Ungulate wonderment Exciting, earth shattering news! I'm getting a name plate for my door! Apparently it's a fire regulation that all names be on doors. That's pretty exciting stuff for a temporary student employee I think. In addition to that exciting news, I'm also doing manual labour today instead of computer work. It's a nice change but I'm covered in rock dust now. One of the reasons I like working where i do is that it's located in a part of town that's still not wholly separted from the natural world. Today, during one of my travels past a window (there's no window in my office) I noticed two deer sitting in the snow, under the protection of a grove of spruce trees. They looked so peaceful and serene that I stopped to watch for a few minutes. In the most recent past, my exposure to deer has been exclusively in the form of the high density farms they run in New Zealand. Deer in large numbers cease to be the woodland creatures of Disney films and become another form of large, domesticated, herd animals. I'd forgotten until I saw them today how magical a glimpse of two deer through the trees can be. When I was away two summers ago in the NWT doing geological field work, we came across a herd of cariboo one day up in the mountains. The land we were traversing was covered in these hilly tussocks that made it nearly impossible for a two legged creature to walk across with any dignity, but the ungainly cariboo moved across so effortlessly they looked like they floated. We even managed to coax one curious young buck closer by holding our arms above our head in a crude imitation of antlers. |