Common Ground

by Rob Cowen

  All this in an eye. A bright eye suddenly more alive than ever. There is nowhere left to hide so I am already running, but after crashing through my holly I have slowed into a noiseless gait, ears forward, clearing the fallen trunks and undergrowth, keeping my stamina. I hear the dogs and horses gaining ground but cannot risk tiring my muscles yet; instead, I bounce forwards in long-bodied leaps, retracting my legs, weaving down a slope to force the hounds through the thicker part of the wood. The dogs must have sighted me, for the huntsman’s horse has fallen back and the greyhounds have increased their speed. Paws close in around me, falling like rain on the forest floor.

  I let the fear slip into my legs and open my gait to race through the trees, drifting over the banks and bogs as my pursuers dart headlong through the cover, becoming slowed in the mud, brambles and bushes. But they are relentless animals and each time one falls back another shape steals some yards and pushes forward to bite at my heels. We run together like this for long enough that the first wave of dogs slows and stops and a series of horns brings about others. More shouts and the horses are whipped into catching up. My breath escapes in rhythmical snorts; I can feel my heart tiring and my lungs growing heavy, but still a force keeps my legs crossing and uncrossing. My vision narrows into a tunnel, a hazy white circle through which I can better read the landscape and find escape through the thickening trees. My will to live is strong.

  Still they come. More dogs. The relays. They have crossed the river further up over the wooden bridge. These fresh hounds kindle a deeper fright in me, one I’ve never known, one I can no longer contain in weakening limbs. I feel terror swell and burst through my flanks, clawing at my chest and squeezing the breath from me. The dogs are close enough that they can sense my fatigue, as though they can see my strength dragging behind me like entrails. One, a black-eyed brute the colour of an old wolf, matches my stride then sprints for my shoulder, flicking its head to snap at my neck, but it misses and falls away. Another is almost among my hind hooves. I cannot suppress the panic that sends me into a final, burning gallop. A small gap opens between my heels and the dogs, but knowing it won’t last I bank, changing direction, and plunge through a curtain of thick hazel towards the river.

  Led by the foresight of the huntsman, the men have turned their horses to gallop across a clearing and into the same stretch of dark wood. I hear them smashing back through the brush to my side, their steeds’ chests breaking saplings and boughs in a storm of muscles and hooves. And always that sound of horns at my back. The hated scent of man. Another of my kind, a doe, springs from its lay and bounds off at a right angle, confusing three of the dogs, but the men scream at them and they swing straight back onto my heels. In a patch of boggy ground between two belts of trees, one of the riders is jostled to the front and he draws his sword and spurs his horse to match my leaping jumps. Twice he hacks down, but I shift sideways so that only the flat of his blade smacks against my backbone.

  All this in an eye. An eye bulging with fear, an eye so near to the wide, fast river. But I can run no further. My forelegs are numb and I can’t stop them shaking, slowing, giving out. I stumble to my knees, then chest, then fall entirely into the riverine grass and water mint. Ahead the huntsman walks his white horse between the torrent of black water and me. I see the spear resting loosely in his hand and the glint of the gold-edged horn at his neck. Quiet now. In my terror, I want to close my eyes and let the flood of fang and spear point wash over me, but my body is already mustering resistance. Arise. I leap back up, turn and face the coming horde of horses and dogs, dipping my head, baring my points. My breath heaves in and out in a high whistle. My mouth foams. But I have the will to fight, just as I fought off rivals in all those ruts past, straining and weaving before I ducked and plunged my small, sharp, four-point antlers into their sides, leaving them moaning and kicking out their last alone in the forest. The huntsman shouts at a group of younger men who dismount and tether the greyhounds snarling and barking around me, hauling them beyond the closing circle of horses. The dogs stare with unknown hatred, their long tongues lolling, steam rising from their backs. I read their mindlessness; they are confused.

