The Forest (9 page)

And when she and Walter parted from him the next morning to make their way to Winchester he remained formal and unapproachable. But at the top of the ridge she glanced back and saw his tall, dark figure, still watching after them until they passed out of sight.

Autumn comes with kindness to the Forest. The long light of summer slides into September; the spreading oaks are still green; the peaty humus of the heath retains a soft, seaside warmth; the air smells sweet and tangy.

In the world outside it is a mellow time. The harvest is done, the apples are ready to fall, the mists on the bare fields a damp reminder to men to gather in all they can as the sun begins its gradual recession towards the ending of the year.

But in the Forest nature takes a different form. This is the season when the oaks shed their green acorns and the forest floor is covered with their falling. Men like Pride turn out their pigs to eat the acorns and beech nuts – the mast as this feed is called. It is an ancient right, which even the Norman Conqueror had no wish to stop. ‘If the deer eat too many acorns when they’re green,’ his foresters reminded him, ‘they get sick. But the pigs love them.’ As the days pass, the beech trees begin to yellow; yet, just as this sign of gentle decay is seen, another almost contradictory transformation also takes place. The holly tree is either male or female and it is now, as though to welcome the future coming of winter, that the female holly bursts into berries whose thick, crimson clusters gleam against the crystal-blue September sky.

As the equinox passes and all nature becomes aware that the nights are starting to be just a little longer than the days, further changes are seen. The heather flowers having turned into a haze of tiny white dots, the heathland goes from its summer purple to autumn brown. The brown of the bracken stem climbs into the drying ferny leaves until, in certain clumps, they catch the autumn sunlight like polished bronze. The acorns lying in the fallen leaves have rolled free from their cups and they, too, are brown. The evening mist brings a damp chill. The cold dawn has a bracing bite. Yet in the Forest, these signs mark not an end but a beginning. If the sun is now departing, it is only to cede his place to a yet more ancient deity. Winter is on the way: it is the time of the silver moon.

It is the time for the rutting of the deer.

The buck stalked down the centre of the rutting stand. It was dawn. There was a light frost on the ground. Around the edge of the stand, on ground marked by their slots, as the tracks of the deer’s cleft feet are called, eight or nine does were waiting to be serviced. Some of them were moving about making a wickering sound. There was tense excitement in the air. The pale doe was also there. She was waiting quietly.

The buck’s antlers were splendid and he knew it. Their heavy, burnished blades spread out some two and a half feet from his head and they were fearsome to behold. They had been fully grown since August when their velvet covering had begun to peel off. For many days he had scraped and rubbed the new antlers against small trees and saplings, leaving scour marks on their bark. It had felt good when the strong saplings braced and bent against their weight; he had felt his growing power. This honing served a dual purpose: not only did it clean off the last vestiges of peeling velvet, but the bone of the antlers, creamy white when they emerged, became coated, polished, hardened to a gleaming brown.

By September he was getting restless. His neck swelled. His Adam’s apple enlarged; the tingling sensation of power seemed to be filling his whole body, from his hindquarters to his thickening shoulders. He began to strut and stamp the ground, he had an urge to exercise, to prove his power. He moved about the woods alone at night, wandering here and there like some knight in search of adventure. Gradually, however, he began to move towards that part of the Forest where the pale doe had seen him the year before – for bucks instinctively move away from their original home when they are going to mate, so that the genetic stock of the deer will be constantly mixed. By late September he was ready to mark out his rutting stand. But before that one other ancient ceremony had to begin.

Who knew when the red deer first came to the Forest? They had been there since time immemorial. Bigger than the fallow interlopers, men had designated them by different names: The male red was a stag, the female a hind; the young red was not a fawn, like the fallow, but a calf. While the fallow buck’s antlers rose in broad blades, the stag’s still larger crown rose in spiky branches. The red deer’s numbers were never large. Lacking the fleetness and cleverness of the fallow, they were easier to kill and already the fallow far outnumbered them. While the fallow liked the wooded glades, the red remained on the moor where, as they lay in the heather, they seemed, even in full daylight, to blend into the land itself. Primeval and Nordic, compared with the elegant French arrivals, it seemed appropriate, as the autumn rut approached, that even the fallow great bucks should yield precedence to these ancient figures who had endured in the empty silences of the heath since, very likely, the age of ice.

