Freeways are Not Free

I watched her as she ran toward the freeway, brown and leaping through the tall green grass. Her ears so big and her head narrow and pointing the direction of her own impending doom as she bounced from the grass to the gravel at the edge of the freeway heading into traffic. The car, some 80 yards ahead of me, slowed quickly, not wanting to kill the sweet brown beast.

The deceleration startles her and I can feel her fear that tempers her compulsion to run headlong into traffic and turns her around, back into the spring grass.

Her nature is to go where she will. The freeway isn't natural, but it is natural that she would walk a path to a new pasture or to visit her other deer people or just an ancient compulsion that tells her the direction in which to travel. Maybe its all of these things or none of them at all, but she has her nature, and we...we...it is we who are fighting against it, or maybe looking for it in her big doe eyes or her leaf shaped large ears. Maybe she reminds us to see and listen.

I turn on my hazard lights and slow to about 35 as I come up beside her. She has decided to parallel the barbed wire fence. I look in her eyes as she runs and honk my horn several times warning her that it is dangerous for her in this world of the freeway. I can tell her heart is racing faster than she is.

She is a streak of brown lightening tumbling through the green grassy sky of a spring cloudy day.

I say a prayer for her safety from a world that has stolen much from her people.