The Night We Almost Kept a Deer

Brian Eden

We were playing tennis in the street, which is how summers go in neighborhoods where the nearest court is technically a public road but also the family sports complex.

My wife noticed something first. Something in the bushes. Something alive.

“Brian you need to come here. S L O W L Y.”

We paused the match and tried our best to sneak up on our flower garden, which is not something I’d ever expected to do.

It was kind of thrilling in a James Bond sort of way.

And sure enough, right there in the hydrangeas, tucked in between the leaves and the front steps, was a tiny, ridiculously adorable baby deer. Just lying there hanging out. Waiting for its mother to come back while looking like it fell directly from the screen of a Disney movie.

A small spotted fawn curled up between the hydrangeas and the stone front steps, looking up toward the camera beside a gray downspout pipe
Right where we found it — tucked between the hydrangeas and the front steps.

The deer stared at us and blinked with its big doe eyes.

Our kids lost their minds. The excitement was so big it vibrated.

They asked if we could keep it. My wife and I both said no, which, as any parent knows, is not the end of the conversation but the beginning of the appeals process.

The negotiations were thorough. “What if the mom doesn’t come back for a week, then could we keep it?” Still no. If they found it a friend? No. If they named it first, did that change anything, legally? It did not.

They escalated to the street, flagging down passersby. Interrupting strangers on what had been, until this moment, a quiet evening stroll to ask them whether, hypothetically, they had kids who hypothetically found a baby deer in the garden, would they hypothetically let their kids keep it? Every person said no. Some of them looked a little conflicted about it.

Mamma deer came back sometime after dark. Which was a relief, because I had started to wonder what we would actually do on day eight.

The fawn is the kind of moment that’s a season highlight in the garden, but also the kind of thing that fades from memory by this time next year.

But I told Percy about it that night, while the kids were still talking about it at bedtime, still working through the injustice. It took about thirty seconds. I shared a photo. And now it’s there. The date, the garden, the hydrangeas, the hour. The negotiations. The appeals process to neighbors.

The Percy app's Nest view showing the saved deer entry — the fawn photo above a journal note titled Wildlife Encounter
Captured that night, while the appeals were still being argued.

That’s the thing about a season: it’s not just what you planted and what you harvested. It’s the night the deer showed up. It’s the hour it spent in your garden while your kids tried to figure out how to keep it. Someday, when they’re grown, we’ll be able to look back and see the photo, the story, the exact date it happened. What the garden looked like in late spring. The summer it had a very small, very temporary new resident.

They’ll probably still think we made the wrong call.