CALL ME CRUELLA

 "Does this photo make my butt look big?", asks this garden raider caught on John's spy camera a while back.

This morning as I sat next to an open window waiting for the sun to come up, I kept hearing a noise in or near the Cantina Garden, which was just below me. Usually the deer travel in groups, and you can hear the pitter patter of hooves on rock, or spot a white tail, even in the dark. But not today. All I could hear was the rustling and ripping of vegetation. Could it be that pesky armadillo again? The one who decimated an entire bed of coneflowers a week or two ago?

Finally it got light enough for me to see that it was, in fact, a lone doe, and she was ripping plants out of the beds Hubby had added around the outside of the Cantina Garden fence, then filled with rosemary and other deer resistant plants, to distract them from the juicy tidbits inside the fence. Since the deer no longer pay any mind to our yells and banging, I grabbed my trusty cow bell, ran outside, and started clanging it for all it was worth. I'm sure my neighbors loved that.

It worked, but as she scampered off, I thought I noticed something a bit off kilter about her gait. Crap. That's when I remembered the poor doe I spotted a couple of weeks ago - the one who was holding her left hind leg up in the air as she struggled to follow her herd, but who got left behind. I assumed she had been hit by a car, and it made me very sad to think she was probably fixing to starve and die. Now I'm guessing I may have just run her off from the only food she can get to. I feel like such a turd.