He was already thinking about water when it happened. The trail was pitching downward, and rswfire was narrating the descent the way he narrates most things — as a route being worked out in real time, the river somewhere below and to the side, the possibility of getting closer to it than he had managed yesterday. Camera in hand, walking. Then the shape of the sentence changed mid-stride: there were deer over there, and he did not want to startle them. A doe. Two fawns. On the trail, not beside it. Walking the same narrow path he was walking, in the opposite direction.
The first thing he did was step back. The second thing he did was speak to her. He greeted the mother directly, told her he was not there to bother her or her kids, and named the problem plainly — that somehow the two of them had to get around each other. It was a negotiation opened out loud, on the assumption that there was another party to negotiate with. She looked at him with what he read as complete indifference, the flat regard of an animal who sees humans all the time, and kept coming, the fawns with her. He said we can wait for you. Then he waited.
The terrain did not cooperate. The trail was narrow and steep, the vegetation thick enough that the deer kept dissolving into it; he zoomed the camera to keep them in frame, lost them, found them again. He wondered aloud whether they even could get up the bank, whether the path was the only route available to them, whether they were choosing where they stood or simply had nowhere else to be. He tracked the doe's body — healthy-looking, he thought, but thin, very thin legs — and said he did not know whether that was normal. When one of the fawns trembled he asked whether it was him or the fly. He asked if he was too close. Each observation arrived with its own uncertainty attached, unresolved and left that way.
Thirty minutes in, he tried asking for passage. Can I get around you guys, would that be possible. Can I just go past you, would that be all right. The fawn in the path did not move, and rswfire did not force it. He told it he would wait, and then repeated it — I will wait, I will wait — and tried instead to coax it toward its mother, who was somewhere off through the brush, still eating, entirely unhurried. He tucked himself into a corner of the trail to make room. He kept talking, low and continuous, half to the deer and half to the record.
Somewhere in the middle of the standstill he said the thing the whole hour had been building toward: do you know how profound this is. Not that he was watching deer — that he was sharing space with them, that he had a place in their lives at that moment, that they were inhabiting the same space. He had already stated the underlying claim earlier, more bluntly: this is their space too, more theirs than ours. The blockage was not an obstacle to the walk. It had become the walk.
By the end they had him boxed — deer on both sides of the path, rswfire stopped in the middle, saying out loud that he was stuck and did not know what to do. He had been there an hour. What finally moved things was other humans, coming down the trail from above, and the fawns beginning to shift ahead of them. He announced his harmlessness again as they came past him — completely harmless, guys, I'm right here, I'm not moving I promise, I'm not moving — and held absolutely still while they went by and rejoined their mother. He called the reunion a wonderful sight.
Then he was walking again, and the ordinary business of the trail resumed: which way he had come, whether he had already seen this overlook, the Scenic Overlook he still wanted, the spring below it, the route back to the visitor center. He said he had no words for what had just happened, called it one of the coolest experiences of his life, and described what he had actually been doing for that hour — trying to understand whether they were choosing to be there or whether he was the obstacle, trying to show he was not a threat. Something moved in the brush and he noted, dryly, that you want to be mindful in the forest, that the timing was interesting. And then, twice, without elaboration: what a wonderful day.