The Age of Deer E-Book

Erika Howsare

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 542

Beschreibung

A stag leaps on an ancient brooch. A doe and a fawn step across a field at first light. A pair of antlers is silhouetted by the side of a busy road. From the earliest cave paintings to the present day, humans and deer have a long and complex history. Royal harts were the coveted quarry of European kings, while the first Americans relied on deer for everything from buckskins to arrow heads. Once hunted to the point of extinction in some parts of the world, deer numbers have exploded in recent years, causing tension between scientists and conservationists. And yet, this is our own story, as the fortune of deer is inextricably bound up with the actions that we humans take on the world around us. Weaving together history and reportage, in The Age of Deer Erika Howsare deftly explores the relationship between our two species in the line where wildness meets humankind. It is a reminder of the poetry and violence of the natural world, from an exciting new voice in nature writing.

Leseprobe

Praise for

The Age of Deer

“I carried The Age of Deer in my pack for a few days through a canyon in Colorado, and it was a great complement to the lopsided slopes of fallen trees and the sound of roaring water. The deer is due its storyteller, and Howsare takes the role with smartness and grace.”—CRAIG CHILDS, author of Tracing Time

and The Secret Knowledge of Water

“In her lyrical and revelatory The Age of Deer, Erika Howsare crafts the definitive account of humanity’s long-standing dependence on the lovely creatures, their prominent place in myth and legend, and our modern failures to live peaceably alongside them. A cautionary (but often beautiful) tale of good intentions gone awry.”—EARL SWIFT, author of Across the Airless Wilds:

The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings

“By paying close attention to an animal often seen but rarely observed, Erika Howsare reveals that deer are far more mysterious and complicated—and far more deeply embedded in our lives and collective histories—than they may seem. The Age of Deer is a wonderfully perceptive, absorbing, and rewarding exploration of life in all its interconnected forms.”

—MICHELLE NIJHUIS, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“The Age of Deer joins a growing canon of fresh treatments of wild creatures that are anciently enmeshed in the human story. And as Howsare reminds us in her warm, relaxed style, we will always have such a relationship with deer. The next one you see is going to intrigue you in a whole new way.”

—DAN FLORES, New York Times bestselling author of Coyote America

“Extraordinary and absorbing, The Age of Deer proves John Muir’s notion that when we pick out one thing in the universe we find it hitched to everything else. Howsare understands that we live in an age of numbness when ‘few of us are willing to really feel,’ and suggests, through the lives of deer and her experience with them, an elemental antidote.”

—DAVID GESSNER, author of Return of the Osprey and All the Wild That Remains

“A warm, engaging, and thoughtful look at what matters to deer and what they mean to us. Howsare is fascinated by the paradoxical status of an animal we all think we know: not tame, but not quite wild either; fetishized by some, resented by others; all too common, and yet impossible to ignore. I highly recommend it!”

—NATE BLAKESLEE, author of American Wolf

“Erika Howsare has written a fascinating and brilliantly researched book on deer. She turns that research into lively stories that range from finding deer beds in the hilly bramble behind her home to eating deer tartare at an upscale winery, from Marco Polo’s deer conservation measures to the high-fence deer hunting preserves in Texas, from deer as a ‘food of luxury’ to deer as a ‘food of mercy.’ She has an ear for the conundrums and contradictions of our entanglements with these creatures, who increasingly occupy a middle ground between wild and domestic, survivors of our species’ worst predations. This is also a book about nature, culture, and our nationhood—an interrogation of the American project as that story continues to unfold across our deer-happy landscape.”

—ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author of A Woven World

 

 

Copyright © 2024 by Erika Howsare

Published in the UK in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-178578-946-5

eBook: 978-178578-948-9

The right of Erika Howsare to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Book design by Olenka Burgess

To my dearest: John, Elsie, Rosa

 

 

Landscapes are ephemeral compared to species.

ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING ET AL.

As all hunters know, the deer is the sweetest of game.

PAUL SHEPARD

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I: STANDING

Chapter 1: Dancing

Chapter 2: Goods

Chapter 3: The Graph

Chapter 4: Value

Chapter 5: Kinfolk

PART II: STRUGGLING

Chapter 6: Capacity

Chapter 7: Decline

Chapter 8: Management

Chapter 9: Should Not Be

Chapter 10: Bodies

Chapter 11: Pests

Chapter 12: The Cull

Chapter 13: Victims

PART III: CRAVING

Chapter 14: The Fetish

Chapter 15: For Show

Chapter 16: November Dawns

Chapter 17: Craving

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction

SUMMERTIME: THE LIGHT WAS FULL AND GREEN. I SAT IN a camper in the woods, writing, facing a steep hillside. And here came twin fawns; one, then the other.

They couldn’t see me, despite my easy view of them. They made their way down through beech and oak trees along a flank of the hill, on a pathway I’d often seen deer use—that I myself have often used, walking with my daughters.

The fawns were a few months old, still spotted along their sides, but past the newborn stage when their mother would have left them curled on the ground while she went off to find food. At this age, they’d be spending much of their time roaming along with her, learning how to move through her home range and what to eat.

But where was the mother? The twins had arrived at the bottom of the hill, where there’s a gate between stone pillars and a place to cross the quiet one-lane road. They loped across the pavement and into the tangle of weeds and boulders on the other side.

I kept writing. Maybe fifteen minutes passed. Then I looked up and she had materialized, a little uphill of the gate: not walking, just standing. She faced the way her fawns had gone, her head raised high. I watched her for a second or two—some fleeting mother-to-mother understanding in my mind: You’re looking for them, aren’t you?—before the fawns burst into view, galloping back across the road and straight toward where she stood.

They were so much like human children as they ran, just like when I come home and my own girls rush right at me. It was that same unadulterated bond. There was no slowing down as they reached their mother. They crowded under her and jabbed their faces into her belly and began to nurse.

