The White Buck
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Strange things have been going through my mind. I look at yellow tulips and am reminded of Elena’s hair. I look at the moon and think about Ash. And then I remember a magical evening, when I was at the cabin in Inverness. I was hiking with a friend and all of a sudden in front of us we heard footsteps. We were walking on a gravel trail, made by humans, I suppose because nature doesn’t put all those pointed rocks together. It was almost the end of the trail, but not quite, and my friend Annie and I were worried about whether we could make it to the end of the trail by nightfall. I remember that we were talking about that, in quite ordinary voices, when we heard the footsteps.
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We instantly, as if we’d consulted, stopped and fell silent. I had a bottle of water in my hand; I put it in my backpack and then held the backpack like a weapon, ready for somebody to try to jump us. I don’t know why but I know Ann was thinking the same thing: that these crunching footsteps were from something big.
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And then something stepped out of the foliage on the right, directly onto the gravel trail. It was outline against the rays of the setting sun and Annie and I both involuntarily gasped. It was a buck, at least ten-point, its magnificent horns haloed against the sunset, but the buck itself was as white as milk. It was a warm, living white—I remember that clearly. But its eyes were dark; I remember that, too. Because it was looking at us. Just standing there, framed against the sunset, looking calmly at us.
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Moving an inch at a time I got my backpack back on. I’d seen footage of deer and elk attacks and if this magnificent creature wanted to hurt us, well, a backpack wasn’t going to save us.
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And the buck, although alert, wasn’t making any menacing moves. It was just calmly standing there about twenty feet away, watching and flicking its ears, but keeping its tail up. His ears and tail, I should say, because with that wicked-looking crown of horns, this animal was definitely male.
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And then there was more crunching in the underbrush and out onto the trail stepped his doe. She must have been his doe because there were only the two of them and she stood very close to him. She wasn’t white, as he was. She was an ordinary doe. I say ordinary but I mean she was a delicate miracle, standing on legs that looked as if they should snap in two under her weight, her body smaller than the buck’s, with clean lines, and a beautifully shaped head, topped by very large ears that moved continually. Her tail flipped, too, up and down and side to side.
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And then, her tiny hooves crunching delicately on the gravel, she bent to eat something—what? I couldn’t see. Maybe grass growing through the granite, maybe some flower or herb. She remained, silently cropping the vegetation and her mate stood guard above her.
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And then, still stopping to crop what I could now see was grass from beside the gravel pathway, the doe began to move away from us. The buck stood for a moment, still outlined against a flaming orange and red sunset, and then he turned to walk beside his doe.
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Annie and I barely had to glance at each other. Picking our steps as carefully as we could, we followed the white deer. We would have been crazy not to follow it—but we were really crazy doing what we did. We kept watching the buck for signs of agitation, and never saw one, but still . . . to this day, I don’t know if he would have given any sign or if he would just have trampled us to death in an instant.
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Crazy as we were, we were both under some kind of spell. Both of us felt it. The white buck wanted us to follow him, the spell said so. If we followed we might come to harm, but we were bound to follow.
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Coward that I am, I stopped and hurriedly took off my walking shoes. I whispered to Ann, who was watching me as if I were a lunatic, “Thooeth! Thooeth! They’ll hear uth,” remembering from something I’d read a long time ago that “s” was the most easily heard sound in all words, and that all guerilla fighters lisped.
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Annie rolled her eyes (I think) but obeyed me. We crept on; shoes held in our hands, after the glimmering whiteness of the buck, who was still perfectly visible, still moving at that stately, regal pace, as the doe continued her evening meal.
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The farther we walked, the more we fell under the buck’s spell. The first steps hurt as the sharp gravel easily pierced my socks, but the next steps hurt less, and then I was walking without feeling the least pain. I simply floated over the gravel. The deer simply floated ahead of me and Ann. The buck glanced back every so often, but there was still no sign of hesitation or of agitation in his body. In fact, he looked almost benevolent—now that that rack of horns was in shadow. Eventually, the buck and doe turned off on a side path that had no gravel—only lovely mud.
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And we followed and we followed. Ann and I followed the two deer for at least another twenty minutes, which was, I know, criminally foolish. We got up to with twelve feet of them. I think that if either of us had been on her own she would have walked right up to touch the buck; Annie because she has some mysterious way with animals (she rescues baby pigeons and full-grown skunks and the dog doesn’t live—including the police dog on duty—who hasn’t stopped to fawn on her. I used her as a model for Anna Eva Whiteraven in Dark Visions (yes, I’ve known her that long, and she’s only become a better friend as the years go by).
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(Bit of trivia: Annie really did own a clock like the one Lewis owns in Dark Visions. It was a cow that in the morning rang its bell and shouted “RAKE UP! TIME TO RAKE UP!” I just couldn’t make it fit with Anna Eva’s character so I gave it to Lewis.)
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In any case, finally, the buck had ceased to shimmer before us, the long dark twilight lay ahead of us, and it was hard enough to find our way back to the gravel path and to the car.
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We didn’t talk much about the experience; it was too magical and special to “be made common by words” as Frances Hodgson Burnett would have said. But sometimes now, we talk about “that night we saw the white buck,” and inevitably our tones get hushed and our minds feel renewed because it was such a special experience.
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Oh, yes, and I see that I have written that if I’d been alone, I would have gone up to try to touch the buck myself. I don’t have the magic over animals that Annie does, and I would never have risked her safety by trying to touch a wild animal without her. But if she hadn’t been with me I would have been sure that I had found the door to Magic at last, and silly as it sounds, I couldn’t have resisted.
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I don’t think I could have resisted. Maybe I have more common sense than I think.