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By Root 3229 0

to find the chemicals he will need to manufacture his new antlers. That means calcium. And the obvious place to find that is in the old antlers he has cast. Using his corner incisor teeth, the buck gnaws at them, therefore. Then, feeding on the rich summer vegetation and living in seclusion, he has to wait patiently as new bone tissue, drawing nutrients up through blood vessels from the pedicels, slowly grows, branches out and spreads. The growing antlers, however, are delicate; to supply blood they also grow a covering of soft veined skin, which has a velvety texture, so that during these months the buck is said to be ‘in velvet’. Supremely conscious that he must not allow the precious antlers to get damaged, the reclusive deer will walk through the woods with his head raised and held back, the velvet antlers on his shoulders, lest they should get caught in branches – a magical attitude in which he has often been depicted, from cave paintings to medieval tapestries, down the centuries.

The buck paused. Though still shy of being seen, he knew that the worst of his yearly humiliation was over. His velvet antlers were already half grown and he was conscious of the first faint stirrings, the beginning of the chemical and hormonal changes that, in another two months, would transform him into the magnificent, swollen-necked hero of the rut.

He paused because he saw something. From the tree line where he was walking, a stretch of heath extended, about half a mile across to a gentle slope scattered with silver birch where the violet heather gave way to green lawn backed by a line of woodland. On the lawn he could see several does, resting in the sun. One of them was paler than the others.

He had noticed the pale doe at the last rutting season. He had caught sight of her again that spring when he had escaped from the hunters. He had supposed they might have killed her, then he had glimpsed her in the distance once more, not long afterwards, and the knowledge that she was alive had pleased him strangely. Now, therefore, he paused and watched.

She would come to him at the rut. He knew it as surely as he could feel the sun in the huge open sky; he knew it with the same instinct by which he knew that his antlers would grow and his body change in readiness. It was inevitable. For several long moments he watched the little pale shape on the distant green. Then he moved on.

He did not know that other eyes were watching her also.

When Godwin Pride had set off that morning his wife, seeing his face, had tried to stop him. She had used several excuses – the roof of the cow stall needed repairing, she thought she had seen a fox near the chicken coop – but it was no good. By mid-morning he was gone, without even taking his dog with him. Not that he had told her what he was up to. Had she known that, she would probably have called the neighbours to restrain him. Nor did she see that, a few moments after leaving, he took a bow from a hiding place in a tree.

He had been waiting two months for this. Ever since his encounter with Edgar he had been careful to be a model of good behaviour. He had retracted his fence to its proper place. His cows were brought in from the Forest two days before the fence month. When Cola only glanced suspiciously at his dog, he had turned up at the royal hunting lodge at Lyndhurst the very next day. This was where they kept the metal hoop known as the stirrup – if a dog was not small enough to crawl through it, then his front claws were ‘lawed’, cut off, so that he could not be a threat to the king’s deer. Pride had insisted they took his dog to the stirrup, ‘Just to make sure he’s all legal, like,’ he assured them with a charming smile as the dog wriggled safely through. He had been careful. He had also had to wait for the right weather conditions; and those had come today when the faint breeze had blown from an unusual quarter.

He might not be able to get his field, but he was going to get something back from those Norman thieves. He would strike a little personal blow for freedom: or for his own obstinacy,