The Deer Crossing That Wasn't a Deer

The road I take home from my sister's place cuts through eleven miles of state forest, two lanes, no shoulder, pines pressing in on both sides. It is thick with deer crossing signs, the yellow diamonds every quarter mile, and in fifteen years of driving it I have slowed for plenty of deer and never hit one. I am careful on that road. It taught me to be.

Last November I was driving it back around ten at night after Thanksgiving. Clear night, cold, the kind where your headlights seem to cut a solid tunnel through the dark. I was doing maybe forty, watching the ditches the way you learn to, when something moved at the edge of my beams up ahead on the right, just past a crossing sign.

At first my brain filed it as a deer, because that is what the road trains you to see. Tall, dark, standing at the treeline. I lifted off the gas. But as my lights swung fully onto it, the shape did something a deer does not do. It straightened up. It stood, on two legs, and it kept standing, and it kept going up, until its head was well above the top of the crossing sign, and the crossing signs on that road are set high.

I want to be careful here, because I know how this reads. I did not see a face. I did not see fur or skin or clothes. What I saw was a tall dark upright shape at the edge of the woods, taller than any person, standing perfectly still and turned toward my car as I slowed. And the thing that has never left me is that when my headlights hit it full on, they did not seem to land. It stayed dark. Like the light went into it and did not come back.