Charlene's Web of Lies (Entry two)

While I was wandering around the woods this week, I noticed a spider.  Spiders freak me out a little,  so i kept walking rather than staying to observe the spider for too long.  As i was walking I started day dreaming and came up with this story, inspired by the spider:

Charlene crawled down her web, lifting her long legs with an elegance that flew in the face of most people's opinions of spiders.  She waited in the middle of her web, hoping an insect would come along soon.  She liked crickets the best, but she'd settle for a fly if one came her way; she was starving.  Her famous ancestor grandmother, Charlotte, probably would have already caught an insect by now.  Charlene thought bitterly of the story her sister had told her earlier that morning, and every morning for the past twelve days in a row.

"Our great-great-great..." the list of greats went on for quite some time, "grandmother Charlotte was an amazing spider." Charlene rolled all four of her eyes while her sister droned on.  "The deer who wonder through the forest at night told me all about her."  Charlene resented the annoying deer her sister was speaking of.  Each night, a herd of loud deer came galloping through the woods.  They stirred up such a racket that all the insects in the forest stood still for quite a long while.  If Charlene hadn't caught and insect before the deer came through, she'd often have to wait until the moon moved far across the sky before an insect would stumble into her web.

"The deer say," her sister continued, "Charlotte did great things in her life.  She saved a young pig from certain slaughter."  Her sister went into great detail, gushing over Charlotte's cunning bravery.  "She spent her nights weaving different words into her web.  She wrote, 'Some pig,' and the farmer decided to keep little Wilbur around.  She saved that pig's life.  Later, a man learned Charlotte's story and wrote a book about her.  She's famous!  A true hero, that's what Charlotte was."

I should weave some words of my own into a web, Charlene thought.  I could show them all what I really think.  And why shouldn't she? She had all night, and her sister would no doubt be preoccupied talking with those hoofed friends of hers.  Nobody would have to know that Charlene was the one who weaved the worded web.

Her bitterness building, Charlene set to work at once.  As the night carried on, her energy faltered.  Weaving words into a web was much more exhausting than Charlene could have imagined.  She stopped for a while to snack on a small fly that had gotten stuck in her first web before finishing her new project.  As the sun appeared over the horizon, Charlene admired her work.  Charlotte was NOT great, her web said.  She smiled, satisfied, crawled onto the bark of a nearby tree, and drifted off to sleep.

*****
Charlene woke with a start.
"Charlotte was great," she heard a voice cry.
Charlene looked up to see a young child standing over her, holding a book with a crew of farm animals on the cover.  Oh no, thought Charlene.  She scrambled away from the child as fast as she could, but she simply wasn't fast enough.  A huge, heavy shoe came down on Charlene, and in an instant her whole world went black.

Deer (Entry 1, Week 2)

Lately, I've been trying to pay closer attention to all the different types of animals that spend time in the woods in my back yard.  Early one morning last week, I noticed Sassy and Jade (my cats) staring intently out the window.  I got up from bed and walked over to them, curious to see what they were looking at.  I saw an adult-sized light brown deer who was eating something.  She (or he - the deer didn't appear to have any antlers, but I wasn't completely sure how to tell what gender a deer is) looked very serene, enjoying her early morning snack.

I wanted to get a closer look, so I abandoned the cats and their window view and stepped outside onto my back patio, cell phone in hand - I wanted to appreciate nature without worrying about taking pictures, but I also really wanted to get a picture to include with this blog post.  As soon as I opened the glass-sliding door, the deer's head shot up.  I thought I had opened the door quietly, but I definitely wasn't stealth enough to go unnoticed by this deer.  She stared at me for a relatively long time, maybe a minute or so.  Then, she made a strange, shrill noise I'd never heard before.  I tried in vain to find a video of a deer making a similar sound on Youtube, but I'll try to describe the noise.  It sounded like a cough mixed with a scream.  The deer only made the sound once before she ran off into the woods, leaving only the sound of snapping twigs in her wake.  

When I went back inside, I began thinking about the deer.  Questions flooded my mind.  What kind of deer was it?  A white-tailed deer?  Was it a male or a female?  What was it eating?  Grass?  Do deer eat grass?  What was that odd sound the deer made?  Was it some kind of warning cry to alert other deer of a human invasion of an oasis that was theirs long before I was even born?  Why hadn't I seen other deer nearby?  Didn't they travel in groups?  What were those groups called? And why didn't I know more about deer, anyway?  I have lived in this house for over three years, sharing this land with these beautiful creatures, yet I know next to nothing about them.  

I grabbed my iPad and did what came "naturally":  I Googled deer.  I clicked on the Wikipedia page for White-tailed deer and began scanning it for interesting information.  I'll admit that my failing attention span made it difficult for me to look up answers to all my questions, but I did discover some cool facts.  For instance, according to Wikipedia, 1 in 10,000 female deer have antlers, but it's "usually associated with hermaphroditism."  Under the communication section, I read that deer do in fact make a variety of different sounds.  After reading about the various deer sounds, I'm fairly sure what I heard was a deer "snort," a sound that indicates danger.  I inadvertently scared the poor deer.  I'm hoping to keep my eyes peeled for more deer over the course of the semester.  As I learn about them and the other animals I see, I'll update this blog.

I've included the picture I took below.  It's not professional photography by any means, but I thought it might be cool to give people some idea of what the woods by my yard looks like.  Also, I think deer are kind of cute, so I wanted to include this snapshot.