I laughed out loud. I’d never seen deer nursing before! They were just like baby goats or calves, the lusty way they went at it, bumping their mother’s hindquarters backward as they latched on. Being half-grown, they had to crouch to fit into the space under her body, their back legs folded and their forelegs outstretched; I could see the nearer one pawing the ground repeatedly with a front hoof, and again I was reminded of my own children, how they used to stroke my shirt with a hand as I nursed them. And I remembered that mix of sensations—patience and immense satisfaction—that, now, I imagined I could see in the stance of the doe, stoically waiting while her babies drank her down.

A car approached; I could hear it coming over the rise. The three weren’t in danger where they stood, but the doe would not want to keep nursing as the car went by. My mind flicked to the driver, wondering if that person would get to see what I was seeing, wondering if they’d be delighted, too.

The mother leapt, as lightly as a dandelion seed; no disentanglement, no pulling or tugging; she just seemed to float up and over her fawns as she moved away up the hill, calm and self-contained. The white broom of her tail whisked the air once or twice.

The fawns followed. The car passed. And the moment was done.

I live in rural Virginia, on a narrow road that noses against the austere, forested wall of the Blue Ridge. My yard backs up to thousands of acres of woods. White-tailed deer are a constant in these introverted mountains, almost as elemental as the trees. Just in the last week, I’ve had two encounters with small groups of deer, found tracks in my garden, and discovered two of their bodies decomposing in the woods.

Yet half an hour away there are big suburban housing developments where residents spot deer just as often as I do. And in Charlottesville, the place we mean when we say we’re going “to town,” deer also thrive, in the pockets between busy bypasses and leafy residential warrens and dry cleaners and bakeries. However strongly we might associate them with wilderness, there are deer who spend their whole lives in cities, and for the most part, they do fine.

Species like dogs have a special relationship to humans that has evolved over millennia, one based on mutual benefit. Others, like big cats and whales, would be much better off without humans in the picture at all. But deer—in their quiet way—occupy a middle zone between those extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and in many ways, they actually prefer to share habitat with us. All across North America, as in many other parts of the world, we exist in intimate proximity to deer. Like any family member, they stir knotty feelings.

In my earliest memory of deer, my friend’s father is dragging a carcass toward me. It’s late fall in rural Pennsylvania—probably overcast, brown and gray. I’m standing in their yard, looking across a ravine to where he and another man, both wearing coveralls, have emerged from the woods with a deer they’ve shot.

The powerline cut where they’re walking is a brushy no-man’s-land, running up and over ridges in a straight line. Behind me is the road my friend and I both live on. Nearby is her house, chocolate brown, where we spend a lot of time playing dress-up and pretending to be detectives. Downhill are the ammonia-smelling pens where her father keeps his hunting dogs.

He is a frightening, bad-tempered man. His words for us are always harsh. I remember him in this moment much more clearly than the deer; like the sky on that day, his presence is oppressive, and I don’t want to be there when he enters the yard. The memory ends when he’s still far away; we must have skedaddled inside.

My uncle Jim hunted, too. I was bookish and shy of these men, and unlike them, I had little connection to the woods. In Boy Scouts, my brother learned how to make a fire and pitch a tent, but in Girl Scouts we wove sit-upons from wax paper and made Christmas ornaments out of different pasta shapes. I don’t ever remember seeing a deer in our yard, and though it seems impossible, I have no memories of seeing living deer anywhere. They must have been there, but it was the dead ones that left an impression.

We lived south of Pittsburgh amid the small-town ruins of extractive industry. Pulling things out of the land—coal and natural gas—had a long legacy there. The Pittsburgh rivers, Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio, are big and muscular, and the industries had been too, but during my childhood in the 1980s, the general feeling was one of embitterment and loss. Many steel mills had closed; jobs had disappeared; downtowns had hollowed out, leaving only lawyers’ offices and hearing-aid stores. Driving around, we saw gravel pits, junkyards, moldering industry and raw-looking farms. People lived modestly and carefully because they had to. The folks who tended to talk about the loss of prosperity were the same ones who had gun racks in their basements.

My parents weren’t in this category. Both their fathers had hunted, but they didn’t; our house contained no trophy heads but lots of LPs, books, and art. Culturally, if not geographically, my mother and father had moved some distance away from their roots. When I came of age I took another big step, to urban California, and began to see Rust Belt ruins with more detachment. Looking at photos from this time, I see I was also drawn to the caricatures we make of living things: dolls in a junkshop window, decals of spring fawns and bunnies. I made ironic trophies of these places where our relationship to beings had been stretched beyond the realm of myth and snapped, becoming grotesque and candy-sweet.

After some time in California, where I met my now-husband, John, I returned to the East Coast and landed in Virginia, outside Charlottesville. This was not the Rust Belt; it felt gentler and cleaner. We lived in deep woods, learned to identify bird calls, and started a garden. I worked on a small farm for three summers, harvesting vegetables and observing as other workers dealt with live and slaughtered Berkshire hogs. We moved to a rented cottage on a large estate and, wandering its acres, found a spot where many deer bones had been dumped. I know we saw living deer too, though again, I don’t specifically remember them—except one, a white doe that we spotted from the car one Halloween at dusk.

We were becoming more attuned to the land. We bought a house at the foot of the Blue Ridge, kept chickens, and studied the trees. I also worked as a writer and was asked to produce a column on homesteading and “green living,” then a phrase much in circulation. My subject matter boiled down to dilemmas. There were the minutiae: Should we rip out invasive brush if it’s sheltering songbirds? Is it better to buy hybrid seeds from the local hardware store, or mail-order heirloom ones from Maine? And there was the big picture: What does stewardship mean? What was done to this place in the past and how should that inform our actions?

These questions spilled outside the boundaries of the column and into longer and longer essays and manuscripts of poetry. What is natural, and is natural behavior necessarily more ethical? Our ties to animals were the thorniest dilemmas of all. Human concepts framed their lives and deaths in deeply unsettling ways. The questions about them looked back at me with eyes of their own.

Life among the ruins, the biology of artifice: These were still my habitat.

