Summer is over by the calendar, but my garden and weed patch needed water to tide them over until the rains begin. I plugged in the irrigation pump, then made the rounds to see that the sprinklers were spraying properly. 
  The deer startled me when I walked up on it in waist-high grass near the south fence. I didn’t startle it, however, because it was dead. 
  She was lying on her left side next to a flattened space where she’d made her bed before she died. 
  Deer often pass through our field and lawn. They snack from our garden and berry vines and occasionally nip leaves from small apple trees. 
  Two years ago, something stripped most of the bark from a spindly oak and nearly killed it. In recovery, the tree is growing more like a bush. 
  I don’t know that a deer caused that damage, but the dead deer lay almost on top of the knee-high oak. I first looked to my tree, but it had not been chewed on. 
 Perhaps the deer had caught a hoof while hopping the fence and had broken her neck on landing, but her neck was straight and normal looking. Besides, it seemed unlikely an agile deer would have met its doom on our low fence. 
  I saw no wounds, no damage or disruption to her smooth coat. Her open eye was dry, but her body had hardly begun to swell. She’d been dead long enough to stiffen, but not long enough for rigor mortis to subside. 
  I looked closer. 
  A small gob of pink foam stained the grass at her mouth. There was a pool of clear fluid in her nostril, also tinged with red. 
  We think of animals living placid lives, except for danger from predators and the hardship of winter. There were no parasites in Bambi. 
  This deer had ticks, of course. Dozens of the plump arachnids scurried through her hair, especially visible on her nose and undersides. I don’t know whether ticks on deer are always that active, or if they were disturbed that her blood had grown cold and was no longer flowing. 
  I stepped back and looked at her again, a normal, healthy-looking Blacktail doe, except that she was dead. 
  Whitetail deer in northeast Washington are dying this year from a disease that causes hemorrhaging. I don’t know if Mule deer and Blacktail are susceptible to the disease or even if it occurs on this side of the Cascades. 
  I headed for the house to call the Department of Fish and Wildlife. 
  As it was Sunday, I got a recording that advised calling the State Patrol. I did that and asked if DFW people wanted to check the deer to see what had killed it. 
  The WSP operator said they’d not be interested, that I could either bury the deer or drag it off into the woods. 
  When I slid the deer into my utility trailer, I noticed a spot of bare, scraped skin on the side of her rib cage under her right foreleg. It was the same width as the tops of the steel fence posts that ring our property. 
  I pressed my fingers into the area and into the opposite side for comparison. The damaged side seemed to give more easily than the other, but I couldn’t tell if a rib was broken without cutting her open, and I didn’t need to know that badly. 
  A broken rib and punctured lung, whether from fender or fence post, would explain the slow death and the bloody foam. 
  It was a shame to waste the meat and hide, but I’m not brave enough to eat found meat when I don’t know how long it’s been dead or the cause of death. Two friends in different parts of the country were surprised that I hadn’t butchered the deer, for dog food if not for my freezer. 
  The hide was worth saving, but I’m not sure what state law says about salvaging dead game. 
  More than concern about the law, though, was a feeling, perhaps irrational, that I was not entitled to that deer. I hadn’t earned it. 
  And so I trucked her into the woods, far from the highway, and left her where she belongs.