  A dipping sun gleams on the sweaty faces of the riders. They cheer, nod and slap the necks of their mounts. I expect the huntsman to approach with his spear, but it is his master, the one who cut at me, who urges his horse closest and leans over. He wears a fine, sweat-darkened quilt jacket. His face is scratched with thorns, his cheeks smeared with fresh blood. He swings a leg from his steed, steps down, sword in hand, and stands close enough that I notice his fair hair and blue eyes. A beard shaped to his jaw. The men fall silent and raise their horns ready to blow as he steadies the blade at my head; I duck and weave to keep it away, but he keeps its tip hovering below my eye, like a fly. The smells of dung, fear, sweat and exhaustion. Drops of perspiration run down the man’s nose. Beside my hoof a wasp sinks its sting into a dying bee. A ladybird stretches its wings on the fronds of a sweet cicely and floats away. I turn my head towards the purer scent of pines and the roar of the fast water. Finally his tongue flashes through his teeth and he lifts back the blade. It is a quick movement, but I move quicker. With a snort, I push at the ground and kick out, summoning the last of my inner fire to bound towards the water, fleeing the roars of surprise and outrage.

  All this in an eye. Trembling in my running vision, the huntsman turns his reins and trots to intercept my escape. He becomes even more animal-like as he raises his spear and tilts his head to better plot my weaving, sprinting run. There’s fire in him now too. Not malice, but the same intent I’ve sensed in wolves, an imperative to kill as fast as possible. It’s in his tensed limbs, the fluidity of his movement and the guttural sounds he unconsciously gives his steed. He’s ranging and reading, closing in on the large heart beating hard behind my foreleg. With a shout he spurs the horse into a run, but I bank and turn to meet them, bucking and kicking so that we come together in a collision of moving limbs at the water’s edge. I am suddenly under his steed’s hooves, jabbing my points upwards at the white flailing monster above. It rears and unsteadies the huntsman; he slips so that the puncture-punch of his spear misses my heart and sinks deep into the muscle of my hind leg. An explosion of agony as I leap for the river. Then all pain vanishes as the freezing blackness swallows me. I’m half-aware of another shape crashing into the writhing river beside me, grabbing at my neck and legs. Then it too falls away, like the sky, like the sun, like the land.

  No smells now; no birdsong. No noise of men. There is nothing but the thunder of the swollen water as I bob and spin in the power of the current. I feel the long shaft of the spear wobble, tug and tear away downstream and then the warmth of my blood clouding in the cold river. I’m blinded; my lungs crushed as though bitten. Then instinct sparks my legs into a paddle and I break the surface and breathe. Something is almost upon me. Something green. Hands touch my neck. My nostrils flare and I gasp in more air, but then I’m sinking again. When I brush the stones of the bottom with my hooves, I force myself upward, lunging for the far bank.

  All this in an eye. The huntsman’s eyes rushing up to mine in the violent water, wide and white as full winter moons. He grabs for me again, this time finding my antlers and gripping, dragging us both underwater, down into the churning guts of the river. Swallowed, we corkscrew with the stones and the torn branches, coiled and locked together. I feel the great weight of the man, the heaviness of his jacket and boots holding me down. I kick and buck, twisting my head and, as I do, I glimpse terror. His eyes are like a fawn’s when the wolves howl down from the hills. There is no urge to kill me now, only to escape. His will to live is strong. He claws at his clothes and tries to haul his face up to air, but we spin ever deeper. Then he screams; a stream of bubbles before he breathes the river back in, his face screwing up against the pain. Every sinew in his neck strains until, left with an infant’s strength, his grip loosens. We separate and as I kick desperately for the surface, he turns with the murky to
rrent below, vanishing, his mind filling with the faces of his children.

