This is the story of an encounter.

Our house sits on a gently sloping hill. Its walls, which are mostly windows, floor to ceiling, survey the scene: old forest uphill and surrounding, and downhill a field flanked by trees that bend toward the light, creating an inadvertent colonnade. I’d say the field was about the size of a football field but why succumb to a cliché? This field was here long before recreational sports swallowed so much human focus.

Our house was not designed for a small dog’s convenience, but so it’s happened. In all weathers and directions, Henry eyes the outdoors, like a captain the sea from his bridge. Vigilance is his unexpressed motto. Birds at the feeder, scampering squirrels, a gusted leaf stiffen him first to attention, then a growl, then a piercing tocsin. Jane and I chide Henry for barking, but that’s unjust. Equally, he could chide us for reading. Each is doing what we were born to, fulfilling a purpose derived from God knows where.

How Henry detects deer browsing the lower field I’m not sure. His eyesight, we’re told, is not as keen as ours, but how can he sniff the deer’s presence from such a distance with the windows shut? Invariably he locates the deer first and erupts in outrage, pawing to be let out. Though Jane and I welcome deer as denizens of our domain, assuaging our anxious hearts with their pastoral charm. Henry will have none of it. Deer to him are intruders, as obnoxious as snake, skunk or bear. The nerve of them! Perhaps before Henry’s tenure, such trespassing was tolerated, but no longer. The glass door slid open – what choice do we have? – Henry hurtles across the deck, down the stairs, past the lawn into the field with a fulminous fury startling in one so small.

The deer look up.

A year ago, at Henry’s first appearance, they skedaddled. Deer don’t like trouble. With their agility and speed, they avoid it, vanishing magically into impenetrable thickets in an eyeblink. Sometimes they collide with cars or – rarely – are felled by bow-hunters, but mostly they preserve themselves and propagate, so that many hereabouts rate them pests. (Whether deer consider humans pests is not known; well they might.)

Henry barreling at you across a field, raucously barking, might alarm anyone initially, even if four times his size. But these deer have taken Henry’s measure. They know he will stop short – at a safe distance – some invisible perimeter – and confine his fury to yapping and pacing. Yes, this invasion of his domain is outrageous – but life is precious – and how might those big deer punish him if he really got their goat? Henry, in the familiar phrase, is “all bark and no bite” – which the deer understand – so let him carry on, no need to disturb their repast.

Eventually they saunter off – insolently, as one might brush off a mosquito – and Henry returns to the house – satisfied with this result perhaps, but not, we conjecture, pleased. Though small (thirty-five pounds), he means to be taken seriously. No cuddly lapdog, he’s a mighty warrior, can’t you see, protector of his kingdom and of all who therein dwell. Neither Jane nor Carll can whoosh so fast or noisily across the grass! Yet somehow – unaccountably – Jane and Carll alarm the interlopers as he does not. The least hint of them and off the deer bound, their white tails bobbing. What do soft-spoken torpid Jane and Carll have, Henry wonders (in this reconstruction), that he hasn’t?

This encounter brought to mind the Nameless One and tariffs for some reason.