The Neighbors

I'm a little late in my writing today.  I don't think I realized how much work writing is before I started this blog, and as today was our one trip to town every two weeks I didn't have much time.  The one thing I love about living where we do is the wild life.  Excluding the skunks of course which I now consider the bane of my existence up here.

On about the third day we were here we were reminded quite amazingly of one reason we were here.  We had just sat down to dinner.  It was something canned that I had heated on the wood stove.  Nothing fancy as I didn't really have much of a cooking facility and we were tired from the days work.  We didn't have a table and chairs and wouldn't have wanted to eat inside if we did have.  Besides the weather was beautiful, especially during the day, and as it was still freezing at night there were very few bugs to bother us.

We looked up and there she was.  A beautiful female deer.  She was only about 200 feet away! She wasn't afraid and appeared to not even see us but rather was busy eating her dinner right along with us. So we sat there and ate our dinner as she ate hers and marveled at this land where wild animals didn't seem to fear us.  It wasn't hunting season and as we didn't have a freezer yet we just enjoyed watching her eat.

This wasn't the first time we were to see her.  All that spring and summer we caught many a glimpse of her and it wasn't unusual for her to join us for dinner or to see her eating breakfast as we headed out to work on our house.  She was even so brave as to show us her little one as the spring wore on.

There don't seem to be a lot of hunters in this area so maybe that is why the wildlife is so tame.  Of course we are quite pleased to watch our dinner growing up.  Eating our hay and getting fat and sassy.  There just isn't anything quite as satisfying as venison chili simmering on the wood stove.