by Holly Webb
“Can I?”
“I take her out in the garden before I feed her so she gets to explore more,” Lola explained. “If you don’t mind staying inside you can see her from the kitchen window. Or my bedroom – you’d see her really well from there. I just have to mix up her milk.”
“How many times a day do you feed her?” Paige asked, watching as Lola poured the water on to the milk powder.
“Four times. But Uncle Chris does the lunchtime feed when I’m at school. And he fed her the whole time I was at Dad’s. We reckon she might be able to go down to three feeds a day soon. She’s grazing more when we take her out of the run. OK, this is ready.” She smiled shyly at Paige. “I can’t wait for you to see her at last.”
“Me too!”
Lola opened the gate of the run and Dapple dashed out to check on the rose bush to see if there were any new buds to eat. Mum had told Lola that she’d given up hope of seeing any roses that summer. Dapple ate all the low-down ones and the other deer came and nibbled away the higher buds.
“Here, Paige brought you a present,” Lola told her, pulling a handful of dandelions out of the bag. She looked up at her window and waved at Paige. She could see her friend’s nose practically squished against the glass, watching as Dapple eagerly gobbled the flowers. There were so many that the fawn’s muzzle was stained yellow with tiny glowing petals.
Lola pulled her school cardigan tightly round her as she slipped out of the side door. The mornings were definitely colder now that it was September, and the leaves were just starting to turn brown. Under the horse chestnut tree the deer lifted their heads and eyed her cautiously but they didn’t race away. It made Lola glow inside that they knew her now. They knew they were safe.
There was a faint clanging from the run as Dapple stood up against the metal gate, clearly wondering why Lola was being so slow. Lola hurried round to the shed and slipped into the pen. “I can’t take you out now,” she said gently to the fawn. “School starts again today. I have to go soon. But I promise I’ll let you explore this afternoon.” She held up the bottle temptingly and Dapple grabbed at it.
Lola stood leaning over her, watching as she drank. Dapple was so much bigger now – Lola definitely didn’t need to lean down as far. The fawn’s white spots and dark stripes were fading too so she was more of a golden brown colour all over. She was beginning to look like the older deer, Lola realized, glancing back at the gathering under the horse chestnut tree.
Her stomach twisted a little. Soon Dapple would be old enough to leave the run and live in the wild again. Uncle Chris had already cut out her lunchtime feed because she was grazing more. He said it wouldn’t be that long before she didn’t need milk at all – before she didn’t need them at all.
“Got to go,” Lola whispered, as Dapple slurped the last drops out of the bottle. “I’d better not make Mum late on the first day of term. See you this afternoon, sweetheart.”
She looked over her shoulder as she took the bottle back to the kitchen. Dapple was standing by the gate, watching her go.
“She’s not a pet,” Lola whispered to herself. “I always knew that.” But it was so hard to imagine that one day soon she’d be coming home from school and Dapple wouldn’t be there waiting for her.
“Do you want to come over for tea tomorrow?” Paige asked, catching up with Lola as she walked into school on the Monday morning just before half-term. “Mum said I could invite Maisie and Hannah too.”
Lola shook her head. “I’m not sure I can. Sorry, Paige. Uncle Chris is coming to ours. He says he wants to have a look at Dapple.”
Paige frowned. “Why?”
“I’m not sure.” Lola sighed. “I think he’s going to say she’s old enough to be out in the wild. It’s nearly the end of October – that’s when he said she’d be ready.”
“Don’t you think so?” Paige asked sympathetically.
“I suppose… But I can’t imagine not having her…”
“Dapple’s so lucky you found her,” Paige pointed out, giving Lola a hug. “She really is. It’ll be OK.” She sighed. “Have you done that maths homework? I don’t understand division the way Mr Marshall showed us. I wish we still had Miss Addison. Year Six is just too much hard work…”
Lola stood by the gate to the run, looking worriedly at Uncle Chris. “Do you really think she’s old enough?” she asked again.
“Dapple’s five months old now – at least. She might even be a little older. She’s not taking bottles any more,” Uncle Chris said gently. “When you let her out she’s only coming back to the run out of habit. She could disappear into the wild bit of the garden or the cemetery any time she wanted to.”
“But … but if she’s coming back to the run without me waving a bottle at her, doesn’t that mean she likes it?” Lola argued. And then she stopped, her shoulders drooping. “We don’t want her to like it, do we?”
