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.

I did the only thing my body would let me do, which was press the accelerator and go. As I passed it -- and I passed within maybe twenty feet -- I did not turn my head. I looked dead ahead at the centerline and I drove. But I heard it. Over the engine, over the tires, I heard something heavy move behind the car, one long stride through the brush, and then nothing.

I did not stop for eleven miles. When the forest finally opened up into the outskirts of town and the first streetlight hit my windshield, I realized my hands were locked on the wheel so tight they ached. I pulled into the first gas station and sat there until they stopped shaking.

I have told this to exactly three people. One laughed, one said bear, and one -- an old game warden who drank coffee at the same diner I did -- got very quiet. He said he had taken reports off that road for thirty years. Not bears. Not deer. Tall things that stand up at the treeline and watch. He said the crossing signs are a joke among the wardens, because whatever really crosses that road, no sign could warn you about it, and it does not cross for cars. It waits for them.

I still drive that road, because there is no other way to my sister's and I am not going to let a shape in the dark reorganize my whole life. But I do not drive it after dark anymore if I can help it, and when I have to, I do not slow for anything at the treeline, deer or otherwise. If it is a deer it will move. And if it is not a deer, slowing down is the last thing I ever want to do again.