The word deer comes from dēor and der, which in old and middle English meant, simply, “animal”. The Dutch word “dier” still means this. The sense of a deer as an animal, as opposed to a human – it has been found to have referred to ants, fish and foxes – may come from “wilddēornes”, the origin of wilderness or wild-animal-ness.
Deer still seem to embody this mysterious animal-ness: four-legged wildness, dainty and strong, mysterious and controlled. You may say it is all in the antlers: I say it is all in the tail. I saw a small herd of fallow deer in London’s Clissold park recently. A doe walked up to the fence as I walked past, then turned away and flicked her white tail: a flash of white, like a shooting star you’re not sure you’ve seen, like the tap of a fluffy wand, like a cute cursor blinking.
My bedroom opens up on to a courtyard, above which tower several apartment blocks: I am at the bottom of a small hill, they at the top. For a few months in summer the apartments start to send messages to each other.
As people open their windows, the sun catches the glass and reflects into my bedroom, so that every now and then there is a quick, thin flash. Now that I think about it, maybe it would happen every day but in winter nobody is flinging their windows open.
Reading about deer, the tail flicks and you jump hundreds, thousands of years at a time and from continent to continent, language to language. Here is the carved wooden deer from 500BC found at the Pazyryk burials in Siberia: magnificent horns, and thin legs balancing on a segmented orb.
A gilded wooden figurine of a deer from the Pazyryk burials, 5th century BC. pic.twitter.com/exZOVNex5c
— Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart) November 23, 2021
You suspect deer are walking through the Canterbury tales, and there they are: an illusion conjured by the magical clerk for a couple sitting in his study, of “Forests and parks full of the dim wild deer” and deer “slain by hounds, / And some with arrows bled, with bitter wounds.”
In Celtic mythology they’re “fairy cattle”, in northern Mexico, when it rains but the sun is shining, “a doe is giving birth”.
The contemporary poet Taylor Johnson describes a dead deer, “whose neck in post-rigor mortis pining / broke itself again so that the head could face / the woods”.
“Consider that the deer, when called, won’t come alone / purely due to linguistic vagary,” they write. “Consider … how I’m able to crane my neck back / see only myself.”
Follow the deer, hunt the deer, and it will lead you on a path you would not otherwise follow. Because people have been writing about deer, painting them, carving them, telling stories about them, trapping them in idiom or on cave walls forever, like stepping stones.
Deer eyes have a tapetum lucidum – a “bright tapestry, coverlet” – a layer of iridescent blue-green: this is why, at night, their eyes shine your torch back at you. This layer allows them to see more clearly in the dark (so they can keep moving through time, and you can keep following them). A reindeer’s tapetum lucidum changes colour from gold to blue, as the overall colour of their world turns darker, bluer in winter.
You are following the deer, trying not to startle it, and then a window flashes the sun into your room:
And when this master who this magic wrought
Saw it was time, he clapped his two hands, lo!
Farewell to all! the revels out did go.
And yet they’d never moved out of the house
While they saw all these sights so marvellous,
But in his study, where his books would be,
They had sat still, and no one but they three.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024.
Have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
