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By Jacob Erdman

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The activity around here the last little while has involved animals as diverse as deer and dogs (well, one dog, who has carefully avoided having anything to do with deer but draws the line at steers in the yard.) For several years now, my wife has viewed the increasing deer population in these parts with concern. Hers is not what I would call a broadly ecological concern that might engender bumper stickers and rallies. Her concern focusses on her garden and the possibility of going out one morning to find footprints among the (missing) brassicas.

This year the footprints appeared, accompanied by depredations among the brassicas, not to mention the pole beans.

We had plenty of warning that the deer were moving in, starting last winter when they regularly appeared nibbling the tips of the apple branches on trees in full view and not that far from the dining table. Just the other day, on two separate walks, we saw deer wandering, in their ditzy way, across the road. In one instance a fawn following its mother pulled up short half way across the road to have a better look at the approaching car.

Mother, after several moments, returned and took child back the way they had come, thus enabling the resumption of traffic, for the moment. We did not stay to see whether mother would try again to get her fawn to cross the road. And then a day or so later a deer, unaccompanied, did cross the road, but pulled up short to look at us as if to say, “What are you doing here?” The dog who accompanied us had his mind on the possibility of finding something edible—trucks going back and forth on our road, carrying freshly-harvested corn, drop an apparently necessary dietary supplement of fragments of cobs or even husks—and would not have taken the slightest interest if the deer had stopped right in front of him.

While we may wring our hands about the disinterest which our dog shows in the world around him, every once in a while he picks up on a non-food experience and shows that his lack of interest is not so much a matter of inattention (or near-sightedness), but stems from a clear sense of priorities. ‘Live and let live’ may be his motto most of the time, but let the living overstep the bounds of propriety and this apparent marshmallow of a dog can suddenly, like Clark Kent emerging from the phone booth, take on an entirely different character: Super-pooch, Protector of the Status Quo. The change happened the other day, right before our eyes.

Early that morning we had heard a gloomy “Moo!” coming from somewhere back of the house, somewhere where no moo-er had been for many years. “That sounds like a cow that has left a pasture,” we said to each other but heard no more bovine complaints. On a walk on the road later my wife remarked that the footprints in the soft shoulder of the road looked as though they belonged to a moose, or a cow. Later that afternoon a neighbour lad drove into the dooryard to tell us that he had chased a couple of cows into our lower field, cows he had found wandering down the road. We speculated as to where they might have come from and tried a couple of phone calls without raising anyone. Not long after he left though, my wife came into the study to tell me that a couple of steers were in the dooryard, looking at some of the ornamental plants with a speculative eye.

Deer are one thing, steers are something else. I hot-footed it for the outside and spoke to them severely and they galumphed off in a non-committal way, across the yard and over toward the paddock beyond the barn. Their action didn’t seem very convincing and a few moments later after we had returned to our various tasks we were informed in no uncertain terms that they had returned—by the dog, who had wanted to spend some quite time on the porch and obviously disapproved strongly of having his quiet time impinged upon by a couple of interlopers.

I had the impression, when I arrived on the scene, that the steers were trying to figure out where all the noise was coming from. The dog, fastened, as usual, to his leash, was at the end of the leash and obviously of the view that if he could get loose he would tear both steers into small pieces and stomp on them. A moment later, without my having done much more than clap my hands a couple of times, the steers high-tailed it out of the yard and, according to news that reached us, were later returned by their owner to pasture.