All this time, deer had been lurking at the edges, as they do. In the background of our wedding photos was a deer skull we’d picked up at that dump site and hung on the wall of the farm cottage where we married. In our conversations with neighbors, there was talk about deer eating people’s gardens. We saw them leaping fences or lying crumpled along the road on our long commute. Gunshots pierced the quiet in the fall; a neighbor brought us the tenderloin from a whitetail he’d shot on the edge of our land. The door handle on our old shed, installed by some former owner, was made of an antler. Now and then, I’d hear about my brother getting a deer back in Pennsylvania; six years younger than me, he’d learned to hunt from Uncle Jim after I left for college.

A lot of roads led to this book. I don’t remember one moment when I decided to write it; it must have been an ordinary one, like spotting a deer on an evening run, or dusting off the deer bones we’d found in the woods. My understanding of the human place on earth, shaped by post-industrial rupture, scented by tomato plants, was profoundly uneasy. And deer were a single node where many of my questions—about damage, repair, myth, nourishment, and the things that divide us—might come together.

Deer speak to our twin American obsessions with death and its denial. But being in Virginia had given me an awareness of deer as living beings, fellow inhabitants of the landscape who are not rare, but familiar. They are animals whose impossible beauty plays against their commonness, their constant abundance. Deer sightings are most interesting to me when they’re in some kind of half-human zone: a backyard, a roadside. I note their scat on trails, or look up to find them watching me from among young trees and the rusting chassis of a pickup truck.

I’m writing this in winter. These last few months have seen the annual fall rutting period for deer, which coincides with both hunting season and the highest incidence of deer–vehicle collisions. In general, deer act a little crazy in the autumn before settling down to survival mode in winter, and their interactions with people reflect that cycle. Fall is a good time to observe the more contentious, fraught aspects of our modern relationship to them—the signs that, whether we think of it or not, we are living in an age of deer.

In America, just during these last few months, people have debated the ethics of baiting deer with food or doe urine in order to shoot them, of hunting deer using dogs, and—in a number of communities around the country—of culling programs that reduce urban deer herds. We’ve celebrated young children who have managed to kill big bucks, and punished an eighteen-year-old who filmed himself riding one in the backyard. We’ve encouraged hunters to kill coyotes, so that the coyotes won’t kill as many deer, so that hunters will have more chances to kill deer.

We like it when people with some perceived disadvantage—little girls, old women, wounded warriors—successfully bring down deer. But we also like it when deer become victims for people to save: from icy rivers, from storm drains, from fences and clotheslines in which they get tangled. One woman from Colorado posted a video of a mountain lion attacking a deer; off-camera, her distressed voice asks, “Oh, the poor thing—what should I do?” as though humans have some responsibility to stop predators from eating.

On Vancouver Island, Canada, deer started turning up with BB gun injuries; conservation officers suspected homeowners had been shooting them to protect their shrubs. Mule deer dangled from helicopters in Utah, where scientists studied their health.

While officials reminded the public that feeding deer is a bad idea, stories nonetheless surfaced of people using food to lure deer onto their porches and even into their homes. The town of Pulaski, New York, announced that it would install a bronze statue commemorating Bella, a deer that had become the town’s unofficial mascot. Raised by a farmer after her mother was killed by a car, Bella lived her adult life in town and was unusually comfortable with people; a local newspaper called her “a special member of the Pulaski community.”

Several people were gored by deer; in Michigan, a hunter was killed by a deer he’d just shot.

As in most years, vehicles in the U.S. killed well over a million deer, and hunters killed nearly six million.

Chronic wasting disease, which is fatal to deer, was confirmed in more than twenty-five states and kept on spreading; this continued to fuel debate over the sale and transport of deer raised on game farms.

A deer crashed through the storm door of a home in Edmond, Oklahoma, running wildly through several rooms before (according to Newsweek) “locking itself in a bathroom.” The homeowner described the scene inside his house as being like “a bomb, an explosion, a crash.” Animal control officers pulled the deer out of the house by a rope tied to its antlers. Then they euthanized it, citing its “numerous cuts.”

Etsy offered more than eight thousand products whose designs incorporated deer skulls, including window decals, cornhole boards, and hip flasks. A new game came onto the market called Deer Pong, in which players toss balls into plastic cups hanging from the antlers of an electronic buck’s head.

At least two deer were spotted with Christmas lights tangled in their antlers.

Despite all the commotion, deer remain, living their lives—usually with a quieter sort of drama.

A few months ago, I bent down to photograph some pink plastic flowers that were piled in the corner of a little cemetery near my house. They must have blown off a headstone and been caught by the fence; they were half-buried in dead leaves from the monstrous oak nearby. My daughter, who often spots things the rest of us miss, called me over to see something.

It was a dead fawn, trapped by one rear hoof near the top of the fence, the rest of its body draped downward, head and neck resting on the ground. Though its snared leg still looked much as it had when the fawn was alive, with tawny fur and a pert black hoof, the body became progressively more decomposed as our eyes followed it down, down, all the way to the dark leathery skin that clung to the hollow-eyed skull.

We couldn’t tell how exactly the foot had gotten tangled. But it was easy enough to imagine what must have come next: the awful struggle, the exhaustion and starvation, the likelihood that the fawn’s mother had been nearby, unable to help, forced at some point to leave her baby to die.

Like the well-meaning woman asking “What should I do?” while the mountain lion pinned its prey, I had the urge to help the fawn; I wished it were still alive and I could free it. Unlike the mountain lion, however, the fence was not a natural predator. It was one of the many, many lines that humans have drawn across the land, enclosing and dividing space in human terms.

But calling the fence an unnatural threat to a native animal would be too simple. This fawn was part of a deer population that, in itself, has been profoundly shaped by people. Virginia and other eastern states actually imported deer in the mid-twentieth century, restocking herds that had been depleted by human hunting and habitat destruction.

In places where wolves and big cats are largely absent from the picture, humans are now the most significant predator of deer. Where humans once acted to raise their numbers, now wildlife managers rely on hunters as a sort of volunteer army, keeping the deer population in check.