  I see all of this in the deep, black, liquid eye of a wild deer. It’s suspended over me for less than a second; it will be with me for the rest of my life. I am lying alone in a little hollow under a birch tree twenty metres up the bank from the river when I hear the gunfire. It’s mid-afternoon, 3 May, one of those miraculously hot, bright days you get after hard rain. Leaves glow overhead like green clouds, diffusing the sun into friendly warmth. Then from east of the edge-land comes the sharp crack-crack of shotguns. I prop myself up on elbows and scan the wood. Maybe it’s farmers hunting rabbits or woodpigeons; it doesn’t matter, it is too far away to cast a shadow over this little idyll. I slump back into the flowers and foliage, adjusting the rolled-up jumper under my head. Other sounds come and go: the inescapable traffic, a plane passing, a squawking jay from across the river, chaffinches. Then the echoes of four more pairs of shots rumble up the river like rolling thunder. In the lull that follows, there are two new noises, as if someone is crumpling crisp packets in quick succession. The first is distant enough for my senses to not react but the next – only two seconds later – is just to my right. Something alarmingly near, moving alarmingly quickly over the leaves. Animal. I open my eyes and the roebuck is right there above me, hanging in mid-air as it leaps the hollow. And in the same moment I see it, it sees me, for I watch the reaction twitch along its long flank in a shiver, like a flicked whip. Time pauses. Before my brain can kick in and muster my body into a defensive curl, it records details, bits: the lithe, muscular form as it banks; the black nose and a white chin; the grunt in its breath; the two small, sharp, twisted, waffle-cone-coloured antlers and a coat the same hue as oak leaves in winter. All four hooves are off the ground and its muscle and sinew are contracting and bulging, rippling and flexing its chest like sail and rigging at full lick. And then there’s that eye, the surprised, scared, revelatory eye just three or four feet from mine, looking down at me. I can’t remember ever being so close to a wild animal of this size or feeling the intensity it brings, as though I’ve been plucked from an armchair by a tornado of fur and mass and pungent form. As though the wood itself is suddenly up and running. It is something so immediate and exquisite that it’s hard to believe it’s happening. And maybe because of this, I fix on that eye. I see the eye itself, the round orb and glistening dark surface fringed with lashes, but I see through it too, past the lens and retina, along the optic nerve and beyond to somewhere that exceeds understanding; somewhere you could disappear into and never return.

  Time speeds up again, reeling away like line behind a bitten hook. I presume the deer glides off into trees and upriver, but I don’t see that because my body has flinched and sought to protect the central, vital organs by turning itself towards the earth, right arm over my head, legs scrunched, shoulder braced for an impact that won’t come. By the time I sit up again, the wood has returned to how it was. The edge-land is going about its business – the plane still passing overhead, jays; it’s only me still caught up in the wake. I feel like a hammer has been swung into my diaphragm. Breathless, giddy, I am somewhere between ecstasy and a heart attack. A heaviness thumps between my ribs and a high note whistles in my ears. I feel twitchy, tense. My body isn’t behaving how it should – or perhaps it is. Just as a magnet can magnetise metal when rubbed over it, the deer vaulting me has temporarily animalised my nervous and respiratory systems. There is disbelief, relief, then the urge to shout, to release, vent and share what just happened. I instinctively look around for someone to talk to, someone who – by chance – might have witnessed it. It was right there! I want to scream at anyone. Did you see? It could have killed me! Or – as it comes to me a second later – I could have killed it. And as the human impulses trickle back I suddenly start to feel starkly alone, as though I’ve drifted too far out to sea while I wasn’t concentrating. The adrenalin wearing off. I wish there were other people with me. There should be other people here. The next best thing is in my pocket, but my finger hesitates over my phone’s screen. From behind me, way back in town, a train flying into a tunnel yawns out a long, discordant honk, the note rising at its end like a disapproving question – reeeeaaa-lly? I pocket the handset and feel for my notebook. It’s probably right. This doesn’t need sharing. Not yet. And not like that. Anyway, what could you say? How do you describe these feelings? How can I explain the kind of primitive excitement flowing through my veins to someone who wasn’t here? ‘Oh, hi, how are things? I just thought I’d call and say I’ve glimpsed the immensity of existence.’ Because, grand as it sounds, that’s how it feels.

  A lot of people insist that hunting is in our DNA; some will go so far as to assert it is a fundamental human right, a cultural imperative, even if the necessity for it to provide our food, clothes and shelter has long been delegated to more convenient, efficient or morally palatable methods. Whatever we might think – or not think – of it today, hunting and the process of being hunted ourselves is old programming in the human brain, undoubtedly at the root of the inquisitiveness, admiration, respect, fear and sense of kinship we still feel for wild animals. Prey or predator, the creatures we feasted on and fled from have stalked waking thoughts and nightly dreams throughout our evolution. It’s reckoned that between Homo sapiens and our ancestors, we’ve probably hunted animals similar to deer for as long as two million years. The roe deer itself is thought to be unchanged in appearance in the last million. That’s a long time to have known one another, a long time to have consigned each other’s forms and features to deep memory, especially considering how hands-on and brutal the relationship has been.

