I saw a deer.

I stopped. There she was, the same color as the trees, that pearl gray with brown edges, tall and lean, just like the trees. But then I saw her eyes. Black, wet circles poked from her gray tree form, and she looked at me. Perfectly still, she saw me. I don't know how long she had watched me walk down the trail, how long she had stood there measuring me, determining the level of my threat, before I noticed her. But there she was staring with those black eyes and pointed-up ears.

I stopped as soon as our eyes met, and we looked at each other, listened to the leaves and the birds and the lack of footsteps. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to feel her coat. Was it as soft as it appeared? I wondered what she wondered. I wanted to be close. I wanted to know. Then she turned, and, with a flick of her white fluff tail, jumped away into the rest of the gray trees, and I listened to the sound of her bounce on the leaves, pause, bounce on the leaves, pause again, and then her final retreat, the white plume of her tail pulsing one last time through the branches before she was gone.