This fawn was a victim of a human artifact. But then, the fawn itself was a human artifact. It owed its existence in part to the laws that restrict hunting, the landscaping plants that likely made up some of its diet, the lack of predators. This is the biology of artifice. And the fawn’s quality of life, too—the experiences it had while it was alive—was massively shaped by human action. Undoubtedly it crossed roads many times in its life; was barked at by pet dogs; ate non-native plants; drank from compromised waters; chose bedding spots away from all-night lights; followed its mother along paths whose courses tracked or avoided human driveways, property lines, powerlines, fields. Perhaps, before it died, it had even managed to jump a few fences.

I am not a deer hunter, deer tracker, or deer scientist. Before I wrote this book, I’d never even touched a live deer, unless you count the two times I’ve collided with them while driving (or that snapshot of me as a preschooler, feeding a fawn at a petting zoo).

But like so many people, I see deer almost every day, mostly in the middle distance. They usually move away, in a mood of caution but not panic.

There’s a curious quality to these sightings: a mixture of interest and habituation. We almost always remark on deer when we see them, an acknowledgment that we don’t often grant crows, vultures, or squirrels. Deer are bigger and more charismatic than any of these by an order of magnitude, and it just feels odd to let their presence go unremarked.

Too, there’s something about how a deer looks back. A squirrel or a vulture seems quite oblivious to my presence, whether I’m watching or not, whereas deer are clearly attuned to my arrival and my intentions. Knowing that deer are primed to react makes each one seem like more of a live wire.

Yet deer are too familiar to be surprising. They don’t appear right underfoot, strike from the underbrush, or lurk on shelves in the toolshed. They usually receive nothing but a matter-of-fact “There’s a deer”—yet they receive this almost every time they appear.

The human relationship to large animals has historically been a destructive one; as we fanned over the globe, megafauna mostly disappeared. Deer are the largest wild animals we still live with in any widespread way, one of the signal species of our time, as firmly established in our cities as in our national parks.

More simply, their size is like our size: an eerie analog for our own physical presence. If you wrapped your arms around a deer of any North American species, it would be much like embracing another human adult.

The prey status of deer makes them “good” by default, and perhaps that appeals to a certain side of the human self-image: we like to think we’re innocent, just doing our best to get along. Watching deer, we see a picture of what we might be like if we were wild, eating our food right off the stem, subject at every moment to predation.

Around the world and through the ages, from the Argentinian pampas to the Siberian steppes to the Scottish Highlands, deer have provided people with meat. (In the main, they haven’t given us milk, though the notion is oddly persistent, chasing itself through various mythologies and legends.) Our bodies have been entwined with theirs in deep and sometimes troubling ways. We’ve used their skins to cover our skin; they’ve furnished us with clothing and tools, often in greater quantities than any other game animal. They are dependable yet wild providers. For complex reasons, they’ve mostly stayed out from under the roof of domestication. They remain uncowed.

They’ve also given us ideas: stories, icons, and imagery that begin in our deepest artmaking past and continue through to the present. A Nlaka’pamux story from British Columbia tells of a human hunter who marries a deer woman and learns, from her family, to always throw the bones of his quarry into water, so that the deer can come back to life. He soon realizes he has been hunting the woman’s own brothers, but the ritual restores them. “Thus these Deer people lived by hunting and killing each other and then reviving.” By the end of the story, he has hunted, killed, and resurrected his own wife and son. It’s a complex interspecies alliance, as though deer and people are metaphorical in-laws, shocking and harmonious all at once.

Other myths tell of women who shapeshift into deer, or deer who steal the sun and carry it away in their antlers. Their profiles—slim and shapely—are like letters of the alphabet, initials that stand for wilderness, grace, and hunters’ quarry. They have been—they still are—what is desired, what flees, what is pursued, and sometimes what gets caught.

Unlike other species with whom deer have key interactions—predators, food sources—humans bring ideas to the relationship. We carry inside us images and narratives that tell us how to look at the deer before us. They’re a screen upon which we project our conflicting concepts about nature. They exist somewhere between what we believe about nature and what’s actually true.

Given all that, deer may not only be a great historical species with long, tangled, essential ties to humanity. They may also be the species that perfectly symbolizes the way we live with nature now, and the way we will carry on into whatever weird, paradoxical future awaits.

Many mythical heroes have followed deer away from the familiar and toward new destinies, glorious or tragic. This is true for Rama of the Ramayana, King Arthur, Herakles, warriors and saints. Once I began to trace their paths—trained my sights on them like a hunter would do—deer led me, too, to a world of surprises.

To look at our modern relationship with deer, as I found, is to step into some of the discomforts—political and social—of how people live with each other. And it means asking the biggest question of all: How will we live on this planet?

There is a long-standing tradition in certain American yards of displaying life-size artificial deer. These may serve as targets for shooting practice. Just as often, plastic deer are purely for decoration.

If landscape painters have often placed deer in bucolic wilderness settings in order to symbolize purity and abundance, then imitating that look in one’s yard seems to broadcast “Here is a peaceable kingdom.” It’s a message of coexistence, as though our dwellings were no disturbance at all to wild animals, and might even be favorite landmarks along their routes.

In the case of deer, this can be a version of the truth, especially if we’ve planted some tasty hosta or lettuce nearby. Not so for the unfortunate buck who approached a plastic doe in an Illinois yard a few years ago and tried to mate with her.

Humans watching from indoors filmed the whole thing: how the buck sauntered near, mounted, did his best to copulate (here some strategic blurring was added in postproduction), and only gave up when the doe’s head—this must have been a down-market product—popped right off her body.

In the video, the buck jumps away in confusion, then comes back to give a forlorn sniff at the fallen plastic head. It’s the wrong texture, scent, temperature; unresponsive and stiff; but nonetheless, enough like the idea of a deer to have substituted, briefly, for the real thing.

The Age of Deer

Part I

Standing

CHAPTER 1

Dancing

IT WAS THE NIGHT OF WINTER SOLSTICE, AND HERE WERE all the trappings of a school play: music stands, metal risers, handmade banners. The battered stage was hung with garlands of evergreen. My family and I, among several hundred others, sat with our coats draped over the backs of our plastic chairs.

Two mothers whispered—“Oh, is that Evelyn?”—“Yes.” A baby coughed.