  Long before its incarnation as a royal hunting forest, the ground I’m sitting on would have run thickly with roe and red deer. Huge numbers of beasts flowed into the Preboreal landscape vacated by the ice as it vanished northwards. Eleven thousand years ago, in temperatures and woodland cover similar to now, Mesolithic settlers – if ‘settlers’ can be the right word for hunter-gatherers – moved through this gorge, stalking, slaughtering, skinning, cleaning, cooking and eating these deer, sewing their skins into clothes, stretching their hides for tentage, fashioning weapons and decorations from their antlers and bones. Noses knew the smell of eviscerated guts; fingers the feel of fat and the breaking strength of leg ligaments. Such things were routine, day-to-day necessities, the details of our pre-agricultural dependency on these animals. And from the human perspective, it was nothing less than dependency.

  You don’t need to travel far from here to get an idea how deep the relationship ran. Fifty miles on a rough bearing east-north-east, five miles south from the coast at Scarborough, lies one the most extraordinary Mesolithic sites in the world. The smooth green pasture and plough soil you find at Star Carr today is deceptive: over millennia the build-up of decomposing plant matter remade this landscape, burying under peat all traces of the vast inland lake that filled the area during the post-glacial period. Burying, but not destroying. The peat has preserved much of what is normally lost, like flowers pressed between pages. Lake Flixton – as it is known to archaeologists – was a wide, relatively shallow body of water teeming with fauna, fringed with wetland, swamp, thick woodland and seasonal Mesolithic dwellings dotted around its peninsulas and promontories, thought to be used by hunter-gatherers as a seasonal base. The finds have been revelatory – huge quantities of flint-felled timber created a firm platform on the lake’s shore; posts for a permanent building with a wooden frame lashed together using honeysuckle stems or nettle cordage and thatched with reeds; hundreds of examples of flint and deer bone worked into bodkins, scrapers, harpoons and arrowheads. But the relics that grab the heart and haunt the eye are the twenty-one headdresses. Fashioned from the frontal bones of male red deer skulls, the antlers still attached, these are frightening, primal things, entrancing and unnerving to behold even when sterile and suspended behind a layer of Perspex at the British Museum. They have a strange presence and an almost human quality. On each,
beneath the antlers, just where the plane of the frontlets is flattest, two holes have been neatly bored through the bone using flint. In that peculiar way our minds seek out the form of faces, you invariably see these as bifocal eye sockets, as though you are being confronted with the skull of a small, horned person staring back at you. In fact, the holes were made at the back of these skullcaps so that they could be tied to the head with a leather thong. These weren’t hung like hunting trophies today, bleached, mounted on a plaque, nailed to a wall to gather dust; they had a purpose: they were made to be worn. Each was carefully worked on and thinned down in places. Cut marks show that the deer’s flesh was carefully removed before the bones of its nose were snapped off and the edges of the skull trimmed. Their insides were scraped and smoothed, made comfortable for specific human head shapes. It was bespoke tailoring. For what, though? Celebrations? Rituals? Shamanistic dances? Rites of passage? Disguises for hunting? The definitive answers aren’t preserved in the peat but what the deer bone tools, carved antlers and headdresses make starkly visible is the extent to which our bodies must have been permanently animalised. They speak of a particularly porous boundary between human and deer. And perhaps it needed to be. The act of hunting was fraught with tension and danger: a broken leg could mean lameness, a gored stomach a slow, painful death. Maybe the further we pushed through the membrane and the more we coaxed the animal within ourselves, the more skilful and successful we became. What the relics of Star Carr also exude is a feeling of the local, something that is so often absent in great archaeological finds. This wasn’t something that happened halfway around the world; it was right here. The long reach of time has brought distance, but even so, when you think about it, it’d be surprising if there weren’t these kinds of involuntary emotional, physical, spiritual responses whenever the relationship is briefly, unexpectedly restored. It’s like old lovers randomly bumping into one another in some far-flung foreign city – strangers who are instantly and intimately familiar.