An Anniversary

 The day that has just passed, 10/19, is an important day to me.

On this day, about five years ago. a miracle happened. My dog, Simon, was paralyzed and had been for weeks. X-rays confirmed it -- herniated discs were putting pressure on his spinal cord and nerve cells were supposed to be dying every day. Everyone told me to have him put down. I had to carry him outside 3 or 4 times each day. But he wasn't ready to go and I could tell. The world was telling me to kill my dog and I wouldn't.

And on this day I walked out behind my house and waited in ambush for a deer. I needed one badly -- I was broke and all out of groceries. First I saw one deer run past me too fast for me to shoot. And then I waited for a long moment until I felt something telling me that I should stand up. This is usually a very bad idea in an ambush, but I listened to it and I stood up.

This was me and Simon the day his spine went out.

And right in front of me, only a few yards away, a deer stood broadside. I aimed and fired and brought the deer down with a perfect spine shot (proven later through autopsy while butchering). 

I went inside to get a rope and a few sharp knives to work on the deer. But Simon wasn't where I had left him in the kitchen. He was hiding in the bathroom, where he would always run when he had heard a loud sound like thunder, or a gunshot. I picked him up and carried him outside and set him on his feet and he ran across the yard.

In the very same moment that my bullet had severed the spinal cord of a deer, Simon's spinal injury was miraculously healed. That night he ate venison for hours while I butchered. His recovery was complete and he is still here at my feet as I write this.

This was my first deer.

I suppose that even if the remainder of my life is perfectly ordinary, I will always have that one thing to look back at and know that I saw something happen that cannot be explained any other way. People spend their whole lives waiting for something like that to happen and the funny thing is that once it does, there's really no instruction manual to tell you what to do about it. Afterward, I spent a lot of time wondering what I was supposed to do about it but there didn't seem to be anything for it but to eat the deer and to go right on hunting and to take care of Simon. And that is what I have done. Nobody is likely to build a cathedral on the spot, but I still know what happened there. I suppose that more important things have probably happened on patches of dirt where someone remembered as long as he could and then grew old and after a time he was gone and the miracle was just a patch of dirt and the world went on as it had.