Deer Eyes

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

“The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.”

John Muir

 

Nature calls to us in moments we do not expect. A young deer was looking at me. I held the gaze of its dark and shiny eyes, its long eyelashes and dark snout. We were so close I could hear its breath over the trickle of the burn, where it stood with both front legs at the water’s edge. It seemed caught between surprise and curiosity, looking back at me, ears twitching, dipping its head then snapping up and looking at me again. 

I had stepped out of the trees beside the burn to kneel down and fill a pot with water, and suddenly we found ourselves face to face. A sense of shock as our presences collided, and then a sudden connection as our eyes locked.

There it stood, regarding me with an expression of curiosity in its dark eyes. It was young, I could tell from the white spots on its flanks, and I realised I could well be the first human it had ever encountered. So, although it teetered on the brink of flight, that had not yet become an ingrained response. It had not yet learned that Human meant Run.

 

It looked at me. I looked back at it. Absorbed in awareness of the other, all other matters temporarily forgotten. This fawn was not even a year old, yet standing there with its feet in the water, its flanks blending perfectly into the heathery bank behind it, I realised how utterly it already belonged here. Grown from the forest itself, its young eyes held the weight of the universe in their innocent gaze.

 

As with all such encounters, to move or to make a noise is to end it. Even awareness of the moment of connection is enough to break it. Something happened – maybe my eyes twitched or a stone clinked under my foot. Maybe I did nothing at all but wonder how long we would stand there. In a moment the young creature turned and leaped up the bank. There it stopped, turned its head to give me one last long look, before vanishing instantly between the thick pines.

I stood alone once more, aware again of the bubbling of the water and the space of the forest all around me. The moment of encounter was over. But in its wake I felt different. Somehow affected.

 

Remembering why I was there, I dunked the big aluminium pot I was holding into the deep part of the stream and brimmed it with clear, gleaming water, straight down off the mountains. The pot was heavy as I lifted it out and walked awkwardly with it back through the woods, my other arm sticking out sideways for balance like a branch. 

 

In camp the water went into a smaller pan and onto the stove. The gas lit and roared as I turned it up to maximum. I sat and tended dinner as it cooked, giving it the odd stir, saying little. I did not join in with the banter and blether of my companions, and made no mention to anyone of the fawn. I didn’t know what to say about it. Wasn’t sure I was even supposed to speak of it, yet. There was more in that moment than there seemed. But what passed between us? Anything? Something stirred, in that instant when our eyes locked, but what?

 

It was like locking eyes with someone and realising instantly that you are in love. That sudden catapulting knowledge, as if it had been there all along. But this wasn’t love. What was it?

 

Laughter and speech from my own kind went on all around me, accompanied by the various material noises of pan lids, sleeping mats being inflated, and the sveek-sveek-sveek of waterproof trousers as someone walked by. I found all the noise suddenly irritating, like the intrusion of rowdy tourists in a place of worship – whether they are believers or not. I sat and thought about the deer. How quiet it was, how perfectly it fitted in. Compare that to us here – we visitors to nature. Just look at all the stuff we had with us here for but one single night in the woods. The deer physically was everything it needed, and anything else it might want the forest would provide. It was soundless when I found it, and when it decided to leave it vanished at will. I’d never have been able to find it again if I tried. And yet, there had been that last moment. That glance back over the shoulder at me, that knowing look, before departing.

 

Looking around at our camp, my dissatisfaction grew at the way we had imposed ourselves upon that place. For my whole life, I have been coming to nature. I’ve journeyed in the hills, the woods, the rivers and lochs of the Highlands for years. I’ve stood on the peaks of mountains shrouded in blizzards; followed the flow of rivers through roaring falls; and walked many a Ben and Glen. The number of hills I’ve put under my boots is in the hundreds. But in all that time, through all those days and nights, I’d never before felt out of place. Until then. Or perhaps it was that I was in the right place, but was myself somehow wrong. Too noisy. Too stupid. Too dependent on material things. 

 

We ate our dinner, we sat and talked, we laughed, we went to bed. Just as people in the woods have done for thousands of years. But I felt like we had missed something essential. Unable to sleep, I lay in my sleeping bag listening. The forest was full of life, and the night sounds came out to take their rightful places as our noise faded. The air whispered through the darkening woods. Millions of pine needles on the ends of branches murmured in the breeze. I heard a creature scampering across the forest floor and thought of the deer again. I wondered where it lay tonight. Was it warm? Curled up somewhere in the grass with its fellows? Was it snoozing peacefully, or was it in fact awake? Maybe it was watching our campsite even now. Are deer nocturnal? I had no clue.

 

All of a sudden I decided I wanted to lie outside myself, to see what it was like. I awkwardly dragged myself out of the tent and went and lay with my head nestled between two root boles of a huge pine tree. With the top of my head against the trunk, staring upwards, it rose far above me. It suddenly seemed so huge from this unusual perspective. It had presence; a sense of being and strength that emanated into the night. Its branches were wrought-iron shadows across the brighter blackness of the night sky, and I could see the white gold of stars shining down between each twist of wood. The tree seemed so big I imagined a branch would sway in the breeze and knock a star from the void. 

 

I knew well enough, though, how distant those stars truly were, and how long that light had travelled to get here. I moved my head minutely from side to side, alternately obscuring and revealing stars from behind branches. What were the chances of this? That centuries ago some light should set out from that distant star, cross the cosmos at precisely the angle to someday reach our world, to land here in Scotland this night, pass between the pincered branches of a pine tree and ultimately enter the miniscule target of my eye. If I moved my head slightly to the left, then its different photons that have travelled that distance alongside their parallel kindred, yet they have never met. Parallel existences, but never touching. I closed my eyelids, and millions of photons made it that far, but no further. I opened them again, and let the light flood in once more. With each blink I was deciding the outcome of centuries-long journeys. There’s something remarkable about that. And a question. 

 

Are our own fates so easily influenced?

My thoughts drifted back down from the stars to the terrestrial darkness. Down, through the wind of the sky; down through the wood of the trees; down into the soil of the earth and to the deepest roots of the mountains. Their outline rose over the edge of the forest – a deeper mass of blackness against the starry sky. The Cairngorms. 

 

Darkness reduced the three dimensional reality of the mountains to just a line in the sky; the lumps and bumps of their silhouette every bit as unique and individual as the serrated edge of a key. I had been a visitor to them, an interloper snatching moments of beauty from their high places. But now I was here to stay. A house bought, a job begun. So this place was to become home. 

 

But home it was not, I realised. Not yet. There was that sense of dissatisfaction again. An incompleteness. A sense that I was merely looking out at the world from the wrong side of the window frame.

Can that abyss be crossed? Can this place unlock something – an understanding maybe? No, not that. Not ‘understanding’ in the intellectual sense. I mean it in the way that a young deer understands, from the moment it takes its first steps on shaky legs, that it belongs. The hills, the whispering pines, the drooping eyes of a deer sleeping in the grass – they are all a part of something much bigger than themselves, but they themselves are part of It.

There is more to a place than one person can experience, or even that the place itself can record in rock and root. Its story is woven together by threads of life and time of different lengths and weight, but they are all a part of the tapestry. Pull at one and you find it woven irretrievably to everything else. When I looked into the eyes of that deer its thread crossed mine, and now mine is passing under those of the stars and the hills. Tomorrow it will cross the thread of sunrise, which loops back and forth eternally through it all. Then what? Where will my thread go next? I don’t know. But it has started now. So there and then, beneath a pine tree and by the light of the stars, I resolved to weave myself through as many of those threads as possible, to see if I too can understand.