Fallow Bucks, Chalk Scree.

I haven’t been able to put my fieldcraft into action much in recent weeks. But I’m making up for it now. I’m off to the gap on the downs that lies between two blocks of woodland – where there are fallow deer.

The high slope falls away steeply with far-reaching views of autumnal farmland. At what must be an almost 45 degree angle in places, the hill is treacherous to walk down. Close to the fence, it’s a skid over chalk scree nuggets that roll underfoot like acorns. On the open down, thick, fragrant grassland helps both the staying up, and the falling.

On one side the wood is mostly derelict coppice, with the hazel trees yellowing into fans. I can imagine the coppicers both dreading and relishing the challenge of this wood. How the lactic acid in their calf muscles must have burned, how they’d have laughed at each others’ falls, and how injuries from a slip with a billhook or saw in hand would have almost been inevitable.

At intervals, there are tracks where the deer move from one wood to the next, and leap the waist-high fence. The splayed double brackets of their hooves, and the imprint of their fetlock spurs, or ‘ergots’ are some three metres from the fence and proof of the height they’ve jumped, and the weight of the animals. I imagine them like steeplechasers.

Horseshoes of earth on the down have been excavated from grassy anthill tumps by partridges and pheasants, to get at the ants and dust bathe. Some of these have been pawed at and enlarged by the bucks. There are droppings, or ‘crotties’ and not only hoofprints: there are knee prints where the animal has knelt, and dents and slices where it has thrashed in testosterone surges at the turf and grass with its antlers.

At the foot of the wood, the light filters through a wild cathedral of tall beeches where the bucks’ rutting stands are. Their fading lemon-green leaves are like a brief whiff of spring, before the caramel fire of them is revealed. A strong smell of ammonia reaches me, where the bucks have made their rutting wallows and rolled.

Then a small herd breaks cover from some hawthorn behind me. They cross the gap at a canter, long legs like thoroughbreds, hocks working hard in the long, tussocky grass. A dark chocolate buck leads a harem of three, chestnut-spotted does. He carries his head high, on a level plane with his spine, to manage the heavy, thorny crown of palmate antlers lying along his back. The four duck beneath the laddered platform of a shooting high seat, and jump the fence into the opposite wood. I wonder how the buck does it with his head held so high, but the last I see of them is a dark, upside-down horseshoe on each white rump, kicking up and over the fence like one clean set of heels.  

Time is up for me today, but as I climb to leave, in the woods that are below me again, there is the gutteral, repeated, belchy sound of a buck and then, unmistakably, in the still air, the clash of antlers, like wood knocking on wood.