabilitator who keeps them a little longer, and gets them on goat chow and sweet feed, and then releases them into the wild. They join existing herds.”

  “Do the other herd members attack the new ones? I learned that horses sometimes do that.”

  “No, deer aren’t like that. They don’t pick on a new member. They welcome them.”

  “Oh, that’s good.” I racked my brain for more questions. She was going to put Star in that carrier and take her. I swallowed. “I can come to visit her, right?”

  Kirsten’s eyes softened, and she looked down quickly. “No, Diana, I’m sorry, you can’t. Fawns imprint really easily on humans. She is following you like a dog, so it looks like she might have already imprinted on you. We need for her to have only one caretaker, and that has to be me. So, you’ll have to say your goodbyes now, I’m afraid.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes.

  “You mean I’ll never see her again?”

  Kirsten’s eyes teared a little now, too. “No, you won’t.”

  I felt like sobbing. It wasn’t just saying goodbye to Star. It was everything.

  “Listen, you’re doing the right thing, Diana.” Kirsten put her hand gently on my arm. “It’s illegal to keep a deer as a pet. This way she’ll be in good hands and she’ll find a herd to belong to.”

  I knelt and took Star’s little body in my arms, feeling the beat of her heart in her chest. I touched some of the delicate, star-like white spots that lined her backbone and spread over her flanks. She stared at me with those almond eyes framed with the long lashes. Now I couldn’t stop the crying. “Bye, Star.” She nuzzled and licked the side of my face. Just for the salt, according to Kirsten. “You be good, now.”

  I glanced up at Stephanie and saw that she was crying, too. So were Grandma and Grandpa. I couldn’t even look at Noah.

  My vision was blurred as Kirsten put Star in the carrier and shut the door. “All set, then.” Kirsten put the carrier in the truck’s passenger seat.

  “Maa!” said Star.

  My heart jumped. I balled my hands into fists.

  “Thanks for calling me. She’s in good hands,” Kirsten said as she began to back out of the driveway. I followed her to the end of the driveway and watched as the blue truck wound around the corner and out of sight.

  I wiped my nose on the end of my t-shirt as I headed back down the driveway. Grandma took my face in her hands and kissed me on the forehead.

  “You did a good thing, Diana.”

  “I better get going,” Noah said. He picked up his wake board from the porch where he’d left it.

  Grandma and Grandpa and Stephanie told Noah goodbye and left the two of us out by the driveway alone. Noah leaned against the porch stairs. “I’m sorry you’re so sad about the fawn.”

  “I know it was the right thing. I’ll get over it. I just … I don’t know.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “I’m sorry to be so upset.”

  “Don’t be. I like that about you. You get so into stuff.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” I felt my cheeks flush with pleasure.

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you?”

  I looked into his face, feeling a little out of breath. “I thought we weren’t going to talk. And now here you showed up today. What’s that about?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe yesterday wasn’t a mistake. Maybe we can hang out over the summer and see how it goes.” He bumped the wake board against his leg nervously a couple of times. “No pressure. What do you think?”

  “No pressure?” That sounded pretty good.

  Then he touched his index finger to the end of my nose. “No pressure.”

  After he left, Stephanie and I went inside and cleaned up the sun porch. Moronic Mood-o-Meter zooming around at about a nine. “You were right. He likes me. But he says no pressure.” I dipped the mop in the bucket of vinegar and water to swab the floor.

  “Awesome, Diana!” Stephanie was collecting the towels to put in the laundry. “That is so great!”

  I wrung out the mop, and swabbed one section. “I thought he liked you at first.”

  “No, look at the way he came out last night to bring you gas.” Stephanie went behind me, drying the floor with one of the towels. “Noah really cares about you.”

  As I mopped another section of the floor, I said, “In the past, with guys, I’ve kind of messed things up. I don’t want that to happen this time.”

  “It won’t,” Stephanie said. “You’ve changed. You’re more caring. You risked getting in trouble last night to come and help me out. Honestly, I’ll never forget that.”

  I leaned on the mop, letting her words sink it. It felt like the sun was warming my face.

  “I feel like, no matter what happens with Daddy and Lynn, you and I will always be close. We’ll always be sisters.”

  I felt tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. Would I ever have believed that this could happen, back when we were first together at the ranch?

  I closed my eyes, letting a few moments spin by in silence.

  “But there’s something else I’ve been wondering about,” Stephanie was saying. I opened my eyes.

  “What?”

  “Do you remember when Kirsten picked up Star, she said that usually the mother deer has two fawns?” Stephanie looked at me with fearful eyes. “Do you think there might be another fawn out there in the woods? Waiting for the mother to come back?”

  I stared at Stephanie and caught my breath. Why hadn’t I thought of that? “There might! We have to go check!”

