Bike ride

I went for a bike ride today. Ped­aled for about an hour, cruised through town. There are sec­tions in one of the parks, down near the riv­er (which is still mighty high), that are rather fright­en­ing­ly mud­dy. At a cou­ple points I was pray­ing I would­n’t have to put my feet down, since I was wear­ing san­dals and I did­n’t real­ly want to feel riv­er muck squelch­ing between my toes. I should’ve brought my cam­era, I kept thinking.

Then I was com­ing down the north side of the pedes­tri­an bridge and I saw a big ani­mal in the grass along­side the trail. I thought, Wow, that’s a big dog. Then I looked clos­er, and it was actu­al­ly a deer and her fawn. I jammed on the brakes (which, though clogged with mud, worked just fine, if a lit­tle loud­ly) and stopped. The deer did­n’t run, which sur­prised me. She made a slow cir­cuit of the grass­es, every once in a while paus­ing to look back at me and make sure I had­n’t moved. Her fawn’s eyes nev­er left her. Then I heard some rustling off to my left, and looked over to see anoth­er moth­er-fawn pair com­ing out of the river­side brush. Four deer. I watched them browse for a while, try­ing to decide if I should pass through or go back and leave them along the trail.

Then anoth­er cyclist came from the oth­er side, and she did­n’t see the deer until they had almost made it back to the bush­es. The spell was broken.

Still wish I’d brought my camera.

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I did some out­lin­ing work on The Cold­est War last night. (It’s the expan­sion of my tale of the dead in the Kuiper belt, called “Out­side, Look­ing In”, which I’m cur­rent­ly try­ing to sell.) I also put up the first draft (very raw) of “Between Heav­en and Earth” on my writ­ing site. Feel free to have a gan­der at it, if you’d like.

See ya!