Nature is beautiful, awe-inspiring, and sometimes unspeakably cruel. Especially in the case of a crippled fawn that was recently born in a back yard near Yellowstone National Park.
“The fawn was helpless,” said Darius, who filmed the above video in his yard. “She was just born earlier that day, and still had some blood on her belly.”
The fragile fawn would have had no chances of surviving in the wild, and she struggled to keep up with her mother and newborn brother. All of the mother’s efforts to lick and coax the fawn along were to no avail, and the fawn was soon left behind to fend for herself.
When Darius realized that the fawn’s mother wasn’t coming back, he did what any kindhearted person would do: he took the deer into his home to care for it and protect it from predators.
He bottle-fed the fawn every four hours, and he fashioned a brace from an oatmeal box so that her leg could heal. And though his other pets were initially perturbed by their new charge, they soon warmed up to the fawn. His Bernese, Mack, even stood in as a watchful surrogate.
Darius avoided naming the fawn so as not to grow to close. “I really hoped that she did not get attached to me too much,” he said, “because that would make it very hard for her to survive in the wild. She would become an easy target for hunters and predators.” But as the video shows, the fawn grew very attached to him and seldom left his side.
Once the fawn was healthy enough, Darius began to search for its mother, leading it out every evening. And miraculously, the fawn was eventually reunited with her family, and Darius still sees them together every so often. “I’ve seen the family many times,” he said. “It is a very, very good feeling seeing them safe roaming around.”
