My house borders on a patch of forest. It's not much of one - you can see the lights of a country club on the other side, on nights when the club has their lights on, and you can hear the sound of the interstate opposite them sometimes - but it's still a forest. We get visits every so often from white-tailed deer who live there. Usually this happens in autumn and winter, because the deer come looking for any kind of forage they can manage; their range used to be a lot bigger before the interstate was pushed through and started being used.
About two years ago, one of the does in the deer herd did something to her left hind leg that left it dangling, mangled, and bloody. We don't have wolves here, and I haven't heard of coyotes in the region. People generally don't hunt in this particular patch of forest as it's too close to residences on all sides. I can only assume it was either a close brush with a car, or a horrible accident. I saw her a few times and wondered what would happen to her. Eventually, a year later, she started showing up in the backyard with three sound legs and one leg that terminated just below the hock. Apparently the ruined part of the leg must've fallen off. It was interesting to watch her; she could navigate the woods pretty well, although she wasn't as fast as the rest of the herd.
I watched a group of about eight whitetails including the three-legged female for about twenty minutes last year; there were two bucks in their first season of antler, several adult females, one or two that must've been part of that year's crop of fawns, and this three-legged one. The two bucks tended to look around for danger the most often, while the others grazed and spread out through the visible part of the woods. The three-legged female seemed to be on the outskirts of the group. Interesting thing was, there was one healthy-looking female with her at all times. I don't know if it was a daughter, or just another herd doe, or what. She was too big to be from that year's crop - besides, I doubt the three-legged one could've mated anyway, there's balance issues involved. She just trailed after the three-legged one. Even when the others scattered as they heard a car coming around the corner on the other side of the houses, she stayed with the three-legged one, running after her when she started her peculiar pop-hopping run, never outpacing her.
I wondered what would happen to her over the course of the winter, and I thought about her once or twice this past summer. The deer didn't come into our yard too often this summer. Guess they found enough to eat in the woods. It just didn't seem like the kind of thing that a wild animal could survive with for two years running, you know?
Anyway, I just looked out the back window. There were about six deer back there - they looked like they were all does. Most had coats the same brown-grey as the tree bark around them. One had a more lively brown colour, and looked younger.
And one had three good legs and a left hind leg that terminated just below the hock.
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