Forest Full Of Deer

You heard them before you saw them. A sound that was not the sound of the forest.

Not exactly a sound. A quality change in the air ahead of you. The particular quality of ground being moved through by something large and careful. A branch. A soft impact. The forest doing nothing dramatic, just doing slightly more than it does when nothing is in it.

You slowed. The most important thing you can do in a forest when you think something is there is to slow, and then slow further, and then, if it seems warranted, stop. Your natural pace, which is the pace of a being with no predators and nothing to hide from, is too fast and too noisy for the forest's actual inhabitants. Slow to their pace.

The first one. A shape that becomes an animal as the eye adjusts. Beyond a tree at about forty feet, a deer. Very still. Already watching you. This is the humbling realisation of forest wildlife encounters, that the animal usually sees you long before you see it. It has been watching your clumsy approach since you entered its perceptual range. The encounter that feels like chance for you has been a deliberate assessment for the deer.

It has not run. There are several reasons a deer might not run. It may be downwind, meaning it cannot smell you yet and its visual processing is delivering ambiguous results. It may have young nearby and be making a different calculation than flight. Or, more simply, it has assessed you as probably non-threatening and is waiting to see what develops.

Do not make eye contact directly. In many animals this triggers alarm. Look just slightly past or to the side. Let the deer be in your peripheral vision. You are not interesting. You are a stationary shape in the landscape. The deer has seen stationary shapes before.

Then you see the others. Because there are always others, once your eyes have adjusted to the specific task of seeing deer-shaped information in forest light. One there. Two there. Further back, a younger one, legs still uncertain, moving behind its mother with the careful spacing of something that knows the world is large and dangerous.

The light falls through the canopy onto the group of them and they are perfect in it. The coats catching the gold of late afternoon. The antlers, if there are antlers, drawn in the same gold. The specific stillness of animals that are good at stillness, better than you will ever be, their whole survival depending on the accuracy of their stillness and speed.

A minute. Perhaps two. The encounter is in your hands as much as theirs. Breathe slowly. Let your body do what it can to reduce its human signature in a forest that has been dealing with humans, with good reason for caution, for as long as deer have been deer.

A movement. One of them takes a decision and is gone, through the trees, the bounce of the tail, the white flash that is the deer's alarm signal. And then they all go, the forest full of the soft sound of hooves, rapid and light, and then silence.

The forest returns to its neutral state. But it is better than it was. You were in it with them.

Walk quietly. The forest rewards it.

...