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Mount St Helen’s Fawns


Not long after Mount St Helens blew its top on May 18, 1980 I was contacted by Fish and Game.

(A quick aside: my “serval son” Deaken had just turned a year old two days earlier. We were at Ocean Shores in a tent on vacation when the mountain blew, and Deaken knew it immediately. He became a nervous wreck; we humans found out less than an hour later what had happened and headed home in the direction of the blast. Deaken thought that was insane and rubbed his nose raw on the cage trying to get out—the only time in his life he ever objected to being transported.)

The Fish and Game agent said he knew of a veterinarian in Cougar, Washington who was presently holding two very young, spotted male fawns orphaned by the eruption. He wondered if I would be willing to take them in and raise them until they were old enough to forage on their own and then release them to the wild.  I quickly fenced in about a quarter acre of our woodland area with chicken wire, prepared Deaken’s outdoor pen for two fawns, and said, “Yes, of course!”

I did everything I could think of to keep these two creatures wild (as in, wary of human beings), who I had named Harry and Jerry sight unseen: Harry after the man who lost his life at Spirit Lodge during the eruption and Jerry because Jerry rhymes with Harry, and they were twins, so why not? (Alas, Jerry became Jennifer upon arrival when I noticed that “he” was a “she”!)

Wearing gloves to eliminate my human scent as much as I could, I fed the spotted babies bottles of milk replacer  and then left them, and later on fed them feed and left them, praying they would remain wild and unattached to humans, until it became perfectly obvious to me that they had bonded with me anyway. By the time they lost their spots, I had been identified as “The One Who Brings Us Sustenance” so they began to cry out whenever I approached them.

Kris and Mt St Helens Orphaned Fawns

I had wanted to keep them from identifying humans as good guys because I knew what Fish and Game wanted them for: for hunters to shoot at later in their lives. I had learned my lesson with Tammy the irrigation canal fawn: I didn’t want the same fate to befall Harry and Jennifer.

So when it became apparent that these two fawns were not going to remain wary and wild, I did the only thing that appealed to me: I reached out to the wildlife park, Northwest Trek, to ask if they would accept them when they were old enough to forage on their own. I told them that Fish and Game would be pissed at me, but that I simply couldn’t allow “my” deer to be shot like fish in a barrel or like lions in a “canned hunt” in Texas. (I told them I was an animal advocate; I wasn’t a hunter helper.)

Northwest Trek agreed to take the deer. Harry and Jennifer became the park’s goodwill ambassadors until they became too old and potentially dangerous to interact with people; then they were introduced into the fields where they lived out their lives without getting shot.

So, this story ended happily. Fish and Game never did give me grief over my decision. Perhaps they forgot all about me after I agreed to take the fawns. I never heard from them again…and certainly didn’t inquire!

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