It is normally a few days after the autumn equinox, when he has taken charge of the group of hinds who will form his exclusive harem, that the red stag raises his mighty head and utters the haunting call, a few notes higher than the bellow of cattle, which echoes over the heather at twilight and causes men to listen and say: ‘The stags have started to roar.’

And more days will pass before, in the woodland glades, the fallow bucks add their own, different call to the sounds of autumn.

The buck’s stand was not one of the most important – older and more powerful great bucks held those – for this was still his first rut. It was about sixty yards long and nearly forty wide. He had prepared it carefully for days. First, working his way around the perimeter of the stand, he had used his antlers to thrash the saplings and bushes. As he did so, a strong scent exuded from glands below his eyes, marking the bushes as his territory. He anointed the trees along the perimeter too. Then, as the moment came closer, he had made scrapes with his forefeet, which also contained glands, upon the ground, even tearing it up in places with his antlers. He urinated in the scrapes, then rolled in the wetted dirt. This created the pungent smell of the rutting buck, thrilling to does: for unlike the red deer, it is the females who come to the male in the fallow rut.

And so, as if for some magical knightly tournament that was to take place in the forest glade, the handsome young buck was ready to challenge all comers on his rutting stand. His rut would last many days, during which time he would not eat, living on the energy provided by a phenomenal production of testosterone. Gradually he would grow less alert; by the end he would be exhausted. The watching does would guard him, therefore, patrolling the outer edges of the stand, looking out and listening. And indeed, all nature participated: for the birds would call out at the approach of danger and even the forest ponies, usually silent, would whinny in warning if they saw human intruders come near the dappled forms in their secret ceremony.

The buck had been pacing the stand for hours. Trampled grass, crushed bracken and nutty brown acorns lay underfoot. As well as the does, two prickets and a sore, who was trying to look as if he might step into the ring, were watching. A faint light was filtering through the trees. From time to time he would pause in his pacing to give the rutting call.

The rutting call of the fallow buck is known as a groan. Stretching his head slightly downwards, he then raises his swollen throat to emit this call. Its sound can hardly be described – a strange, grunting, belching trumpet. Once heard, it can never be forgotten.

Three times he groaned, handsome, powerful, from the centre of the stand.

But now a new figure was approaching through the trees. There was a rustle as the does scampered out of his path. He emerged and crossed the line quietly into the stand, walking calmly towards the buck as though he had not a care in the world.

It was another buck and, judging by his antlers, the two were perfectly matched.

The pale doe trembled. Her buck was going to fight.

The interloper moved slowly across the stand. He was darker than her buck. She could smell his scent, pungent, sour, like the mud from brackish water. He looked strong. He walked past her buck who fell into step – this was the ritual of the fight – just behind. The two males kept walking, almost casually; she saw the muscles flexing in their powerful shoulders, their antlers waving slowly up and down as they went along. She noticed that one of the two little curved horns just in front of the base of the antler blades on the dark buck’s head was broken, leaving a jagged spike. A sudden twist of the head and he could gouge out her buck’s eye. The other does were watching silently. Even the birds in the trees seemed to have quietened. She was aware only of the slow swish of the feet of the two males on the fallen leaves and bracken.

All nature knew her buck’s fate was about to be decided. A buck might challenge one of the mighty great bucks and lose with honour. Perhaps the interloper had broken his horn that way. But when two matched bucks come head to head, one must be defeated. He may be wounded, sometimes killed; but most important he has lost, his pride is shattered. The does know it, the whole forest has seen. He slinks away, and the stand and the does belong to the victor.

The pale doe watched as the two males reached the end of the stand, turned and started back again. Was it, after all her waiting, to be the darker, sour-smelling buck with the vicious spike who destroyed her chosen mate and then possessed her? She had come to the rutting stand. She belonged to the winner by right. That was the way of it. Then she saw her buck give the sign.

