Sarah Nicole Prickett at Bookforum:
WHEN A DEER, A DOE, STEPPED INTO THE ROAD perhaps a hundred and twenty feet ahead of the car I was driving, it seemed for a moment that she would die, even though, during the same moment, I did not feel afraid that I would hit her. I was calm; I returned my smoking hand to the steering wheel; I braked. The deer seemed to be looking at me. There was a chance she might actually run toward me. I switched off the high-beams. All of this happened in two and a half seconds, before the deer continued across the road, safely to the other side, in a single bound. It was then that, exhaling, I realized the extent to which I had felt for—on behalf of—the animal, and for days after I dwelled on the feeling.
Why, in my memory of the moment, was my thought so precisely that the deer would die? Without being afraid, I had made a leap. I had ascribed to her something like a death wish, or, in more properly psychoanalytic terms, a death instinct.
more here.