  22

  STEPHANIE

  The late afternoon sun was skimming the tops of the trees, low in the sky, as Diana and I raced down the road to the place she had first found Star. Our flip flops made loud smacks on the asphalt as we ran.

  “It was near a pine tree missing some bark on the trunk, right by the edge of the woods,” Diana said, out of breath. “Right around here.” She angled into the woods, ducking under some branches and knocking others aside. I followed her, the sharp pine smell enveloping me. “She was kind of underneath a bush, where you couldn’t see her.”

  We crashed through the underbrush, bending down and searching low under every bush we saw. I was peeking under some low-hanging branches when Mama’s rin
g tone sounded on my phone. My heart started pounding, but I didn’t pick up. She had left me and gone to Asheville. She could just worry.

  The ringtone stopped.

  “Wasn’t that your phone?” Diana said from a few yards away. “Why didn’t you answer it?”

  “It’s Mama. I don’t feel like talking to her right now.”

  Diana wound around a few pine trees, searching. “Seems like you’re pretty mad at her.”

  I didn’t answer. I just wandered a bit deeper into the woods. “Do you think we’re getting too far away from where you found Star?”

  Diana stopped and looked back out at the road. “Maybe. Let’s head that way.”

  We headed back toward the tree missing the bark, slowly, and began to make concentric circles to try to make sure we’d covered all the ground.

  “Your mom isn’t going to change,” Diana said. Our feet made silky hushing sounds as we rambled through the pine needles. “You’re always giving me such a hard time about not forgiving people. But it seems like you can’t forgive your mom.”

  Diana’s words echoed in my head as I continued on the search. Thinking about what had happened with Mama, my blood pounded in my temples. I realized how mad I still was. But when would I learn? That was just the way Mama was.

  Maybe Diana was right. Maybe she wasn’t going to change. Maybe I needed to follow the advice I was always giving Diana about forgiving people. Maybe I needed to forgive Mama. I drew a deep breath. I’d call her back tonight.

  Finally, after twenty minutes of searching, Diana threw up her hands. “Well, I give up. It was a good idea, anyway, Steph.”

  “Okay.” I followed her winding route toward the edge of the woods, scanning the ground. Diana was already standing in the open when I decided to look under one last small bush beside a rotting tree trunk.

  And there, rising to its feet, was a tiny fawn even smaller than Star. With a gasp, I knelt, pulling back stray branches.

  Its deep brown eyes looked at me searchingly. Its pear-shaped ears pricked anxiously in my direction.

  I jumped to my feet. “Diana! Come here!”

  I knelt again, examining the fawn. It held one of its hind legs off the ground, not putting weight on it.

  Diana was beside me, staring. “Stephanie, you were right! Oh, my gosh, she’s probably starving.”

  “And there’s something wrong with her leg.”

  “Maybe.” Without hesitating, Diana reached under the branches and gently pulled the fawn out. It struggled, crying weakly. Diana clasped the little body to her chest, with the legs hanging down. “Come on!” She ran toward the house.

  I followed. I couldn’t believe we had found another fawn!

  We pounded through the yard and up onto the porch.

  “Grandma! Grandpa!” Diana yelled. I opened the door and we burst into the kitchen.

  Grandma came into the kitchen. “Oh, goodness! Not another one!”

  Grandpa came from the back bedroom. “What’s going on?”

  “Get a bottle ready, Stephanie!” Diana said. “Hurry!”

  My hands shook as I poured the goat’s milk into one of the bottles that Grandma had just rinsed, put it into the microwave, and turned it on.

  Grandma grabbed blankets and towels from the laundry room, lay them on the floor of the sun porch, and Diana gently laid the fawn on them. The fawn scrambled to its feet, bleating softly, standing unevenly on three legs.

  “She’s starving!” Diana said.

  “Well, we know what to do this time around,” Grandpa said.

  I brought the bottle out on the sun porch, shaking it to mix it.

  “Can I try?” I said. “Since I found her?”

  Diana nodded. “Okay.” And then she started giving me all kinds of instructions.

  “Okay, okay!” I tried letting the milk drip on her nose, and pushing the nipple between the fawn’s lips. Her little round black nose sniffed at me and at the goat’s milk.

  “We need to call Kirsten again before she gets too far down the road,” Grandpa said. “She’ll need to come back.”

  “Okay,” Diana said.

  I kept trying to feed her while Diana tapped in the number she’d left on the pad on the counter. She got Kirsten right away.

  “We found another one! We have her here on the sun porch. But she’s only putting weight on three legs. There’s definitely something wrong.” Diana listened, then scribbled something down. She hung up. “Kirsten says the leg might be broken. She says she’ll meet us at the vet’s office. She gave me the address.”

  Suddenly, the fawn started to suck on the nipple voraciously.

  “She’s got it! She’s got it!” She suckled eagerly and loudly, making loud gasping sounds.

  “Look at that poor little thing,” said Grandma.

