My friend and I were lost in dense brush in a canyon near us. Lost is possibly the wrong word. We knew exactly where we needed to go, but we just couldn't get there and our light was dying. We'd been slogging for hours through this stuff (consisting mostly of poison oak and a stiff, pointy thicket-making brush which I haven't keyed out). Finally, after several hours of repeated false hope, we came upon another yet another clearing. We had done this before, and in each case, the clearing was an island, surrounded by more of the same stuff we'd crawled through.
In this clearing, though, there was a large buck. The buck wasn't the least bit perturbed by our presence. He sauntered down the hill through a relatively narrow, less than obvious, channel through the brush, looking back at us periodically. It wasn't scared. It was hiding. It was walking down hill.
Being tired I opted to follow the deer, kidding my friend that it was our "spirit guide". The deer led us down hill for 15 minutes or so, stopping, checking our progress it would seem. Finally, we emerged to a clearing that was the trail.
The deer circled back behind us and was now looking at us from above. He knew we didn't belong there and it would seem, showed us the way out of his living room. He wandered away back up the hill from where, for hours we had literally been crawling through thickets on our hands and knees for hundreds of yards.
I've been exposed to the out-of-doors most of my life and this still was a very odd experience. I felt like the deer was working at a cognitive level. It knew we wanted out, it wanted us out, and so, he took action. |
