Our Pet Deer

Having grown up in Junction Valley on the ranch, we were surrounded by the high mountains with the large reservoir, mountain streams and broad blue skies.  We enjoyed a country lifestyle with our cousins close by.  We had many adventures with wild animals, many varieties of birds, and fishing was a favorite pastime.  We liked to catch the crawdads at the creek and make willow whistles.  We had trap lines in the winter and in the spring we waited for the eggs in the magpie nests to hatch, for the bounty was better on the little birds.  It was a great childhood.

The folks first home was a little three room house near Grandma Lind at the Lind homestead.  The joy of having a pet deer began early in life, probably even with Dad and his brothers and sisters.  When Oscar was only about two years old, he liked to feed the bottle of milk to his pet fawn and walk around holding on to it’s tail.  They were friends.  Mother said that she always knew when Tom Sherry was in the neighborhood, because the hair on the pet deer’s back would stand straight up and then the dog would start barking.  For some reason the deer didn’t like Tom.

I remember us having several pet deer that we loved, one about every year.  Dad would go out riding and find a little spotted fawn laying under the bushes and bring it home. We would feed them on the bottle and they would follow us around and live around in the yard and pastures.  As they grew up they would take off to live in the wild of the hills.

One Sunday in the fall when I was about seven years old, we were on our way home from church at the school house and as we got up by Uncle Alex’s place we spied a buck deer with horns standing in the pasture by the side of the road.  We called for Dad to stop the car so we could get out to see him.  We were sure he was one of our pets.  Dad stopped, but warned us to stay back away from him because he was a wild animal and not one of ours.  But we were sure he was as we all hurried out of the car in our Sunday clothes and started toward him.  He stood still watching us and we were able to walked right up to him and pet him.  He remembered us!  We were so excited to see him all grown up.  We didn’t want to leave, but the folks finally convinced us to go home for dinner.

We always worried that our pet deer would get shot with the wild deer at deer season time.  We had one that we raised that had four prongs on each side of his horns and we wanted to protect him.  When deer season came along that fall, Dad got a big piece of red cotton cloth and tied around his horns so he had a big red bonnet.  It saved his live for that year, at least.

The habit of having a pet deer continued down through Virgene’s teen age years as well.