I say hello every morning now.
The teller has worked at the same fenced federal installation since 2009 and arrives every morning around five, in the dark whatever the season. The perimeter fence is over six feet high with a strip of barbed wire angled outward along the top. A resident herd of about two dozen deer lives on the property, and in all those years he never drove in without seeing some of them.
One morning in the spring of 2025 he noticed, walking in from the parking lot, that it was dead silent: no birds, no spring peepers, no crickets. His boss arrived half an hour later and stopped where she always does, about twenty-five feet from the fence, to light a cigarette. It was still silent, she said, and then something hit the fence with a bang, like a baseball thrown at full force. The parking lot lights let you see more than a hundred feet along the fence in both directions, and there was nothing moving.
The next morning, walking in, he heard something pacing along the outside of the fence just inside the tree line. The footfalls sounded like something walking on two legs. On a whim he called out, "Hello, good morning!" The footsteps stopped.
There were weeks more of silent mornings. Then, in early July, as he turned into the lot, his headlights swept across the big drainage pond beyond it, an acre or more of water. Five or six feet down the embankment, between the two nearest lights, stood a tall, slender, chocolate-brown figure. It was intently watching three deer at the far end of the pond.
He describes its build as like a teenage boy just after his last growth spurt, tall and lanky with the muscle not yet filled in. He guessed seven feet from the level of the lot. It didn't wait for him to park. By the time he hurried over to the spot, there was nothing to see or hear, and the deer at the far end were gone too.
After work, in the late afternoon sun, he went back. Halfway down the embankment, in the tall grass, was a flattened patch about four feet across, with no trail leading into it or out of it. Deer always leave trails in and out of their beds. The flattened spot sat lower on the slope than he'd thought, which meant the figure must have been much taller than seven feet.
Since that morning the deer have all but vanished. It was four or five weeks before he saw a single one, and he has seen only one, twice. The crickets and peepers came back, but the morning birds still haven't.
He says hello every morning now as he walks in.