DO DEER EAT ACORNS?

While enjoying my tea early this morning, I was gazing with a pruner's pride out the big kitchen window at the newly trimmed trees and bushes that line the road when my eye was caught by some movement beyond, in the newly cleared land across the way. A little focus revealed that it was the Baron himself, browsing along the seemingly bare ground.

Even though the land has been cleared for human sale (human asking price for 1200 tsubo (1 acre; a very large piece of land in Japan) of rural residential mountain land w/potential lake view = 36,000,000 yen, around 300,000 dollars, which gives you an idea of how expensive land is in Japan. For flat suburb land, 10 or more times that; for city land 20 or more times that).

In any case, whatever the human price, the Baron still clearly holds fundamental title to all the ground around here; he was browsing pretty comfortably over there on a mere speck of his holdings, only now and then leaping for a millisecond in starkly absolute fear before concluding it was only a falling acorn or something, which must be exhausting (though it seems to have worked, over the eons), every few other seconds raising his head to scan the ever-hostile surroundings of the infinitely wealthy. I wondered what he was browsing on over there - everything had been graded flat only a few days ago - couldn't be anything there but acorns; do deer eat acorns?

He looked to be in good shape: plump and sleek for winter, no mortgage, 100% equity, an impressive fur coat and a majestic set of antlers with which to conduct his business, he looked very prosperous casually surveying his estates, which spread far wider than a mere human acre; indeed, they have no borders. He dined for quite a while on the finest deer cuisine in the neighborhood, then wandered off in aristocratic hauteur, without paying a yen.

That's the kind of class you have to be born to.