Christmas would barrel over us in just a few days, but there were no mangers or Magi here. This was the annual winter play presented by a small private school near my home. We’d come again that year to soak up its bohemian patchwork of song and chant: pagan Yule traditions, solstice rituals, and medieval Christmas overtones. Kids were dressed as aproned villagers, as avatars of the four elements, as Saint George and Father Christmas, and as Holly and Ivy, the beloved evergreen leaves of winter.

In the audience, I spotted a woman I know and nodded to her. She leaned against the wall, wearing deer antlers on her head and a long cloak of dark green, like a hemlock forest at dusk.

Some elements of the performance change from year to year, but the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance stays the same. Abbots Bromley is a village in the West Midlands of England, and the program hinted that the dance originated there nearly a thousand years ago. As the first notes of the tune cut through the murmur and movement of the audience and seven dancers entered in a stately single file, the Horn Dance did carry an unmistakable sense of antiquity. It had the feel of an artifact older than the red cross on Saint George’s breastplate. This dance felt almost prehistoric, and it was the antlers the kids held to their heads that made it so.

The music was a halting, minor-key tune played on recorder by a lone eighth grader at the corner of the stage. The antlered dancers wore plain tunics, the color of deerskin. The choreography was very simple: The dancers slowly crossed the stage, pausing to lift a foot behind them every few paces, the toe pointing backward just like a deer’s hoof when it strolls through grass. Some of the girls’ legs were nearly that slender.

A dignified melody, almost a dirge. The dancers formed two lines and approached each other, then retreated and bowed; the lines interlaced. In a diagonal across the stage, they arranged themselves by height and by antler size: the old obsession with status, manifested in bone.

In Abbots Bromley, the dance is one of a number of traditional European “hoodening rituals,” in which people once donned animal skins or heads, dancing or marching to ensure a successful hunt. As far back as the fourth century, Saint Augustine is said to have condemned these practices and called them “filthy,” both their antiquity and their pagan power seen as threats by the ascendant church.

Gradually, as the dancers and the tune looped around on themselves, the audience settled into a hypnotic hush. If a shabby auditorium in Virginia was not the Horn Dance’s native habitat, it carried power nonetheless, even when its vehicles were nervous middle-schoolers. That naked, shaky music felt to me like the struggle of any human, striving within a matrix—family, community—and these ritualized movements conveyed a common need for the good luck of sustenance.

Here in Virginia, the deer season was mostly behind us. Some people in the room had killed does or bucks that fall. Some would go home to venison backstrap in their freezers, venison stew in Crock-Pots on their counters, racks of antlers on their walls or porches. Some may have given meat to hungry neighbors. Surely there are households in this county where people pray to kill deer in the fall, so that throughout the winter they’ll have enough to eat.

When Europeans encountered Indigenous people on the edges of North America, they must have understood the importance of deer to the Native population. Such a connection was part of their own cultural foundation, too. Throughout much of what would come to be called the Old World, people had lived with and made use of deer for generations.

Across cultures, deer are frequent actors in stories and myths. But in truth, our intimate involvement with deer is older than any of these artifacts. We’ve been bound by mysterious ties since before any story we remember.

Deer keep company with some of the oldest human graves in the world. A tomb found in Qafzeh Cave—a rock shelter in the Yizrael Valley in Israel—contains the bones of at least twenty-seven people, which have rested on this rock ledge for nearly a hundred thousand years’ worth of days and nights. The people lie among hearths and various animal remains, including red and fallow deer. Archaeologists point to ornamentation with ocher and seashells as evidence that these were deliberate human burials.

The people at Qafzeh did another remarkable thing: They seem to have spent many years caring for a child with a terrible brain injury. After a blow to the head around age five, the child, known as Qafzeh 11, would likely have suffered “significant neurological and psychological disorders, including troubles in social communication,” yet lived until age twelve or thirteen. After death, he or she was laid supine into a pit, in a ceremonial burial that apparently indicates “a unique case of differential treatment”—extra honor, as it were, as though to make up for such a compromised existence. It’s a pair of deer antlers that signals this distinction. They’re held in the child’s folded hands, near the face.

Antlers keep company with other prehistoric remains, too, ornamenting hearths, or forming beds or roofs inside tombs.

We can only speculate on what such offerings meant at the time, but we do know that more recent mythologies cast deer as psychopomps: escorts to the afterlife, a part of nature that breaks off to soften nature’s deadly force. It’s a wish for someone to take care of us on the journey to the hereafter—to oversee us, forgive us, keep us company. Vikings, for example, believed that a deer with oaken antlers, called Eikthyrnir, wandered Valhalla and accompanied fallen heroes on the journey across the river to the land of the dead. The stag’s antlers dripped water into a spring that fed all the rivers of the world: a connection between deer, water, and renewal that infuses many myths.

I once saw a reference to deerskin burial shrouds, too. Certainly this idea exists in legends—like in the Chansons de Roland, when Charlemagne has the bodies of Roland and two other heroes prepared for burial: “The barons’ bodies they then take up and wind / Straitly in shrouds made of the roebuck’s hide.”

It’s a tantalizing idea, that people wrapped the dead in soft, warm skins as they laid them into the earth. Something about it is tremendously comforting.

There’s an old Siberian-Turkish story about a hunter who reconstructs the skeleton of a deer he’s just killed, substituting a piece of wood for the rib his arrow had broken. Later, he kills a different deer and discovers the wooden rib inside its body.

Hunters in both Eurasia and the Americas felt bound to treat their quarry as a respected interlocutor, a sort of dance partner in the ritual of survival. A deer was not just a target, but a conscious being who participated in the event of its own demise. Though its meat would transmute into human life, bones were the undestroyed basis by which deer life, in a larger sense, could continue. To carefully lay out a deer’s skeleton after cleaning and butchering its body was a gesture of honor and atonement. In turn, one became one’s prey. In some places, eating venison was thought to make one swift and wise; in others, it was said to breed timidity.

Some cultures propose a single, eternal figure who represents all deer: Awi Usdi is a white deer who oversees Cherokee hunters, making sure that each slaughtered deer is properly asked for forgiveness. If a hunter neglects the ritual, Awi Usdi will cripple that person with rheumatism.