“Yeah. I know it’s hard.” Uncle Chris put his arm round her shoulders. “But I think she’s ready.”
“I know that really,” Lola muttered. “I just don’t want to do it.”
“She’s been calling to the other deer, hasn’t she?” Uncle Chris reminded her. “She wants to be with them.”
Lola nodded. She had seen at least one of the other deer nose-to-nose with Dapple through the wire fence – a young one, not that much bigger than Dapple herself. She unlatched the metal gate and pulled it wide open. Uncle Chris took a bit of string out of his pocket and tied the gate back against the fence so that it couldn’t blow shut. Then they backed away into the garden, leaving a clear path for Dapple to come past them.
The fawn stepped eagerly out into the garden, her ears twitching as she eyed the pigeons on the fence and a squirrel bolting across the grass to the horse chestnut tree.
She doesn’t know, Lola realized, as Dapple pottered happily around the bushes and stopped to eat a dandelion. She doesn’t know that this is it. We aren’t going to call her back. She’s free now and she doesn’t understand.
When Uncle Chris left to go back to the shelter, Lola climbed the ladder to the tree house and watched Dapple for the rest of the afternoon. Mum brought her some hot chocolate, but most of the time she was on her own. As the light began to fade, around five o’clock, she could see that Dapple was confused. She wandered about aimlessly, as if she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. After all, how would she know?
Lola made herself stay still – she wanted so much to hurry down the ladder and lead the deer back to her shed. But in the end she didn’t need to. Dapple gave one last look around the darkening garden and then padded through the grass and into the shed by herself.
Lola clambered down the ladder and dashed into the house to tell Mum and call Uncle Chris.
“She didn’t go!” she yelped at him as soon as he answered the phone. “She’s back in the shed.”
“I did wonder if it would take her a while to work out what’s going on,” Uncle Chris said thoughtfully.
“Should I shut the gate again?” Lola asked, looking round at her mum. “Mum said what about foxes?”
“A fox might have tried to attack her when she was little but these days Dapple could give them a pretty serious kick. No, leave it open. She needs to understand that she can come and go as she pleases. Eventually she’ll go. We hope. She needs to be a wild deer again, Lola. You know that.”
“Yes.” Even though he was on the other end of the phone, Lola tucked her hand behind her back so Uncle Chris couldn’t see her crossing her fingers. Perhaps Dapple would stay forever?
Dapple continued to sleep in the shed but each day she went gradually further and further from her safe little run. Lola spent the October half-term holiday mostly in the tree house, watching out for Dapple with a pair of binoculars that Uncle Chris had lent her. She held her breath when the fawn first stepped cautiously through the broken fence to the cemetery – she looked so small amidst the great expanse of grass and gravestones.
Lola wasn’t sure that
Dapple would come back that day. The fawn slipped away into the trees in the cemetery and Lola couldn’t see her even with the binoculars. She watched for a while longer, scanning across the grass for a little golden brown deer, but there were only dogs, and a squirrel or two. She was sure that this was goodbye.
But then at bedtime she went out into the garden. Even though she knew Dapple wouldn’t be there, it was still a habit, going out last thing. Lola shone the torch around the empty run and then jumped as a velvet-soft nose pressed against her hand. Dapple nudged her gently and padded back to her basket in the shed.
Paige came over on the last day of half-term and they watched together, up in the tree house as they nibbled on a batch of cupcakes that Lola’s mum had let them bake.
“Do you think she’ll keep coming back here to sleep, then?” Paige asked, fiddling with the focus on the binoculars.
“I don’t know – I sort of hope so but I shouldn’t.” Lola sighed. “Roe deer are supposed to be active through the night, not just in the daytime. Staying in the shed at night isn’t a very deer-like thing to do.”
“Can they see in the dark?” Paige asked, surprised.
“Uh-huh. I looked it up. They see loads better than we do. They’ve got horizontal pupils that let in a lot of light. And they have a reflector at the back of their eyes that we don’t have as well – that helps. You know when cats’ eyes glow in the dark sometimes? It’s because they have it too. Look! There she is, coming back towards the fence.”
Paige peered eagerly through the binoculars. “Wow. Are you sure that’s her, Lola? She’s so big.”
“Yeah, she’s a lot darker than the other deer who come into the garden. She had dark stripes on her back when she was tiny and now she’s almost black – that’s her winter coat.”
