Free Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard Page A

deer. It was roped to a tree on the grass clearing near the thatch shelter where we would eat lunch.
    The deer was small, about the size of a whitetail fawn, but apparently full-grown. It had a rope around its neckand three feet caught in the rope. Someone said that the dogs had caught it that morning and the villagers were going to cook and eat it that night.
    This clearing lay at the edge of the little thatched-hut village. We could see the villagers going about their business, scattering feed corn for hens about their houses, and wandering down paths to the river to bathe. The village headman was our host; he stood beside us as we watched the deer struggle. Several village boys were interested in the deer; they formed part of the circle we made around it in the clearing. So also did four businessmen from Quito who were attempting to guide us around the jungle. Few of the very different people standing in this circle had a common language. We watched the deer, and no one said much.
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    The deer lay on its side at the rope’s very end, so the rope lacked slack to let it rest its head in the dust. It was “pretty,” delicate of bone like all deer, and thin-skinned for the tropics. Its skin looked virtually hairless, in fact, and almost translucent, like a membrane. Its neck was no thicker than my wrist; it was rubbed open on the rope, and gashed. Trying to paw itself free of the rope, the deer had scratched its own neck with its hooves. The raw underside of its neck showed red stripes and some bruises bleeding inside the muscles. Now three of its feet were hooked in the rope under its jaw. It could not stand, of course, on one leg, so it could not move to slacken the rope and ease the pull on its throat and enable it to rest its head.
    Repeatedly the deer paused, motionless, its eyes veiled, with only its rib cage in motion, and its breaths the onlysound. Then, after I would think, “It has given up; now it will die,” it would heave. The rope twanged; the tree leaves clattered; the deer’s free foot beat the ground. We stepped back and held our breaths. It thrashed, kicking, but only one leg moved; the other three legs tightened inside the rope’s loop. Its hip jerked; its spine shook. Its eyes rolled; its tongue, thick with spittle, pushed in and out. Then it would rest again. We watched this for fifteen minutes.
    Once three young native boys charged in, released its trapped legs, and jumped back to the circle of people. But instantly the deer scratched up its neck with its hooves and snared its forelegs in the rope again. It was easy to imagine a third and then a fourth leg soon stuck, like Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
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    We watched the deer from the circle, and then we drifted on to lunch. Our palm-roofed shelter stood on a grassy promontory from which we could see the deer tied to the tree, pigs and hens walking under village houses, and black-and-white cattle standing in the river. There was even a breeze.
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    Lunch, which was the second and better lunch we had that day, was hot and fried. There was a big fish called doncella , a kind of catfish, dipped whole in corn flour and beaten egg, then deep fried. With our fingers we pulled soft fragments of it from its sides to our plates, and ate; it was delicate fish-flesh, fresh and mild. Someone found the roe, and I ate of that too—it was fat and stronger, like egg yolk, naturally enough, and warm.
    There was also a stew of meat in shreds with rice andpale brown gravy. I had asked what kind of deer it was tied to the tree; Pepe had answered in Spanish, “ Gama .” Now they told us this was gama too, stewed. I suspect the word means merely game or venison. At any rate, I heard that the village dogs had cornered another deer just yesterday, and it was this deer which we were now eating in full sight of the whole article. It was good. I was surprised at its tenderness. But it is a fact that high levels of lactic acid, which