Different groups made different rules for hunters. Some banned boastful talk; others made it taboo for hunters to cook or consume certain parts of a deer, like stomachs and tongues, or to hunt while one’s wife was pregnant. Before the hunt, hunters around the globe might dress in deerskins or make deer sounds. In North America, hunters purified themselves in steam or with special elixirs, called or sang out to their prey, and set off on the hunt carrying charms sewn into deerskin pouches: crystals, pigments, or the foot of a fawn.

Even the stags galloping across the walls of Paleolithic cave art sites have been understood this way—as an address to the animal other. In Europe’s most significant cave galleries, Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira, deer are one of the four most frequently depicted subjects.

We are still finding more ancient deer on the rocks. In 2003, archaeologists discovered more than twenty figures inside a cave called Church Hole, one of many caves in a limestone gorge in England named Creswell Crags. The images are the first Ice Age art identified in Britain; they are engraved, not painted, which helped them go unnoticed even during many decades of excavating the cave floor.

“We know that Neanderthals were here, fifty thousand years ago,” said the paleontologist Angharad Jones as we crossed a tiny bridge and followed a path into the gorge. To one side, a group of schoolkids were throwing spears at a rubber bison. Jones, tall and elegant in a trench coat, had already shown my family and me a reindeer mandible found here, perhaps 57,000 years old, maybe dragged into a cave by hyenas. Now she led us through a metal gate and into the mouth of Church Hole, where Ice Age Homo sapiens had summered, hunting wild horses and mountain hare.

Deer at Lascaux

We squinted as she angled a flashlight at the wall, then moved a laser light along the rough stone just above eye level, tracing a stag. “Here’s the nose . . . you see the ear . . . the antler . . .” And as the red dot moved toward the stag’s front hoof, we all said Ohhhh at the same time: it was such a leg, muscled and real as our own. A profile known to earthlings, as meaningful as that of the waxing moon.

Any theory about cave art is speculative. Were the figures made by bored teenagers? Were they the anchor of a ritual, an expression of an eternal dreamtime, or storytelling props? Jones told us that the species this figure depicted—red deer—was not known ever to have lived in this area. Like the flint used to carve it more than twelve thousand years ago, knowledge of these animals was an import from elsewhere. As the artists migrated in and out of mainland Europe, this deer had ridden here with them, inside their minds: a memory from some other place.

Outside, in the gorge, couples walked lapdogs on leashes, and a man flew a drone over the lake—fringed with green now, though a film in Creswell’s museum had shown us that during the Ice Age, it was too cold for trees to grow here. It was breathtaking to think about how easily this communication could have been missed: the thinness of that tensile thread, connecting us across millennia to people who had stood here in a different world, like a line on a family tree.

In the Americas, deer weave in and out of Indigenous stories as easily as they thread through human life.

Cree people tell stories about the trickster Wesucechak, who grants language to the people but sometimes steals it back. When he turns into a deer and causes a woman named Two Loons to forget how to say “deer,” they both understand that a vital food source is at stake: If she can’t call the deer, no one will have venison. She recovers her memory, though, singing a beautiful song to the deer (“You who stands sideways / looking at us / You who flick your tail / up . . .”). Wesucechak ends up frightened and foolish, his false antlers tangled in trees, hungry for venison that the people won’t share.

The word, then—the name of the deer—is not just a label; it is a sacred bond. It encloses the whole, intensely physical relationship between humans and an essential animal.

In the Sonoran Desert, on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, deer dances, or pahko, are still an active part of Yaqui culture, and the image of the deer dancer, a human head topped by an antlered deer head, peppers the region. The pahko are intimately tied to hunting, but really they seem to encompass an entire metaphysics of being and relation. Reenacting a hunt, the dancer plays not hunter but animal—glancing around for danger, twitching and stepping nervously. Loudly shaking a rattle in each hand, the dancer weaves those movements sonically, seamlessly, into the human music that undergirds them.

Meanwhile, the lyrics of the songs, recursive as a mantra, constantly shift between human and deer perspectives. So a person says “There he comes out” and the deer replies “I come out from there.” The songs ask permission to hunt through profound acknowledgments: that the animal has its own point of view, and that deer minds and bodies correlate to those of humans. Flowers tangled in his antlers, the deer enters the human realm in which he may be asked to give his life for human survival. But the very songs used to ask for this gift are said to have been translated from the language of the deer themselves, by hunters who had crept close enough to hear their talk, using deerskin disguises.

Our fascination with the shimmering line between alive and dead makes it an essential borderland, and it’s expressed in the way relics like skins, bones, and antlers carry their inherent potency into art and ritual. Maybe the fact that deer have been food for so long, in so many places, explains the way people have linked them equally with death and life.

If deer are border dwellers in the human imagination, that’s entirely fitting with their place in the physical and ecological world, where they are in fact denizens of the edges. They skirt the fringes of forest and clearing. They are most active at dawn and dusk, the twilight hours when day and night shade into each other. Their natural home is analogous to what the Greeks called eschatiai—lands of transition, the places where civilization and wilderness meet and interlace.

The boundary is also a pregnant zone of possibility. The deer is the sacred animal of Artemis, the Greek goddess who leads a retinue of nymphs on nightly hunts. In a strange way, through her vow of chastity, Artemis encompasses the potential for procreation—the gift of life that also means the death of maidenhood. For Artemis (Diana to the Romans), this change is always deferred, never actually realized. As wild land could someday be cultivated, Artemis embodies becoming, just like the deer, her familiar.

In fact, all humans—even in the more settled periods of our lives—are profoundly unsettled creatures. Trout belong to the stream and owls to the treetops, but humans are constantly in and out of the ecotone, venturing forth, retreating to shelter; seeking water, then an overlook, then the privacy of a thicket, always on the move and on the make. Evolutionarily, our descent from trees to ground level coincided with the fixture in our character of a certain perpetually juvenile quality, as though we can never quite call ourselves finished. Animals of the margins, like deer, may be icons not only of life transitions but also of our very nature as people.

