A sighting, speculation and a rumor: that’s all I’ve got. Guess it’ll have to do.

First the sighting — two deer, likely does, one larger than the other. I spotted them after 7 Saturday morning. They were feeding in the fresh green stubble of a spring straw field as I took a hard right toward the gate to Sunken Meadow. There they stood like statues, gray-brown in the pale morning light, frozen and totally alert to my presence. When I pulled up short of the gate, grabbed the key and exited the vehicle, the deer bounded off toward the tree line, white tails pointing to the heavens, a pretty sight.

Hmmm? Interesting. Couldn’t imagine they weren’t the same deer I had watched there all through the summer and fall last year. Problem was there had been three of them, a doe and twin fawns, which I watched catch up in size to their mother as the year progressed. Maybe someone had killed the other fawn, I thought, in the road or hunting. Or maybe it was there but off to the side along the tree line and I just didn’t see it. Doubtful. I thought there were only two.

Anyway, I moved along, driving my truck down into the lower level, letting Buddy out and taking my regular route, not really giving much further thought to the deer. Yeah, of course I looked up along the wooded lip several times as I walked the first leg of my trek, just trying to pick them out standing motionless and observing us, but no luck. If they were there, I didn’t see them. But the story got far more interesting after I returned home and went to the roadside mailbox an hour or two later.

As I walked to fetch the mail, my neighbor called my name from across the road. She was walking toward me and obviously wanted to talk. So I crossed the road and she told me about carnage in the neighborhood, an overnight coyote deer-kill in a backyard of a cluster of homes. The wife of a cop, I trusted her information, still do.

“The animal-control officer got a call and investigated,” she said. “He arrived on the scene and found the doe torn to shreds with an unborn fawn pretty much intact.”

Apparently, the homeowners heard something going on but couldn’t see what had happened until daybreak. Then they saw the dead deer lying near their house, the yard bordered on the north by a wetland hollow. My neighbor didn’t like what she had heard, was concerned about her dogs, her horse. “Have you seen coyotes in your yard?” she asked.No. I had never seen a coyote on my property but my son once had, five or six of them by the flower bed in the full midnight moonlight. He was concerned about his favorite tiger cat, Big Boy, who survived that late-night canine visit. Furthermore, I knew of no coyote problems around my neighbor’s hen house, which is surprising, given the amount of close coyote talk I routinely hear around my place year around. “They’re pretty elusive,” I told her, “very good at lurking along the edges and staying out of sight.”

Curious, I tried to track down further information about the incident but came up empty. So I cannot claim to have every detail precisely as it happened. I tried, making several fruitless trips to the home where the kill reportedly occurred, but couldn’t get an answer to the doorbell with many cars in the yard. Then, after learning the homeowners’ names, I left a phone message and  killed time reading a field guide to ferns, portable phone within reach. No return call. Determined to get the story, I called the number twice from work and got the answering machine. Must have had caller ID. Apparently the people didn’t want any publicity. I wouldn’t have used their names or address if they didn’t want me to. It’s easy to get around superfluous details like that with a story like this. It’s the tale that’s relevant, not necessarily names and addresses. To say it happened in the Greenfield Meadows would have been good enough for me. Oh well. You’ll just have to take it for what it is: a story based on fact that is generally accurate.

Of course, the same could be said of my speculation that the dead doe was the missing twin from my Saturday sighting. There’s no way of knowing that, either. I can’t even say those deer were the ones I knew. Still, given what I later learned and the way the scenario developed, my hunch is that those were the same deer minus a pre-dawn coyote-kill. At least it makes a lot of sense to me.

Imagine that. No snow or cold or injury to weaken the deer; just a pregnant doe in her vulnerable last trimester, and still no match for a coyote pack. Who knows? Maybe that doe was carrying twin fawns and there was only one left. Stuffed from a tasty meal, the coyotes probably intended to return for fetid fetus cutlets.