The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [29]
As the equinox passes and all nature becomes aware that the nights are starting to be just a little longer than the days, further changes are seen. The heather flowers having turned into a haze of tiny white dots, the heathland goes from its summer purple to autumn brown. The brown of the bracken stem climbs into the drying ferny leaves until, in certain clumps, they catch the autumn sunlight like polished bronze. The acorns lying in the fallen leaves have rolled free from their cups and they, too, are brown. The evening mist brings a damp chill. The cold dawn has a bracing bite. Yet in the Forest, these signs mark not an end but a beginning. If the sun is now departing, it is only to cede his place to a yet more ancient deity. Winter is on the way: it is the time of the silver moon.
It is the time for the rutting of the deer.
The buck stalked down the centre of the rutting stand. It was dawn. There was a light frost on the ground. Around the edge of the stand, on ground marked by their slots, as the tracks of the deer’s cleft feet are called, eight or nine does were waiting to be serviced. Some of them were moving about making a wickering sound. There was tense excitement in the air. The pale doe was also there. She was waiting quietly.
The buck’s antlers were splendid and he knew it. Their heavy, burnished blades spread out some two and a half feet from his head and they were fearsome to behold. They had been fully grown since August when their velvet covering had begun to peel off. For many days he had scraped and rubbed the new antlers against small trees and saplings, leaving scour marks on their bark. It had felt good when the strong saplings braced and bent against their weight; he had felt his growing power. This honing served a dual purpose: not only did it clean off the last vestiges of peeling velvet, but the bone of the antlers, creamy white when they emerged, became coated, polished, hardened to a gleaming brown.
By September he was getting restless. His neck swelled. His Adam’s apple enlarged; the tingling sensation of power seemed to be filling his whole body, from his hindquarters to his thickening shoulders. He began to strut and stamp the ground, he had an urge to exercise, to prove his power. He moved about the woods alone at night, wandering here and there like some knight in search of adventure. Gradually, however, he began to move towards that part of the Forest where the pale doe had seen him the year before – for bucks instinctively move away from their original home when they are going to mate, so that the genetic stock of the deer will be constantly mixed. By late September he was ready to mark out his rutting stand. But before that one other ancient ceremony had to begin.
Who knew when the red deer first came to the Forest? They had been there since time immemorial. Bigger than the fallow interlopers, men had designated them by different names: The male red was a stag, the female a hind; the young red was not a fawn, like the fallow, but a calf. While the fallow buck’s antlers rose in broad blades, the stag’s still larger crown rose in spiky branches. The red deer’s numbers were never large. Lacking the fleetness and cleverness of the fallow, they were easier to kill and already the fallow far outnumbered them. While the fallow liked the wooded glades, the red remained on the moor where, as they lay in the heather, they seemed, even in full daylight, to blend into the land itself. Primeval and Nordic, compared with the elegant French arrivals, it seemed