Illustration by Annabelle Bullock
Morning Swim
She comes to the water, as mountain deer do, never fully trusting each step. An older doe. No fawns with her. Perhaps she’s laid them down, licked as much scent from them as she can, and gone off to forage. Perhaps, for some reason, she didn’t give birth this year. Or those she birthed were taken by a bear or coyote. So much gets eaten in spring, the green world’s flesh beckoning.
Today the air constricts with heat. The streams run low, portents of a drought. I’ve come to fish before too much summer settles, before there’s not enough water to chase after.
I stand on the far shore, hidden by a red oak, looking out through the boughs of a witch hazel that nuzzles the larger tree’s trunk.
The doe wades into the reservoir, chest deep, and bends her head to drink.
I assume she’ll turn and pick her way back through the rocks, enter under the canopy to find some place on the mountain where she can lie down and rest until evening.
If it was up to me, I’d tell her to head toward the small seep where the mountain turns hard to the southeast. A hemlock grove grows there, many of the trees still young enough to offer camouflage with their lower branches. The ground will be cool and the fallen needles will make a soft bed. Because the crease is steep, she’ll hear or see any predator that approaches.
My mother, when I was young, made me sit while she swam laps. One arm, then the other, rising over head, slicing down by her ear, pushing the water efficiently, fingers and hands forming paddles. She wasn’t an exceptional athlete, but she taught me how to swim through repetition. As I’d sit watching her, I recognized, as best a six-year-old boy can, that she possessed grace, that the way she moved was nimble, supple.
The doe surprises me. After she takes one last drink, she walks toward deeper water until her legs can’t reach the bottom and begins to swim toward me, a good three hundred yards separating us.
I’ve seen wolves swim long distances; moose navigate water with awkward ease. This deer bicycles her legs, but slender hooves don’t provide much propulsion. She keeps her head above water. But just.
I look back at the far shore, convinced something has bumped her, threatened her. A bear clattering a rock or turning over a log looking for grubs. A coyote she didn’t hear or smell sneaking up behind her. But this can’t be. The wind’s in her favor, and I see no movement as I scan the water’s edge up to where the shade begins.
Might she simply have wanted to swim?
The reservoir isn’t big, and the stream that feeds it on the western side is one of the coldest on the mountain. Even on the hottest days the water temperature doesn’t reach sixty.
We may not be fish, but the fluidity of water—the mutability of what comprises most of our bodies—offers sensuous delight. Weight buoyant, sliding through the substance where we first took on life.
Her path isn’t direct, but in time she draws closer.
When she’s almost in water where she’ll be able to stand—only thirty yards from me—she turns, just like my mother would, and begins to swim back the way she’s come, until she reaches the place she first entered the water and walks slowly out, looking first to the left and then to the right, picking her way over the gravel shoreline to disappear into a crevice in the understory, the mountain’s shade swallowing her.
Todd Davis is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems (2024) and Coffin Honey (2022), both published by Michigan State University Press. His writing has won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
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