Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Closer than ever to a deer

Clearly, my dog Sophia smells the presence of a roe deer on the slopes opposite Gamone, and starts barking, before she actually sees the animal. An hour ago, I dashed across the creek and managed to get this photo before the deer spotted us, and disappeared into the woods.

In French, there's a lovely simple word, orée [from the Latin ora, extremity], to designate the edge of the woods, where wild animals come out to feed on the grass. There, they know that, if a danger appears, they can spring back into the safe obscurity of the woods. It's strange that this common rural term doesn't appear to have passed into English. The nasty-sounding word edge, of Germanic origins, is associated with blades of weapons.

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