  “She’s so beautiful. What should we name her?” Diana asked.

  “What about Clover?” I said.

  “I like that,” said Grandma.

  “Well, we better get her over to the vet’s office,” Grandpa said. “Somebody will need to hold her in their lap.”

  Grandpa drove with Grandma in the front seat, Diana and me in the back, and Clover on Diana’s lap on a towel. Diana kept her arms wrapped around her. Clover struggled occasionally, but her injured leg prevented her from moving too much.

  Twenty minutes later we pulled into the gravel parking lot of the emergency veterinary clinic, which was a double-wide trailer. Kirsten was already there, with Star still in the dog carrier in her truck. She came up to our car window, and leaned in.

  “There’s a new vet here today that I’ve never worked with before, but he seems very good. He said to bring the fawn right in. Want me to carry her?”

  “Since I found her, can I?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I ran around the side of the car and wrapped my arms around Clover’s little body, hugging her close the way I’d seen Kirsten do with Star.

  “Maa!” As I held her in the waiting room, I could feel her heart beating next to mine. She struggled a little. Her ears, twitching back and forth, tickled my chin.

  The vet, with graying dark hair and kind eyes behind glasses, hurried out, wearing blue scrubs. “Hey, I’m Dr. Miller. Come on back and let’s take a look.”

  We all went into the exam room, and Dr. Miller directed me to place Clover on the metal exam table. I put her down, and her little hooves slid on the slippery metal. With gentle hands, Dr. Miller examined Clover, who winced and kicked when he touched the swollen area on her leg. “It feels like it might be a break. We’ll need to get some x-rays to find out for sure.” He suggested we take a seat out in the waiting room for a few minutes.

  When he called us back into the exam room a few minutes later, Dr. Miller pointed to the x-rays hanging up on a light screen. “It’s definitely broken.” Dr. Miller traced the ghostly image of Clover’s bone with his pen. “Can you see the fracture there? It’ll have to be set. What I’d like to do is start an IV and get the fawn stabilized, and then I’ll do surgery later today or tomorrow.” He adjusted his glasses, looking at Kirsten.

  “That would be great,” Kirsten said, with a shy smile. “Thank you so much. Not many vets would be willing to work on a fawn.”

  “Well, a broken bone is a broken bone, and I enjoy orthopedic surgery,” said Dr. Miller. “And then you can come pick her up in a couple of days, if she’s doing well.”

  “Perfect,” Kirsten said, her smile broadening.

  “Our staff will love having a fawn here,” Dr. Miller said. “That doesn’t happen too often. This little girl is lucky you kids found her. Good work!”

  Diana poked me in the arm, and I felt myself blush.

  The technician came to take Clover.

  “Wait. Will we see her again?” I asked. We had only had her for a little while. How could I have developed such affection in such a short time?

  Kirsten shook her head. “No, so sorry. I’ll pick her up once the surgery is done and take he
r to rehabilitate her at my place. Remember, you’re not allowed to visit. I can call you with updates.”

  So, once again, Diana and I said our goodbyes.

  “Bye, little girl,” Diana said, stroking her head. “They’re going to make you all well.” We each gave Clover a kiss on the top of the head. Then the technician took Clover from us.

  “Maa!” she bleated, as she was carried out of the room.

  The four of us were quiet part of the way home.

  “Star and Clover will be taken care of and eventually be reintroduced to the wild,” Grandma said.

  “When can we call to check on them?” Diana asked.

  “Maybe tomorrow afternoon?” Grandpa said.

  Once we arrived back at Grandma and Grandpa’s cottage, Mama’s ring tone started up on my phone again. Diana gave me a pointed look.

  “You should answer it.”

  I tightened my lips and nodded. A prickly feeling ran up my spine. I walked through the grassy back yard and down to the dock so I could have privacy.

  “Hi, Mama.”

  Shadows stretched over the graying planks and the dock rocked up and down. While the father goose swam in alert semi-circles around the dock, the mother goose rearranged herself in the nest, touching her bill to each of the fluffy goslings as they quietly cheeped around her.

  “Hi, sugar. How are you doing? I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

  “Really?” I caught my breath, then closed my eyes and shook my head. I wasn’t going to let myself be taken in.

  “Did everything go all right with you and Matt last night?”

  I considered what to tell her. I started to say everything had been fine, but then I changed my mind. “I need to talk to you about that.”

  “Oh, well, okay, we can talk when I get home, sugar. Barry and I had such a lovely time. I got here in time to go to a place where we did some dancing. It meant a lot to him for me to come, I think.”

  My heart beat hard a few times. I remembered Diana telling me to forgive Mama. “Well, that’s good. I’m glad.”

  “Thanks for understanding, sugar.”

  “Sure. No problem.” I looked out over the surface of the water, where the sunlight seemed to glitter. The baby geese cheeped.