Gift of Deer - Book 19

Helen Hoover was a popular nature writer back in the 1960s and so.  She and her husband left their careers in Chicago in the late 1950s and moved out to the far northern woods of Minnesota where they could see Canada across their lake.  I read about the harrowing adventures of their first year in A Place in the Woods a couple years ago.  I was searching around on my kindle trying to find a good book to read on the airplane flight home from Boston and stumbled across this book.

The Hoovers did something that would probably be frowned upon today, they fed the wild animals that lived near them.  The winters are long and bitterly cold and they saw how the wildlife really suffered. One day a wounded, starving deer stumbles into their yard seeking to feed on the grain and corn they put out for the squirrels and other critters.  The deer has been shot and is blind in one eye.  The Hoovers feed and tame (somewhat) this buck they name Peter.  He is a gentle soul.  He brings a mate, Mama, and then year after year their twin fawns join the herd.  The Hoovers are intensely interested and love observing how the deer interact with one another, their human friends and other wild life.  There are encounters with wolves, bear, fox, lynx and bobcat.  Some things are comical and some things scary.  There is heartbreak too in the form of hunters who dare to come onto the Hoovers' land and shoot in spite of being near their cabins and posted no hunting signs.  There is great nobility too.

This is a gentle peek into a life so far removed from me here in suburbia, where deer have become nuisances, not rare sightings.  Now they eat my garden, give us deer ticks infected with Lyme disease and dart out into the road causing accidents.  But they are lovely creatures all the same.  Growing up, a deer sighting was so rare.  I still remember the first time I saw a herd of deer.  I was up at college in the mountains and it was fall and dusk.  As we drove back to school, we passed a farm and a huge flock of deer had stepped out of the woods and were grazing in a pasture.

An engrossing read, which left me feeling a little melancholy, I must admit.

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