We figured we had earned a ten minute break, so instead of turning left from Granny White onto Otter Creek (toward our next landscape maintenance client), I turned right onto Otter Creek and parked the truck. There are not many reasons Adrian would put his J.R. Tolkien book down mid-chapter, but Radnor Lake turned out to be one of them.

Before we were even halfway to the spillway, we came upon a couple of people standing on the trail, speaking softly. Just as we were about to blow past them, I glanced ahead and saw a buck right on the trail about twenty feet ahead. A second later I registered two more deer in the same area: two bucks and one doe.

But it took a minute for me to realize just how large one of these bucks was, and what was going on.  The massive, stout buck — by far the largest whitetail deer I have ever seen at Radnor Lake, or anywhere else in Tennessee — was closer to the doe than the smaller buck that was standing on or near the trail.

We circled back to the Granny White parking lot by walking up to the spillway, across the bridge, down the gravel road, then down the hill to the truck.