At the wood’s margin I spent too long pondering by a solitary dancing larch. A trodden circle surrounded the tree, a fairy ring clearly visible under needle-litter. Brushing this away revealed no print or deer slot for clue to its origin, though any such would have been obscured in the rains of autumn. Mystified, I descended the sunken way leading to the valley, banks on either side at shoulder height, its mirey bed worn down by foot and hoof over centuries. Green shoots in sheltered loam will soon open into heart-shaped leaves of the celandine.
Cock pheasants whirred and cucketed away from roost-branches in ash trees overhead, to race, long tail-feathers trailing, across ungrazed fields. February has brought these survivors protection from “slaught’rin guns” (Robert Burns). From the footbridge at the foot of the dingle I saw the birds looking back, indignant at my disturbance.
Beyond them on the slope above, where a salient of woodland winds around the stream, three still shapes resolved out of the fading light. I took out my glass to study them. Small, graceful, coats a rufous grey with white throat-marks and a distinct pale mask that accentuated their attentive stare – three roe deer!
The mystery of the fairy ring’s resolved. Its genesis is the roe’s summer mating ritual, its rut. I’d never suspected their presence here, their habit being so secretive, arboreal, crepuscular. I stood very still and watched, recalling descriptions from John Wyatt’s exquisite book The Shining Levels, in which he tells of rearing a roe faun in Cumbria.
The three pale masks, the unwavering attention, remained as fixed on me as I on them. A family group of buck, doe, and a younger doe. The mature doe would be halfway through her 10-month-gestation, beyond the embryonic diapause (dormancy) that roe deer share with bears, badgers, bats and grey seals, the blastocyst now implanted in the uterus for parturition in time of clement weather and plentiful food. I turned for home, and when I next looked back these ancient presences had vanished clean away.
