Much as I'd like to take a potshot at the deer who roam my neighborhood in the wee hours, jump the garden fence meant to deter geese, nibble on our tomato plants, devour the Swiss chard, and leave behind telltale hoof prints, I reckon I couldn't harm them even if given the chance. I might do away with someone's mom.

Ordinarily I don't think so compassionately of deer, but a sojourn in the Cascade Mountains last month left me a humbled spectator in nature's maternity ward. Over several days, half a dozen mule deer dropped their fawns on lawns and in flower beds of the tiny village surrounded by deep forest. Those who know about such things explained how the deer have learned to use that setting as a birthing area because black bears seldom venture where human beings hang out and leave their scent.

A small child had the nerve to ask a question lurking in all our minds. "How do the deer know that about the bears?"

Many similar questions surround the wisdom evident in a doe's birthing ritual. While newly dropped fawns curl into a fluffy mound not much bigger than a basketball, the moms move a hundred yards away to expel the placenta. The latter has much more scent than the fawn, so if bears come sniffing around, they find the doe or the placenta, not the fawn.

Hours later, when the fawn can stand well enough to nurse, from her watchful vantage point the doe makes noises that summon the tiny newborn to her ready nipples.

Bears have their own wisdom, of course, and they, too, have cubs to care for this time of year. Some youngsters in our group witnessed a brief, violent drama in which a mother bear caught and killed one of the fawns we had ogled and photographed days before. Bears love fawns, too, explained the forest aficionados, especially the delicacy of a tummy filled with mother's milk.

Nature's classroom isn't for the squeamish. I thought of Tennyson's famous line about "Nature, red in tooth and claw," and the almost 3,000-year-old poetry in which God dares Job to try running the world, which includes supervising the gestation of mountain goats and deer. (Job respectfully declines.)

Even such fascinating mysteries as these pale in comparison to those surrounding another birthing scenario I've monitored this spring. These last few weeks I have experienced a sense of wonder while watching my son and daughter-in-law embark on their lifelong journey of parenthood.

Exactly how do we fall in love with a demanding, wee little critter who turns us into sleep-deprived zombies, makes us question our competence and doubt our sanity, and who for a good, long while won't return our love and affection? In what training program does any of us learn to nuzzle and kiss on a tiny sweet-smelling head, marvel at miniature fingers wrapped around our big ones, and for hours on end sway our bodies while doing things with one hand? How do we come so quickly to the certainty that we will guard this child with our life?

Once upon a time, I watched this new dad, then a newborn himself, rest securely in my mother's practiced hands. In that moment, I gained a new, profound, and lasting sense of what it means to love and be loved.

Still, it remains a mystery. Is it instinct? Do we learn it?

Whatever its source, it comes as a pure, though surely not simple, gift. As to every other gift, we respond to this one with thanks, and with hearts full of infinite mercy.