The Stag

I got up before the sun yesterday. The curtain rod had mysteriously fallen off the wall in the bedroom the night before, and I woke naturally in the growing light. 

I set off outside with my camera, determined to capture the sunrise. The paddock next to us hasn’t been grazed in months. In early summer, the farmer leaves it to grow. Soon it will be cut for hay. But right now it’s a sea of feathery gold plumes. I imagined the early sun casting across it, and wanted to see if it would photograph well.

At first the sun hit the top of the hills far north of us. There are so many creased and pressed folds here, mountain ranges running this way and that, that we remained in shadow long after those hills were completely lit up. I zoomed in and out, framing shots between trees, experimenting while I waited. 

After a while, I sat on the huge pile of woodchips next to the fence, deposited there after we trimmed the macrocarpa tree. Waiting for the sun to rise is a bit like waiting for a pot to boil. One of the cats joined me. It was incredibly peaceful, and very mild. The dawn chorus was well over, the birds now busy feeding. The occasional tui call was all I heard.

The sun lit up the treetops on the west side of the valley. I stood up to take some photos. It wouldn’t be long now until the sun’s rays would tilt and slide into the valley. I watched the sun grow down the face of the western hill. It was as if the shadow was peeling itself back, as if all along, all through the night the hill was ablaze, simply covered by a blanket of dark. 

It was then that I saw it. Sticking up from the grass, 50 metres away - antlers. At first I thought it must be a branch fallen from a pine tree. Surely those were pinecones, and twigs? But my brain was taking it all in and it looked foreign. Something was out of place. The pinecones changed into ears, and a nose. This was a stag, and it was looking right at me. 

I lifted my camera slowly and took a shot. Amateur that I am, I stepped forward to take another and the deer suddenly disappeared. I heard the sounds of its hooves, the clang of the wire as it jumped the fence, clipping it on the way over. I watched as not one but two stags appeared again further away and headed over the rise toward the river. 

I took my final shots of the sun lighting up the grass. As I did, I wondered at the chance of seeing a stag that close, in that way. There aren’t any deer farms in the valley that I know of. It’s possible there is, and they escaped. But farmowners are usually pretty diligent about fencing deer. 

Were they wild? I imagined them coming down from the forest park on the eastern hills, wandering the paddocks, easily clearing the post and wire fences. Do they do this every morning and there just isn’t anyone around to see them? Did they come through our garden? Could they, please?

Encountering a deer like this is commonplace in many places, but rare in New Zealand. We are a land of birds. The introduced mammals we have here are small - rodents, possums, stoats and weasels, hedgehogs. Meeting a creature in the wild, something bigger than you, in such unexpected circumstances, felt otherworldly.