The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbours
Erika Howsare (Icon, £20)
OH, deer. Once upon an ancient time, we vaunted, even worshipped the cervid fauna. On an Ice Age cave wall at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire, are engravings of deer so accurate in their depiction of the animal’s musculature that the author, across 57,000 years of time, emits an understandable ‘Ooohhh’. Earlier still than those careful carvings, in the Middle East, a brain-damaged child, known to archaeologists as ‘Qafzeh II’, was tenderly interred with a pair of antler horns in her hands. The deer as psychopomp, conductor of souls to the afterlife, was a phenomenon in Northern Europe, too. The Vikings believed that Eikthyrnir, a deer with oaken horns, couriered heroes across the river to the land of the dead.
‘The deer’s role as landscape architect, a mammalian Capability Brown, is rarely acknowledged’
Today? The world’s 40-plus species of deer are frequently reduced to the caste of pest. headline put it, ‘Deer scourge wreaks havoc in countryside’. They eat trees, which is an unforgivable sin. Deer are so (over) abundant in the US that a million are killed by vehicles per annum. We consider that deer belong in the wildwood, etymologically. The Old English word meant ‘animal’, and so wild--ness was the place of the wild things, but there they are in suburban back gardens, too, transgressively munching our veg. Yet, we love Bambi. At Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire, there still takes place an annual antlered folk dance which reeks of prehistoric, sympathetic magic. In her intriguing study of the long co-existence of humans and cervids, Erika Howsare, an American who grew up in the Rust Belt, where every house ‘had a gun rack in the basement’, admits to ‘dissonance’ about deer hunting: on the one hand, venison can be ‘a food of necessity, refinement, sustainability’—an economy-supporting $26 billion is spent on the pastime in the US. On the other hand, aren’t doe-eyed deer gorgeous? Bambi again.
