The Bambi was lying in a pool of her own blood, panting. The hunter crouched beside her and inspected the wound gingerly. The Bambi looked at him askance and he nodded. The Bambi relaxed its rippling muscles and laid one pointed ear on the mouldering foliage. The hunter patted her other ear. She shuddered.

The hunter sighed and placed his hunting rifle on the lush, inebriated grass. He plonked astride it and eyed the Bambi warily. The Bambi flinched and turned its sculpted head away. The hunter hesitated but then, gathering resolve, reached out across the tree stump that stood between them and stroked the Bambi.

For a split, suspended second there was only the ambiguity of life and death and then the Bambi inched towards the hunter and laid its rump on the severed tree. The hunter bent and again studied the deep gash up close. He mumbled something and the Bambi’s ears pricked and then reverted. The hunter smiled.

The Bambi was heavier than she looked and her injury near fatal. The hunter struggled to lift her gently from her sodden repose and transport her into a cavelike shelter, the confluence of several massive branches. There, he pre-arranged a mat of leaves and on it he placed the simpering Bambi.

Every day, the hunter would come to feed the Bambi from a nippled bottle, wash away the soil and pus, brush her nascent fur, and talk to her in a monotonous but tender voice. As the weeks gathered into months, the Bambi began to wobble on her own quivering legs when the hunter came on his visits. She licked his sweaty face with her coarse tongue. He loved it. He loved her. They would roam through the clearing and the hunter taught the Bambi how to tell apart the poisonous plants from the nutritious edible ones. The Bambi had no mother and so was never brought up to tell the difference: she was drawn inexorably to the bright colors and overpowering scents of the more toxic fruits.

Almost two years had passed and the fawn grew up to be a beautiful and noble deer. Her eyes were misty grey, her mane wavered between gold and titian, depending on the shafts of light that illuminated her as she stood still and sniffed the air. She moved with both agility and grace.

But there were times when the hunter felt a chasm growing between them. He would reach out and she would recoil. Or he would mutter in her ear as was his wont and she would turn her head away. Or he would weave his calloused fingers in her luxuriant coat and she would freeze, as though alarmed. Increasingly, she reacted with unease to his scoped gun and hunter’s lederhosen.

He would come and not find her in their usual place. He thought that she may be looking for her family. Once he spotted her with a stag. He had seen her with him before. She was a hind now and was about to bear her own fawn. She gazed at him suspiciously: he was a hunter, after all – and she and her offspring were nothing but prey. She kept besides her mate, retreating as the hunter advanced. She wanted him gone, that much was clear.

The hunter felt some thing break inside him that he did not even know existed. He leaned his weapon on a nearby shrub, sat on a mossy stone and contemplated the erstwhile Bambi from afar. Could deer be happy? He wasn’t sure. But she looked intent upon her mission as a mother. He nodded his head in resignation and labored to his bloated feet. There was nothing more he could give her. She was a deer now and he has always been a hunter. The day was growing long and he didn’t catch a thing. It was time to go hunting.