The Art of Deer Stalking

‘The Art of Deer-Stalking’ in Egress 1

Content notes: animal cruelty, implied sexual abuse, violence. Please take care when reading this piece.

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Where we now stood had once been electrified with tall fences.

The deer had not been safe then, not outside their enclosure. The searing hide, the gape of flesh, the hot steam rising from their viscera, came back to us in a sick gulp as we saw the prints in the snow: his thick, heavy boots stalking a delicate pattern of skimming hooves.

We had not been back for ten years, not since the destruction of the fences. Now, rhododendrons had taken hold. A deceptive canopy of fresh rose and lilac petals disguised the decaying mulch of dead plants, the throttling weeds entwining fallen branches and twisted roots.  Our journey had been treacherous, made more difficult in the snow.

At dusk, we had finally arrived at the burned part of the forest, where nothing grew. He still held his meets here, where there was nowhere for the deer to hide. The annihilated landscape was glacial and empty. Except for the two sets of tracks.

The red doe, pregnant and heavier than usual, had outrun him, even in this unseasonably heavy drift, because he had been drunk for some days now, drunk and raging and miserable, And with nothing but pity for his own predicament. His prints skewed left as the doe’s ran true north, her skittering across the icy wasteland no match for his bloated, lumbering trudge.

We were silent as we followed the route she had laid out for us. We were sharp, sober, and focussed. Each of us held something useful: a spade, a large torch, a litre of water, a hunting knife. Our boots were laced tightly and our socks neatly tucked into the bands of our trousers. We had thermal underwear and woollen hats and insulated gloves. We had flasks of strong coffee and cereal bars, nips of whiskey in flasks in our sensible padded jackets. We were prepared for the long haul. To stake out our prey.

For the proper adherence to ritual we had shaved our hair ultra-close, and smeared on a square of silver zinc that morning. We shone in the pale light, our glittering scalps catching the last rays of sun. Back then, he didn’t permit us to cover our heads with scarves or hats in case it was discovered that we had secretly been growing our hair. Having long hair was a sign of disobedience, a way for us to integrate more easily if we managed to escape.

The light was diminishing, as it does suddenly in early November, in the first brutal days after the clocks change. It was almost four and the clear, bright sunlight had ebbed to a murky twilight and the necrotic blue sheen on the snow-covered woodland was made only gloomier by torchlight. It was time to break, have coffee, wait for night to fall hard so the torchlight would again be useful. There was no real rush, no urgency. Speed was less important than persistence, now. Surprising him would be easy, carrying out the attack with efficiency, and discretion, that could only be done if we worked as one, with no hysteria, no emotion, no remorse.

We handed round coffee and whiskey but no one wanted food. There was a thrill of anxiety in the group, even though we were prepared for the task, though we knew we wouldn’t be leaving the woods without him. Without discussion, we made a pact of silence; conversation might unbalance us, might force us to retrace our logic, our decision of the day before. There was no other way to punish the man we all had cause to hate, no way to protect the vulnerable from his greedy, sloppy attacks. Nothing less than what we had planned would do. We replaced the lids on hip flasks, screwed thermoses shut. Warmed, stimulated, refocussed, we were ready to continue tracking his lolloping progress again.

One of us held the torch high; a flat swathe of artificial light carpeted the crunchy white earth ahead and lit our grim procession. We were cold but the snow was still dry, clean, powdery and not yet the grey sludge that would persist for the next week or so, blurring the woodland with dirt, fallen leaves, and refrozen hard earth that would be so treacherous underfoot for the deer. The autumn stalking meets would be cancelled for a few days, and certainly long enough to put some distance between our plan and any potential accidental discovery. No one but him would be arrogant and stupid enough to come out in these conditions, trying to outsmart these beautiful, intelligent animals. Our disgust was sharpened.

The deer tracks were long gone, but his heavy, brutal prints were bedded deeper and deeper in the crystalline snow. He was near. Very near. A hut made from corrugated tin was visible in the light of the torch. This sorry location was his base of affairs, his office. We had discovered, at the time of the destruction of the fences, drawers amateurishly padlocked in there, full of the kind of material a man like that might be expected to have. Material that would make any one of us viscerally sick if we were to think properly, even for a moment, about what he hid in his desk drawers, below his locked gun cabinets, his trophies, and his books. We pressed on.

We thought he must have seen us then, seen the light, heard the ominous soft shuffle of boots on snow, the slow, persistent, movement of a mob in the dead of the woods, in the dark, while he was alone. We hoped he was scared, we hoped he was anticipating the worst.

We were there. We were ready.

We needed one person to hold the torch, one person as lookout, two to dig in preparation in the cold, hard earth, one to hold him down and one more to take the hunting knife and use it on him as he might use it on a pregnant roe.

We approached the hut, the torch saturating the metal with a flat bath of electric white. We kicked the door in, in one go, smooth and efficient. He had not been frightened by the sound of us, by our presence altering the woodland air. He was slumped, sleeping, across the desk. He snored gently, not stirring in the angelic pool of light that filled the space.

We dragged him out into the clearing and pinned his arms back, held him in place.

We took the hunting knife out, ran it gently along his throat to test how it felt. He didn’t stir from his drunken sleep.

We looked at each other. The sound of his fractious breathing made him real, even as the artificial light and the blank expanse of snow felt as impersonal as an altar.

When it was done we sat in the snow in a jittery clamour of noise: gossip, crude jokes, hysteria. Whiskey was passed freely and the torch gave intermittent and shaky illumination. We had done something irrevocable, we had transgressed in a way that would never be undone.

He hadn’t known, not for more than half a second, what we were planning, what would happen to him. And his organs were already failing, already weak from all the toxins in his body. We thought, each of us, not of what we had done, but of what further revenge we would like to visit on him: to take his heart with a rusty scalpel, and nestle it in the snow; to smear him with offal and leave him for the hungry wild animals. And of what we had already done: taken a hunter’s knife and slid it in, delicately, swiftly, more than he deserved, and taken his life like it was nothing.

As we emerged from the thickest part of the woods we saw her, in a clearing, the pregnant roe, shivering only slightly beneath her warm pelt. She had survived his advances, and tomorrow, she would have her babies in the corrugated shed, nestling in the pile of blankets he kept there, gore from her birth smearing their soft woollen squares.