Bog Myrtle & Peat

If you didn’t see how a buck casts his winter coat and picks up the rich rust red of summer, you could believe that the year belonged to two different creatures. There’s nothing hidden or magical about the change which comes over roe deer in May. It’s gradual, and dull grey pins endure on summer haunches into June – but there’s always a moment in July when the transformation is suddenly complete, and it’s hard to reconcile the opposite ends of a ceaseless cycle.

Unable to sleep in the shallow gloom last night, I got up and walked to the yard in my pyjamas. The clock said something like half past two, but it was light enough to read a newspaper in the intermission between two warm days. The river clattered, and as a soft breeze shifted its weight from one foot to another, the sound moved off and then back towards me louder. Down in the mist a mile away, a buck was barking noisily. I could picture roughly where he was in the black bowl of a sunken bend of the old river, and I toyed with the idea of carrying a rifle down to find him. Then I was off.

Half an hour later, with my pyjama bottoms rolled up to my knees, I crept between the sleeping antmounds. There had been no need for shoes or socks, and the warm, soapy grass sawed silently between my toes. The buck was still barking, and when I found him at last, he was standing in a foam of meadowsweet and valerian which shone grey as old linen in a layering of blue light. He’d been thrashing the stems, but he stopped to stare away from me towards a distant gap in the alder trees. He seemed almost black in the dawn, and vegetation trailed from his antlers like creepers on a jungle shrine. Then he turned and looked back over my head towards the unlit house where I’d been trying to sleep, showing his face and the luminous blaze of his chin.

Bucks become wondrous in this weather. They’re lost in dreams of rage and fantasy, and a drunkenness lies upon them. Years ago, I came without warning upon a buck in the rocks on a wet side of the hill. He barked and boiled, and he mashed his antlers in the moss. And I was close enough to see that while his ears turned and his nostrils flared like caverns, his eyes were closed. The spectacle reminded me of times late in student parties when, exhausted and worn out by trips and shots of powerful alcohol, we’d find ourselves dancing, closing our eyes to feel other things more clearly. From that I hold the rut is more than rage or an output provoked by hormonal surges. It’s a heightening which flickers between states of bliss and confrontation and it rides in response to incoming stimuli; the animal becomes a conduit for all the year’s confusing energy.

That buck saw me and my rifle in the half-light this morning. And his response was to run in my direction, tossing the stems from his antlers. He barked as he came, and the sound was a terrible coughing. He didn’t know what I was, and perhaps his eye had simply been drawn by the movement of the rifle’s bolt. But that was enough to bring him down upon me with all the spreading chaos of a bookcase which falls suddenly forward upon itself, strewing the carpet with noise and disorder. He stopped at thirty paces and stamped his foot; he licked his nose and frowned in fury. 

Much later in the day, I walked out to see him hanging by his hocks from a rafter in the byre. The shape of his antlers was disclosed in an unflattering shaft of light which streamed from an overhead window. His flesh was setting, and there was nothing to show how he’d raged in the final moment of his life. Only a bluebottle droned in the cavity where his heart had been, just as a wasp will browse at fallen apples.