Never a Boring Moment

 My little brothers would probably disagree with this title, but they couldn't dispute the fact that catching a newborn fawn was pretty exciting. Nope! You're not going crazy. You did just read that I caught a fawn! It was the cutest and most temporary animal we have had yet.

Unfortunately, I had to put him back. But I sure didn't want to. The pictures are a little fuzzy (it was the camera's fault.) I carried him most of the 1/8 of the mile I had to go to put him back where I found him. But then he wanted down, so I put him on the ground and he readily followed me the rest of the way there. When I got the the spot, I tried to leave him there but he kept following. If I ran, so would he.

Finally, after about 15-20 minutes of waiting around for him to fall asleep so I could hi-tail it out of there and watch for the mamma's return from a safe distance, he scampered off into the woods and I haven't seen him since. Here's hopin' he and his mamma are happily reunited. (Sniff. Sniff.)

For those who didn't know, Chris and James caught a fawn a couple summers ago and we took care of it all the way until the day of it's death - about 3-4 months later. (We think it was a raccoon.) Her name was Freda, but since that was a girl's name, we thought it unfitting for this little buck, so we call (called) him Fredo instead.

Fredo with one of our chicks

 It was really funny because our two older dogs Liberty and Jill were hardly interested in Fredo. This I believe to be the result of having Freda before. When we had Freda, Liberty and Jill seemed to like her, even protect her. So having a different fawn was no big deal to them.

But Mia, on the other hand, was completely different. She couldn't keep away from him. She REALLY wanted to play with it. This usually meant sprinting up to it so fast she would almost knock it over, then stand right in front of it wagging her tail and bark loudly in it's face.



This reminds me of another non-boring moment of the day.

Since I was planning on watching until the mamma deer came back, I locked the dogs up in the command center (our main plumbing and electrical base) which is about 15 ft by 10ft building. This was the customary way to pen up the dogs when I needed them somewhere where I wasn't. So that was all well and good. But I forgot about them.

Daniel comes in my room and asks me if I wanted him to let the dogs out.

"Oh! Yes, Daniel, please do!" Daniel leaves, only to come back not two minutes later saying,

"Um...Katie? I can't get the door open. It feels blocked."

"Well, just push harder. It's probably just one of the dogs in the way."

Another minute goes by and Daniel's back again. "It's still not moving. And none of the dogs are in the way."

"Ok. I'll come out and see."  Sure enough, the dogs weren't in the way, but the door was locked. As far as I could see, there was no real logical reason to lock the door with the dogs inside, so I figured it was locked by accident. Mia probably jumped on the knob in her efforts to escape from the building and consequently turned the lock.

Now, the only ways to get in to get the dogs out was to find the key to the door, go through the window, or break down the door. But since the last was not a road I would want to go down, and I was too lazy at the time to go try to find the key, I decided to take the window. This was what I had to crawl through:

I took off the screen, took off the board and raised myself up on the sill.  While Thomas and Daniel watched with the smiles that conveyed their anticipation of this being a funny circumstance as I clumsily crawled through, the dogs on the other side started jumping up to get to me in their excitement at the prospect of being let out. To make matters worse, the ground inside was about half a foot deeper than outside and there was nothing stable enough for me to crouch on before leaping to the ground which also happen to be half cement and the other half dirt - quite uneven. Remember, this building is rather small and with 2/3rds of it filled up with stuff and the other third comprising of 3 big German Shepherds all rambunctiously trying to jump up to me, there were not many options for landing with ease.

So I reached up, grabbed onto one rafter and dangled there about 3-1/2 feet above the ground with all three dogs beneath me still jumping and now actually getting me.

"AH! Go away! Mia GET DOWN! LIBERTY SIT!" This was probably all the boys heard who were still waiting to be entertained by the situation, and judging by all the laughing I heard coming from their general direction, (I did have other things on my mind at that moment,) I don't think they were disappointed. Finally a small spot over the cement opened up; I swung and landed right in it. Phew! Alive! Ground!!! Whoo!! Okay, at this point, it wasn't this dramatic. But I was happy to be on the ground, and I found that my theory was probably correct. The door was locked and based on the fiberglass padding on the wall by the door and how it was sort of ripped out of place, it was highly probably that Mia was the culprit. At least Daniel and Thomas got a good kick out of it, and it was definitely NOT a boring moment!