On the banks of a river in a woodland nature preserve populated with a variety of animals, a female whitetail deer pauses at her favorite drinking spot. It is secluded in the foliage, thick with tall nourishing grass, and offers protection from predators. She feels safe and relaxed here.
She is a 4-year-old adult doe that has fully-grown and developed. She has a lean sinewy body fitting a perfectly healthy animal of her kind and she is in prime shape. She has never experienced a rut, being an unusually timid creature, but her biological urges are becoming more intense in these early October days and she will most likely seek a mate soon. Her mind, if it can be called that, is constructed of instinct and what she has learned from her day to day experiences. She knows that others shaped like her are friends and regards everything else as a possible threat. She knows how to “speak” to other whitetails and communicate bodily to them as well, but she is by no means intelligent in the human sense.
Being an animal who has been raised in the wild of the preserve, she knows nothing of humans or the chemicals that they have inadvertently dumped into the lake that feeds her favorite drinking spot. She is just an animal going about life as an animal does.
She softly clops over to the bank of the river and checks her surroundings before making herself vulnerable when she takes a drink. She listens intently and raises her nose into the air. There is nothing remotely alarming, and she also sees nothing in her low-resolution colorblind vision. It is safe to let down her constant guard and satiate her thirst.
It is early in the morning and dawn is just beginning to break as the doe reaches her muzzle down to lap up the river water. She sips from the cool chemical-tainted flow until she no longer feels thirst and somewhat notices that her refreshing drink tastes sick to her. Things that taste sick aren’t good for her, so she makes a note that she will need to find a new drinking spot, but thinks nothing more of it. Her body refreshed and hydrated, she proceeds to walk over to a tall bush with ripe blackberries and gracefully eats, noticing an unpleasant sensation in her ruminant stomach. She stops eating and stands still, wavering a bit dizzily on her hooves, feeling that she might vomit.
The water she has drunk is rapidly being absorbed into her body and the foreign chemicals she has ingested are entering her bloodstream. She feels the sick sensation pass and feels comfortable again. She continues eating without incident. When she has taken her share of the berries she expels droppings nearby and goes to lie down in the tall grass, where she will rest for a while before setting out into the forest to resume her search for others like her. It will soon be a driving biological force in her life.
Even as the doe settles in and rests, the highly mutative chemicals that have been absorbed into her central nervous system are rapidly altering her very genetic makeup. In turn, her cellular processes are becoming highly erratic and her body is destabilizing from the form she has always been, preparing to make itself into something new and amazing. She is starting to transform, but is entirely clueless to this fact.