A nudge. That was the signal. Her buck moved forward just a little so that his shoulder nudged the hindquarter of the interloper.

The dark buck wheeled. For just a second there was a pause as the two bucks braced back on their hind legs; then, with a crack that echoed through the woods, the two huge antlers crashed together.

Two full-grown bucks fighting is a fearsome thing to behold. As the powerful bodies with their swollen necks strained, grunting, against each other, the pale doe involuntarily backed away. They suddenly seemed so huge, so dangerous. If one of them broke loose, if they came charging towards her … They were evenly matched. For long seconds they inched back and forth, their antlers locked low, their hind legs digging into the ground, muscles bulging as if they might snap. Her buck seemed to be gaining.

Then she saw his hind legs slip. The interloper pushed forward, a foot, a yard. Her buck was clawing the ground, but slipping in the damp leaves. He was about to go down. She saw him lock his legs. He was sliding back, his body rigid, locked in position. The interloper gave a final shove; he seemed about to lunge forward and grind her buck down.

But something had changed. Her buck had hit firmer ground. His feet suddenly got their purchase on grass. His hindquarters shivering, he dug in. She saw his shoulders rise and his neck bear down. And now the interloper was slipping on the wet leaves. Slowly, cautiously, their antlers locked, the two straining bucks began to turn. Now they were both on grass. Suddenly the interloper disengaged. He gave his head a twist. The jagged spike was aiming at her buck’s eye. He lunged. She saw her buck rock back, then smash forward. His whole weight came down on the interloper’s antlers. There was a rasping crackle. The interloper, because of his vicious manoeuvre, was not quite straight. His neck was twisting. He was giving ground.

And then, in a rush, it was all over. Her buck was shoving him back, foot after foot. The interloper was off balance; he struggled, turned and was caught on the flank. Her buck was in full spate now, butting, tossing his head, driving his opponent before him. There was blood on the interloper’s side. Her buck’s head rammed again into his antlers with a tremendous blow. The interloper cried out, turned, stumbling, and limped off the stand. He had lost.

Having strutted magnificently down the stand of which he was now the undisputed master, her buck turned his face towards her.

Why did he suddenly look strange? His huge antlers, his triangle of a face, the two eyes like black holes, staring blankly towards her: it was as if her buck had vanished, been transmogrified into some other entity named only ‘deer’ – an image, a spirit, swift and terrible. He bounded towards her.

She turned. It was expected of her; it was instinctive; but she was also afraid. All year she had waited. Now it was her turn. She began to run, away from the stand, through the trees, the bushes brushing against her. All year she had waited, yet now, knowing him so large, so powerful, so strange and terrible, she was trembling with fear. Would he hurt her? Yes. Surely. Yet it must be so. She knew it must. She had a strange sensation, as though all the warmth, all the blood in her body was rushing backwards, into the base of her spine and her hindquarters, which were trembling as she ran. He was coming. He was just behind, she could hear him, sense him. Suddenly she could smell him. Hardly knowing what she did, she stopped abruptly.

He was there. He was upon her. She felt him mount her; her body staggered under the weight. She had to fight to stand up. His scent was all over her like a cloud. Her head involuntarily snapped back. His antlers appeared, hovering above, terrible, absolute. And then she felt him enter. A searing red pain and then, something full, urgent, tremendous, filling her like a flood.

Adela liked Winchester. Lying in the chalk downs, due north of the great Solent inlet, it had once been a Roman provincial town. For centuries after it had been the chief seat of the West Saxon kings, who had finally become kings of all England. And though, during the last few decades, it was London that had become the effective capital of the kingdom, the old royal treasury remained at Winchester and the king would still from time to time hold court at his royal palace there.

It was not far from the New Forest. A road led southwest for eight miles to the small town of Romsey, where there was a religious house for nuns. Four miles more and one was in the Forest. Yet, as Adela quickly found, it seemed a world away.