Mount Vernon News

MOUNT VERNON — When Jim Hoar walked out of his Millstone Lane house late Monday morning and walked across the back yard to check on his garden, he was surprised to see a very young fawn lying alone under his lilac bush.

He hurried back into the house to get his roommate, Scott Walls, whose hobby is photography. But when Walls bent down with his camera to take the picture, the fawn bolted.

“It ran across the street,” said Hoar, “to a neighbor’s house, then it ran around the back of the house.”

There, Walls got his photograph of the fawn standing in a corner of the brick house. Then it ran away again.

“It ran like you wouldn’t believe,” said Hoar. “I thought it was so newborn that it would have a hard time running, but it shot across the street. It jumped into the water [of Beam’s Lake]. But it swam across the cove, climbed out of the water and lay down under a tree. It was really shaking when it got out of the water.”

Hoar and Walls thought they’d better leave it alone or it would get too far from its mother.

The doe, Hoar thought, was probably nearby, as he’d heard a crunching sound in his woods when he walked out of his house. He said the neighborhood has a large deer population and he sees deer all the time, but the presence of a fawn was too interesting to ignore.

Hoar saw the mother and baby that evening, together again in his yard. He later measured the five bricks on his neighbor’s house against which the fawn stood, and discovered it was 20 inches tall.