The mutant who came to visit

As is my habit, at 7:45 a.m. I stood with my hot tea in hand as I stared out the front window at the oak trees Monday morning. This serene site will lower my blood pressure immediately.

Movement caught my eye. A cow, I thought, down in the pasture. But no.

I looked again.

What was that?

I put down my mug and grabbed the binoculars. Zeroing in, I spied a white … something.

A dog?

No.

A goat? What would a goat be doing on my in-laws’ cattle farm? It couldn’t be a goat.

A coyote?

No.

Whatever could this be? Did Botetourt County have its very own Bigfoot? This is surreal, I thought, lowering the binoculars to look again with my naked eye.

The beast, whatever it was, was nearly solid white, with a blotch of brown visible toward its rear. The head was shaped oddly, with two dark ears and a dark nose. It looked all the world to me like some kind of panda bear roaming upright amongst the oaks.

I grabbed my old analog video camera. It sits on a tripod by my desk, ready for whatever I might see. I hustled out the back door, around the corner of the house to the front yard, flipping on the camera as I hurried.

The thing was still there. I got the camera up and found it in the viewfinder. Whatever it was, it was waving at me.

I could see its arms? legs? moving occasionally, a white blur, even in the zoom of the video camera.

I still wasn’t sure what it was. Obviously it saw me. It was looking right at me, if that was indeed its face I saw.

I held my breath, waiting to see if it would attack. When it didn’t, I raced back inside for my digital camera.

By the time I returned, the animal had moved. Now it faced me sideways instead of straight on, and I could see exactly what it was.

It was a deer. A piebald deer, according to Jim Bowman, a wildlife biologist with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. This is a white deer, but not a true albino.

Piebald deer look much like pinto ponies, with spotches. The coloring is caused by a genetic defect that has nothing to do with disease. The same defect can cause a bowing of the deer’s nose, short legs, and arching spine, and a short lower jaw.

About one percent of the deer population has this condition.

Bowman said he has seen such deer in Botetourt before. When he used to work a deer check station in Eagle Rock, hunters sometimes brought in piebald deer, he said.

“It’s just a recessive trait that pops up. It probably isn’t advantageous for a deer, they’re more visible to natural predators because they can’t conceal themselves well,” Bowman added.

My piebald deer wasn’t waving at me or making threatening gestures. It was stamping its front legs in true deer fashion, trying to make me move. But with its short body and odd coloring, it looked to me like I had a monster in the woods.

But no. I only had a visit from one of nature’s wonders, a mutant deer that I mistook for a goat.