Ghost Fawn Homestead

 

In the spring of 2015, Ken and I moved our family to a little farm in southern New England.  

Just under 10 acres, a barn, and a white Colonial, the property had been in three generations of the same family since it was built in 1936.  The last owners, two brothers who were the grandsons of the original builders (a Czech button maker and a telephone operator from Bohemia), hadn't lived in the house for over 20 years, and finally decided to let the farm pass into the hands of another bloodline.

We were so happy to begin this new adventure.  I was obsessed with the history of the farm, the history of the family who had built it, and the history of our new town.  I longed to know what people had called my property- was it referred to by some geographical landmark?  Perhaps designated by the surnames of the previous owners?  Or something altogether more obscure and charming?

But all my research led to dead ends.  The place was simply never christened anything.  In fact, old timers around town had only sketchy memories of the original owners, and no one appeared to have ever called their farm anything. So it fell to us to name it.

The naming ritual came to me suddenly and firmly.  We were to name the farm after the first animal we saw, and what it was doing.  These rules felt right and poetic.  I explained them to my family, expecting we'd come up with something like "Dancing Crow Farm" or "Fisher Run Woods".  My kids, however, had more prosaic thoughts.

"Nobody's lived in the house for TWENTY YEARS," they reminded me.  "It's going to be something like 'Dead Mouse Farm' or 'Scuttling Cockroach Acres'".

Disgusting and terrible, but they had a point.

Okay, okay, I conceded. Maybe some modifications to my initial flash of intuition.  No insects (uness it was a designated "cute" bug), and only pleasant verbs.  Nothing dead.  Nothing writhing or creeping.  They agreed, and so on a drizzly April afternoon, we officially took possession of the farm.

And we saw....nothing.

For two days, we didn't see a single animal anywhere on our ten acres.  No rabbits, no birds, not so much as a snake discovered under a long undisturbed boulder. A horrible, sneaking fear began to settle on my shoulders.  Had we perhaps bought a cursed farm?  Was the very ground so psychically damaged that no living thing would venture onto it?  How did one reverse such a terrible thing?  A house blessing, for sure.  Masses said on the farm?  Yes.  But how many?  And how quickly could we make ourselves known to our new parish's priest so he would come help us but not think that we were crazy people?

These were the thoughts dramatically racing through my head the morning of the third day on the farm.  I was taking the dogs for a walk, as we had no fenced in area and our dumb suburban dogs didn't know how to stay close yet and not run off and get hit by a car.  The rest of the family was waiting by the van to go get breakfast, as the appliances weren't set to be delivered for another day.

I walked down the gently sloping fields, thick with the stubble of crops planted by a man down the road, who had previously rented the fields to run feed corn on them.  The morning was foggy and silent, and I alternated between brooding over the total failure of wildlife to present itself and having to pay careful attention to picking my way over and through the deep tractor ruts left by the renter's machinery.

I made my way to the lowest section of the fields, where old corn stalks and thick, frozen mud ruts gave way to a marshy area of maple, oak, and river birch, threaded here and there with ancient low stone walls and the tangles of ornamental bittersweet.  That's when I raised my head and saw them.

A hundred yards into the woods, I saw a doe and her fawn.  The pair was so silent that not even my dogs had noticed them, but the two clearly saw us.  Suddenly, in a burst of raw grace, the two of them bounded away deeper into the woods, impossibly silent, silent as the fog, even while leaping over deadfall and stones.  How could anything that muscular and swift be so silent?

When I lost sight of them, I realized that I had been holding my breath, and I let it out in a whoosh of amazed adrenaline.  The encounter had been so beautiful and unexpected that the greater implications didn't register, I just wanted to share the experience with my family.  I raced up the fields to the van, panting and wild eyed.

I told my husband and kids what I had seen, frustrated that my words were failing to convey the otherworldliness of the deer.  "They were just so quiet.  Like ghosts.  Even the fawn.  Just totally silent."  My husband looked at me and said, "Well that's it, isn't it? That's the name of the farm.  Ghost Fawn.  But not Ghost Fawn Farm, that's dumb.  Ghost Fawn Homestead."

Since then, Deer has made itself known on the farm, from tiny fawn discovered in sunlit patches in the woods, to ruined fields of tomatoes, gnawed down to the ground by midnight deer.  We've seen a trio of doe browsing in the brambles next to the trampoline, and the cooling body of a 8 point buck, lying beneath a tarp in the back of the neighbor's pickup truck.  Everywhere, everywhere we see the tracks of deer, stitching together field and stream, woods and pasture here on the farm.  

They're always there, like ghosts in the fog, generations stretching back farther than any human activity here on this property, and, knowing the resiliency of the species, probably stretching ahead farther than any of us as well.