Paige kept watching and Lola gazed at the fence and the blackberry bushes, waiting for Dapple to pop through into the garden. But she didn’t appear.
“Oh, I think she’s gone away again,” Paige reported. “I’m pretty sure that was her darting off. Although there’s another couple of deer moving about in the trees. This is such a cool place, Lola, this tree house.”
“I know. I really want to sleep out here but I think it might be too spooky in the middle of the night.”
“Would your mum let you?” Paige asked.
“She said I could, but I’d have to use my sleeping bag and my duvet and extra blankets, because it would be so cold. I don’t think I’d mind the cold, though. It just might be a bit weird on my own…”
“I could come over,” Paige suggested, fiddling with the binoculars again so as not to look at Lola. As if she isn’t sure I’d say yes, Lola realized at last.
“That would be amazing,” she said. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be scared up here? It’d be really dark.”
“I’ve got a torch.” Paige looked around the tree house excitedly. “I’d love to sleep up here.” Then she sighed. “I can hear my mum talking to yours, she’s come to pick me up. Let’s go and ask when we can have our sleepover.”
That night, for the first time, Dapple wasn’t around the shed and the run when Lola came to look for her at bedtime. But she’d been coming back later and later and Lola wasn’t too worried. Or at least, she tried to tell herself she wasn’t. As she got ready for bed she kept stopping to peer out of the window. It was far too dark to see Dapple slipping back through the garden but Lola kept looking.
She woke up in the morning to a heavy frost patterning the window and she wrapped a thick hoodie over her pyjamas before she hurried outside. The grass was frosted, each blade coated in ice that crunched as she walked across it to the shed.
“Dapple?” she murmured. But the shed and the run were so still and quiet, Lola knew that the little deer wasn’t there. She had gone at last.
“Lola… Are you awake?”
Lola blinked and wriggled. She felt stiff and her nose was cold. She wondered for a moment if she’d left her bedroom window open but then she remembered – it was Paige calling her. They were up in the tree house.
It had taken a while to persuade Paige’s mum – she wasn’t worried that it would be too cold to sleep out, or not that worried at least, but she was afraid that Paige would somehow manage to fall out of the tree in the middle of the night. And then Lola had been due for a weekend at her dad’s so it was late November before they managed to have their tree house sleepover. Lola had kept on watching out for Dapple and she was almost sure she’d seen her once out in the garden after school. But only almost.
“Yes, I’m awake. Are you?” Lola said. She was too sleepy to think straight. Of course Paige was awake, if she was talking. “Do you want to get up? It’s getting light. It must be about half past seven.”
“Are you hungry? I’m really hungry.” There was a shuffling noise as Paige wriggled around in her sleeping bag and then a crunch. “I found the popcorn!”
“Let’s go and sit outside and eat it.” Lola scrabbled about for her hat and then stood up in her sleeping bag like a caterpillar. She shuffled to the door and pulled it open and they curled up on the little front platform of the tree house, gazing at the misty garden and the cemetery beyond.
Paige passed Lola the bag of popcorn her mum had let her bring for a midnight feast (it had been more like a quarter-past-ten feast in the end) and they sat munching slowly.
Lola was still half asleep so it took her a little while to realize what she was seeing – and then she nudged Paige with her elbow. “Look!” she whispered.
Padding out from between the brambles was a line of deer, their grey-brown coats half disappearing into the mist. They came slowly into the garden, stopping here and there to graze – and at the very end of the line was a small one, grey-brown along her sides like the others but her back was almost black.
Lola stared.
“Is that her?” Paige breathed, her hand halfway into the popcorn. “Is it, Lola? The one at the end?”
The deer looked up with a mouthful of frosted grass, peering at them thoughtfully. Lola knew that she probably couldn’t see them from that far away or at least not very well. But it felt as if Dapple was gazing straight at them. She looked so dark and sleek – so perfect.
“Yes,” she whispered to Paige. “She came back. That’s my Dapple.”
Copyright
STRIPES PUBLISHING LIMITED
An imprint of The Little Tiger Group
1 Coda Studios, 189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing Limited in 2019.
Text copyright © Holly Webb, 2019
Cover illustration © Olga Baumert, 2019
Illustrations copyright © James Brown, 2019
Author photograph copyright © Charlotte Knee Photography
eISBN: 978–1–78895–131–9
The right of Holly Webb and James Brown to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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