They embody binaries: victim and transgressor. Elusive and ubiquitous. Symbols of life and memento mori.

For a long time Europeans thought of deer not only as symbolic, but also as magic. Medieval bestiaries claimed that when ill, deer could delay death by swallowing snakes or eating crabs. Stags were said to purge the snakes’ venom from their bodies by drinking large amounts of water, after which they would shed their antlers, making way for new ones to grow. The bestiaries also described deer as having life spans of a hundred years or more, according to one legend that proposes Alexander the Great as a sort of proto-biologist, capturing and marking deer for experimental reasons.

This vital energy could carry through to people: One could find protection from fever by eating venison, or drive away snakes with the smoke of burning antlers. Medea was supposed to have revived the slain King Aeson by infusing a decoction of deer’s liver into his veins. Ancient Egyptians may have used antlers as a remedy for headaches.

One English folk legend tells of King Richard’s gamekeeper, Herne the Hunter, who during one fateful hunt heroically throws himself in front of the king to save him from being gored by a cornered stag. Herne, who managed to knife the deer to death even as it speared his own body, knows he is mortally wounded, saying alliteratively to the king, “A hurt from hart’s horn bringeth to the bier.” Then he faints.

Fortunately, he’s soon revived when a mysterious man steps out from among the trees, cuts off the deer’s head, and affixes it to Herne’s own head. But the cure comes at a terrible price: The healer has caused Herne to lose all his skill in horsemanship and archery. Several embarrassing hunts later, the king is forced to fire him. Herne hangs himself from an oak tree with the hart’s skull again lashed to his own head. The magic of resurrection-by-deer has proven no more than temporary, and the antlers have become a death mask.

Herne’s ghost haunts Windsor Forest through the reigns of seven more monarchs, his “great ragg’d horns” earning a nod from Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor. He’s still well-known enough to turn up in modern media from comics to pop songs, a story laced with that old idea: that deer are a guide to death.

Some of the old deer images are fundamental enough that they keep arising in our present reality. D. H. Lawrence was captivated by images of deer and predators in ancient Etruscan tombs. One day I was reading his meditations on these paintings when I heard the snort of an alarmed whitetail and looked out the window to see a doe being chased through the yard by the neighbor’s German shepherd. Neither was running at top speed; the doe easily outflanked the dog without breaking out of a trot, and it was obvious that the dog was playing, just passing the time on a mild June afternoon. Each carried out a role prescribed by evolution, even if blunted by the conditions of our time, in which the predator is Purina-fattened and the prey knows there’s no real danger.

I turned back to Lawrence: “Above the false door in the angle of the gable is a fine design: two black, wide-mouthed pale-maned lions seated back to back . . . They each one lift a black paw against the cringing head of a cowering spotted deer, that winces to the death-blow.”

He finds a yin-and-yang interdependence in this vision, which spans dozens of cultures. Homer tells us that the brooch Odysseus wore on his cloak, when he first left Ithaca, was engraved with a dog attacking a fawn. Wolves, dogs, and lions sinking teeth and claws into deer is a motif that endlessly recurs in Old World art, from prehistory into antiquity and beyond. Always the victim is shown in the high relief of the terrible moment when it succumbs to the predator.

Take, for example, an exquisite silver gilt amphora, found in Ukraine and made in the fourth century B.C., on which griffins attack an antlered stag. The predators may be fantastical, but the deer itself is almost more realistic than a photo. We see perfectly its ribs, its cloven hooves, its finely expressive face. This is allegory, not history, but the loving attention to the anatomy of the deer speaks to an intimacy with real animals.

The amphora “must have been used for koumiss, a fermented juice based on mares’ milk,” says the monograph, Scythian Art, in which I found it. Scythian is a term that archaeologists apply not only to a group of tribes who lived on the steppes near the Black Sea, but also to a broader world of shared culture that stretched across much of Central Asia for nearly a millennium before the Common Era.

The Scythians themselves, nomadic herdsmen and fierce warriors, did not rely on deer for survival; their domesticated cattle were their main source for meat and hides. Yet their artwork is obsessed with deer. Stags decorate their scabbards, their bridles, their vessels and jewelry. What did deer mean to these people, so utterly distant from us, who got drunk on fermented horse milk?

Maybe just victims who yield to greater force. But then, some of these images inspire sympathy for the hunted. Though their people were often the victors, there was something about victimhood that the Scythian craftspeople were drawn to mentally inhabit. They got inside the pain of the defeated, as though asking what agony might have to do with dignity.

Somehow it’s antlers that embody this paradox. Antlers in Scythian art are a party: They loop back on themselves, they form repeating series of hooked crescents; they make flame shapes, tree shapes, wave shapes. They go beyond visual hyperbole to the purely fanciful: Another stag has antlers that extend for what must be six or eight feet above and behind its head, and each tine ends in the plumed head of a bird. This animal, too, is being ravaged by a griffin.

One spring day in 1891, a crew of peat-cutters in a Danish bog unearthed something astonishing. Their irons turned up an exquisite piece of metalwork, an ancient cauldron more than two feet wide—a true buried treasure.

Archaeologists have more questions than answers about the vessel that would come to be called the Gundestrup Cauldron. We don’t know exactly how old it is (best guess: around two millennia), who made it, or how it ended up in Denmark. But it clearly depicts a man, or a god, with an imposing rack of antlers.

This figure, like the dignified Scythian stags, is serene and authoritative, akin to a meditating Buddha. Next to it, a deer with identical antlers seems to echo and amplify whatever the human figure represents.

Which is—what? If this vessel was made for the Celts in the workshops of the Thracians, as many scholars believe, the antlered man is probably Cernunnos, a mysterious Celtic/Gaulic deity. His divine purview is uncertain—perhaps he’s a god of animals and fertility?—but his antlers give him great gravity (and the name Cernunnos itself may derive from an ancient term for “horn,” from which we also get the word cornucopia). In some images he holds a sack issuing a river of grain. In other images, it overflows with coins: money as the life force itself. One related, and not very subtle, stone sculpture from Luxembourg even depicts a stag vomiting coins.

