With October visions of Rudolph already beginning to dance in my head, on Sunday morning last, I got undeniable proof that deer do indeed live in pine trees. I'm not talking here about matted thickets on the ground amongst rented timberland. I'm talking 45 feet high right out in the backyard.

Might have been 61 degrees. Sunday, October 5. Crisp fall day. Madison, Mississippi morning. I have just filled the bird feeder and have about nine fat doves pecking away at the patio, filling their craws. Overnight, as usual, 15 or 20 small pine limbs have bit the dust out back. The burning pile is off to the right about 25 feet from the largest bottle tree. My fresh stack of perfectly snapped and laid pine limbs is already two feet high.

It’s 6:30 a.m. Perfectly quiet except for that Toyota whizzing by, slinging those fat Sunday newspapers. When the brush pile is as large as a cardboard freezer box, I enjoy the ritual of setting it afire, wishing it smelled like my grandmother's burning leaf piles did in 1955.

The Sunday silence is broken by a snap high in the trees. Looking up, I expect as usual to see another 4 foot long pine limb coming down. What I spot, way up in the tops, looks odd. I figure it’s a piece of dead limb headed toward me. But it is too white. It sticks in the ground not 10 feet from where I stand. When I pull it out, what I have in my hand is a nine inch long section of deer antler with 5, five, FIVE distinct points on it. Gnarled and gnawed, if you can imagine half an antler rack made of ruddy wax, mostly dull white, with another shade about the color of burnt sienna, streaked all through it. It looks like a wax antler that has been scraped and carefully carved on for hours with a sharp Buck pocket knife.

I look back up in the trees for ten minutes or so. I figure I’ll spot a squirrel jumping from limb to limb, trying to get outta my sight. Or I might see a deer. But I don't see a thing.

Afterwards, my hunter friends have various explanations. One says the antler could have been in that tree for 40 years, having been raked off by a buck scraping the tree at ground level when the tree and the deer were young.

Another guesses that squirrels dug up the old antler and scampered up into the trees with it for a week of gnawing.

I like my theory best. I think I have deer in my pine trees.

A cobalt bottle tree with a rooster weather vane atop it; another one with multi-colored, magical bottles; a ‘54 Plymouth hood ornament mounted on a section of silver and blue striped pipe. What better to add to my backyard collection than deer living in my pine trees?

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