`A Slow-Moving Tapestry'

Forty-five years ago the woods behind my brother's house was a field where we scratched out a baseball diamond and our parents and their friends had clambakes and pitched horseshoes. Nature is patient and inexorable. Oak, ash and maple saplings grew tall and obscured the sunlight. The grasses and wildflowers died and the field's borders shrunk. Where I once knew every rock, dogwood and patch of milkweed and forget-me-nots, I get disoriented. My decades-old map is worthless. Most baffling of all -- personally, not ecologically -- is the arrival of white-tail deer, here in suburban Cleveland.

Monday evening, returning from a walk in the woods with my 8-year-old, I stood 10 yards from two does and two fawns as they moved through the trees, grazing on the sparse grasses and shrubs. My brother tells me a neighbor's dog was gored not long ago by a buck. As a kid, the largest wild mammals I saw here were raccoons. Our neighbor, an elderly German woman, killed one with a shovel.

I've been rereading my brother's copy of Dorothy Herrmann's S.J. Perelman: A Life. I sense Perelman's reputation has been eclipsed and that young readers may not recognize his name. He was a witty, acerbic writer who wrote for the Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers) and was long associated with The New Yorker. Hermann quotes from a piece Perelman published in the New York Times on Dec. 3, 1970, not long after he moved, briefly, to England. In "Farewell to Bucks," he describes life on his farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania:

"They used to come over the brow of the hill every evening at 6:40 during the Huntley-Brinkley broadcast in a slow-moving tapestry: First a doe, sniffing the air for possible danger to the two fawns following her, then a half-grown step-brother and finally the antlered sire, all nibbling intently as they made their way toward the salt block down the western slope of our farm. Once in a while, when the volume of our TV set crackled with the bark of guns in Vietnam or the snarl of jet, the deer would lift their heads and listen, but most of the time they were too busy feeding to notice.

"How many thousands of years they and their ancestors had followed that particular track was problematical. Certainly long before the big stone barn had been raised on the ridge and equipped with hex signs to ward off spells or the cattle, these original inhabitants of the land -- and the pheasants, groundhogs, squirrels, moles and all the other rightful owners of the place -- had been quietly going about their business of balancing the ecology...."