I’m the first to see it, in the distance, a brownish mass lying across the narrow dirt path.
Was it a fallen branch, or a tree? Or just a shadow?
The latter was unlikely. Although this path-less-travelled on the southern flank of the Nower (a quiet nature reserve to the west of Dorking) was often soaked in the most spectacular pink light – the ruddy blush of a rising sun merging with a vivid, cobalt sky – today is dismal and disorientating, with hard rain thrown around by a muscular wind.
Yes, it must be a branch. Or a tree.
But as I get closer, Tilda, our crème caramel Brittany, also sees it and begins to bark. Loudly and incessantly. Not sure if she’s afraid or excited, or both, I put her on the lead and try to calm her, gently stroking the tiny white heart on her forehead. But she’s having none of it, keeping up a rhythmic, alarmist yelp as she pulls me along.
From thirty yards away, I observe the thing move. Just a flinch, but enough for Tilda to re-double her efforts, straining to get nearer.
At twenty yards, I realise at last that the thing is a young deer, probably a Roe. Three feet from nose to rump, it lies prone on its side in the dirt, its left rear leg awkward beneath it, the angles all wrong. Its predicament has likely been caused by a miscalculation as it jumped the wire fence that confines the publicly accessible woodland from the privately-owned pastures that fall away steeply to the south.
The deer is a light auburn, but for its stomach and the inner avocado-cup of its ears, which are white, and the solid black of its mouth and feet. With its head in profile on the ground, a wide, dark eye looks up at me and something inscrutable passes between us. My right palm comes up to catch a flutter in my chest.
What should I do? What could I do?
Touching the young deer was out of the question – that would risk it being rejected by its mother. I knew that much. But was I seriously going to get hands-on anyway? It didn’t sound like me.
But this was rapidly escalating into a messy, bewildering scene. Tilda in a frenzy of pawing and barking and crying. The deer, now also agitated, pushing away the soft brown earth beneath it with twists and jerks. Trying to get away; but only hollowing out its own grave. Me, stressed, and sweating with indecision, as epileptic trees howled and shrieked around us.
I couldn’t just do nothing. Leave it there, cold and afraid, vulnerable to predators, or other dogs. But Tilda and I being there wasn’t helping either.
A quick search on my phone, and I’d rung the nearest wildlife rescue centre. Straining to hear, and to be heard, amid the tumult, they assured me they’d send someone out in the next couple of hours, to “attend” to the deer.
But what did “attend” actually mean?
I’m reluctant to leave, but in the circumstances, in the clamour and anxiety, one of us – Tilda, the young deer, or me – is going to have a heart attack. And I have a meeting I need to attend.
So, we set off for home, only stopping to ask a woman we pass, who has an older, calmer dog, to check in on the deer.
But the foal remains central to my thoughts for the rest of the day. And the next. I ring the rescue centre again, but they can’t, or won’t, give me any more information, other than saying that, yes, they had “collected” it, and not to worry.
I’m reminded of Carly, the boisterous, effervescent red setter our family had from a puppy when we moved from Ewhurst to the rural hamlet of Oakwood Hill at the start of the 1980s. One day, on returning from school, Carly was nowhere to be seen, her mellower brother, Pluto, lolling around the garden, his flaccid tail dragging along behind him in the uncut grass.
My brother, sister and I, all still under eleven, but perceptive enough to know that bad news was incoming, swayed between hysteria and confusion. Before Mum and Dad sat us down and hesitantly explained that Carly had escaped and killed a sheep and she had now gone to live on a nice farm in Ireland.
I wonder now if the young deer has also gone to live on that nice farm in Ireland.
Widespread Disruption 