It’s tempting to make one other connection—between the patriarchal symbolism of a figure like Cernunnos, crowned with antlers, and the actual crowns worn by human monarchs. Could it be that the idea of adorning the heads of powerful people arose, millennia ago, from awe at the beauty of deer’s bony crowns?

The loveliness of deer might go without saying, but still, there it is: The more you look, the more they seduce. Their forms are luscious, pulling the eye in an endless pathway, from haunch to fetlock, from ear to antler, line to swell to shadow. They’re lean as knives, but they’re curvy, too. The whole of a deer’s being, every atom of its body, expresses its animal awareness, its aliveness and presence. From far away, deer look stamped onto the hillside, as perfect as the outline of a fern or a seashell. Fleeing us at close range, they spring over fences like water flying from a fountain.

They can mean so many different things, but the easiest one is just this: Deer mean beauty. For that, they’ve earned a specific type of human loyalty. Few wild animals are treasured so quietly, yet so often, from Lascaux all the way to the desk of the modern copywriter.

I live near a national park whose website plugs its proximity to Washington, D.C., and then conjures its “protected lands that are haven to deer.” Even in an age when many city dwellers are familiar with deer to the point of contempt, the well-worn rhapsody still has power. There’s no doubt that many Washingtonians do make the pilgrimage to the park, and that for at least some of them, spotting deer is part of the thrill.

The very etymology of wilderness links it to deer. The Old English word deor meant “animal,” and so wild-deor-ness was a place of wild animals. That deer lurk in the center of our modern word wilderness suggests that deer are thoroughly baked into our idea of nature at its purest, and perhaps that deer are such a fundamental presence in human life that they, of all species, took over the word we once used for animals in general.

On another island, Aeaea, Homer’s Odysseus is relieved to bring a fresh deer to his men after they land; not only is it food, but it succors their grief after various bloody disasters. It is a sign of hope. “The kill was so immense!” Odysseus marvels; he is talking about the deer, but he could equally be speaking of the loss of many comrades, slaughtered by the Laestrygonians, the Cyclops, and the Cicones. He drags the beast back to where his men, “bent with pain and bone-tired,” are waiting. As they catch sight of him, “Heads came up from cloaks and there by the barren sea / they gazed at the stag, their eyes wide—my noble trophy. / But once they’d looked their fill and warmed their hearts, / they washed their hands and prepared a splendid meal.” Feasting follows, and wine and sleep. But it’s the looking—Odysseus’s first glimpse of the stag drinking from a stream, and then his sailors’ long gaze upon its carcass—that seems to fill a deeper need. Violence, and a certain brutal competence (“Treading on him, I wrenched my bronze spear from the wound”), is the hinge between seeing and consuming.

Deer mean abundance for the taking, by eye or by weapon. In existing, they prove that the world is not barren. And even when the facts of history and ecology suggest otherwise, we continue to look to deer for a promise of stability.

In 1834, the American painter Thomas Cole embarked on an ambitious cycle of five paintings he would eventually title The Course of Empire. Each image represented a distinct stage in the growth of a mythical civilization, and the first one pictured a skin-clad hunter pursuing a deer within a wild and turbulent landscape. Cole called this painting The Savage State, and like other Romantic works, it diminishes the human; rather than culture, nature looms. Clouds wrapping a mountain easily outweigh the little drama of a man chasing a meal. Yet it’s a timeless story: the hunt and the kill.

The Empire series expressed Cole’s deep ambivalence about wilderness and civilization. Its third painting, The Consummation of Empire, shows the allegorical civilization at its peak; it has almost totally obscured the land on which it rests. But things fall apart. In the fifth and final image, Desolation, the human presence is moldering back into the earth, overgrown and forgotten, and deer return to the canvas. “Art is again resolving into elemental nature,” Cole wrote, and painted a buck and doe near a ruined temple.

Deer turned out to be the survivors: the bookends to Cole’s vision of the human rise and fall, the outward expression of a nature that could be subdued for a time, but would always come back in the end. They were the truth that exists before and after human fictions.

Cole was an American painter in the age of Manifest Destiny. The pessimism of his cycle’s end was out of step with the national mood at the time, but these days, it seems more prescient. He conjured a fantasy that blurred the distinctions between Indigenous people and settlers: In that last image, all the humans—even that original hunter—have been erased by the empire’s collapse.

It’s a trope that repeated in the early days of the COVID pandemic. Amid the headlines of plague and chaos, there appeared a little subgenre of news stories about how, with so many people sheltering indoors, wild animals were emboldened to move about in cities. Among photos of coyotes in San Francisco and jackals in Tel Aviv, there were images of deer strolling sidewalks in Poland and grazing London lawns. In a moment of collective horror at the invasion of our lives by a virus, we clutched at the idea that nature was sending in ambassadors of beauty, too. Yet what made room for the deer was the withdrawal of people.

We need images of a stability that humans can tend to by our presence, not our absence. We need images of coexistence.

It was early on a September Monday, and the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance would begin as soon as the vicar blessed the horns. I sat in a pew and listened to villagers murmuring. Black robes swirling, the vicar had just appeared from some secret part of the thousand-year-old church, hoisting a wooden ladder—Even that looks ancient, I thought—against the wall where the antlers rested on pegs. The dancers were milling around in their short pants, woolen shirts, and vests. “Blimey, we are early this morning!” said the jester. Someone climbed the ladder and carefully lifted down the first set of antlers—polished with age, attached to a small wooden deer’s head.

I’d crossed the ocean to be here, hoping to see a living link between deer and human history. Now it occurred to me that the Horn Dance tradition also connected this place to my home: in both small towns, it’s an annual event.

Of course, in Abbots Bromley, it had been so since the year 1226. And it was an all-day affair. Soon the dancers set off from the church at a swift clip: six of them bearing antlers, plus the jester, a man playing Maid Marian, two accordion players, a teenage Hobby Horse, and several young boys, one playing a triangle. A small crowd of us trailed them down the lane until the jester gave a signal and the dance began. The music was livelier here than it was at home, but I recognized the choreography. Interlacing, spiraling lines.