Bo and the deer

The light has gone off the ridge and the creek is the brightest thing left down there. Ten minutes after the sun left, give or take.

There is a deer in the creek.

A doe. I know it’s a doe because I have watched this water enough, or because I’d rather use the word I’m sure about.

She came down the far bank at a walk, the way you would walk to a bucket.

She put her head in the water and drank, and stood there, and drank some more.

I was on the near bank. I wasn’t moving. I want that on the record, because it matters in a minute.

I wasn’t moving because I did not want to be a thing that moved.

Bo wasn’t next to me.

Bo was down the gravel bar at the low end, where the water slows and goes round the stones. He was doing the thing Bo does with any water he’s allowed to reach.

He put his head in.

She took her head out of the water and looked up the creek at him.

And then she was in the sycamores, and I didn’t see her go.

One second she was in the creek. The next thing I knew, she was in the trees. Between those two things there was nothing that I saw.

I didn’t see which one happened first.

I did not see whether she looked at Bo first or whether she heard him first.

I did not see whether she had decided before either of them moved.

Here is the part I don’t like.

About twenty steps later, I had a sentence about her. The sentence was that she was frightened.

Then a second one, that she was thirsty and this was the only water for a mile.

Then a third one, that she comes here every evening at this hour.

I don’t know that. Any of it.

I made it up on the way home, out loud, to nobody, and I made it up fast.

So here’s the question for today.

How much of what I knew about that deer did I make up after she left?

I’m going to be honest about the answer straight away. Some of it.

I don’t know how much of it, and I haven’t gone back down to find out, because finding out wouldn’t help.

So I went and got out a book.

Here is where I’m borrowing from. I’m standing outside that whole way of thinking. I’m taking one thing out of it, which is the polite way of saying I’m borrowing.

The name is Nietzsche. German. Eighteen forty-four to nineteen hundred.

The book is called Beyond Good and Evil. It came out in eighteen eighty-six.

He is arguing with the idea that there’s a true way to be a creature and a false way. He thinks the difference between the two is mostly bookkeeping.

Now. The part I want is small, and it’s not the loud part of the book.

He says that a creature which can’t lie to itself doesn’t need to. No gap. Nothing to interpret, because there was never anything hidden in the first place.

I’m not going to say his line. I’m going to say mine.

Here is what I take from it.

I said she was frightened. I said it about four minutes after I watched a thing happen and I had no way of knowing what it meant.

A deer can’t lie to itself. I don’t have that. Everything I said about her was made after the fact.

And so was everything I said about Bo. He was standing right there in front of me, and I still wrote him a whole motive.

Now here’s the part where I use this the other way round.

Read that way, it means the drives in us are worth finding out about. It also means we can find them out, if we only look hard enough.

Fine. I looked as hard as I know how, for about a minute, at a doe in a creek.

I didn’t get a motive. I got the back of a shoulder going up a bank.

That is the cost of holding on to his idea, and it’s a real one.

If nothing is hidden, then there is a lot to learn. That is the reading that comes with it.

If nothing is hidden, then there is also nothing to check my account against. And I’m the only witness I have.

So the idea hands you the honest animal and a lifetime of work. I don’t think that trade is as good as it sounds.

I don’t think it’s a bad trade either.

And Bo is the thing that keeps snagging me on it.

Bo watches that same creek every day of his life. He has never once reported what he thought was in it.

I used to think he was short on thoughts. I now think he just keeps the ones he has.

Back to the creek.

The light has gone off the trees, and everything above my shoulders is one flat grey. The water is doing the thing water does after the sun leaves it. It goes darker faster than the land does.

Bo has come up out of the gravel and is lying on the dry stone with his chin on his feet.

There is mud on both front legs up to the shoulder.

And on the far bank, in the last of the light, the sycamores are making the noise sycamores make. That is all the deer I get.

She could still be in those trees. She probably is.

I have decided that, and I’d like the record to show that I decided it.

Here is where this lands, and I have thought about it for three days, which is a long time for me.

The sentence I wanted was that she was thirsty. That one is the kindest and it’s the one I’d have told somebody.

The creek goes on past the sycamores for another quarter mile before it goes under the road. There is more water down there than there’s here.

I know that because I walked it last spring. I didn’t know it at dusk tonight.

So the sentence I liked most was the one where I was most wrong.

Here is the shape of it, and I’ve been wrong about shapes before.

Understanding an animal is mostly a story you write afterwards about an animal you did not understand.

The deer did what a deer does near water in the evening.

I was there. I watched most of it. I can tell you what I saw. I can’t tell you what it was for.

Somewhere out there, you have watched a dog this week. A neighbour’s dog. A dog on a porch.

And you know exactly what he was doing there.

And you didn’t see most of it, and you weren’t even looking, and you have a whole paragraph ready anyway.

That paragraph isn’t a mistake. It is just not a fact.

Here is the thing to try, and it takes one walk out of a door.

On the next walk, when you see a creature doing something, say the first thing out loud. Only what you saw.

Then say the second thing, out loud as well, which is what you think it meant.

The somebody who could hear you is allowed to be a dog.

Then notice which one came out faster.

That is the whole assignment. One walk, two sentences each time, and you don’t have to do it for every creature you see. One is enough. Maybe two.

And if one of the second sentences is about you and not about the animal, that’s not a mistake in the exercise. That is the exercise working.

If you skip it, you got ten minutes of a man and a dog failing to learn anything from a deer. That is still a walk, and I did it before I gave it to you.

It works on the way to the mailbox. Nothing in it requires a ridge.

Bo is dry. The light is gone. I never learned what she was doing.