Deer Story
The woods are not supposed to be quiet.
I think this is something that anyone who has ever taken even a step into the woods knows
instinctively. Even in the freezing winter months, there is still, underneath everything, the gentle
murmur of leaves brushing against themselves and birds jumping from branches of trees—and,
underneath even that, an ambiance that is nearly impossible to notice until it ceases: the hum of
life, the breath of the natural world.
In Appalachia, we’re taught from a young age to respect and love the forest and mountains that
surround us like we would a dear friend; I’ve always held a deep reverence for the forest,
especially the trails closest to my apartment that I walk through almost every day. I love all the
animals that live there, and enjoy seeing them, but deer have always held a special place in my
heart. I have a journal marking each time I see one, decorated fondly with stickers and flowers,
and, in the middle, a crude but heartful drawing of a white-tailed doe.
The woods being completely quiet in such a way is something that I have only experienced a
handful of times, each being more unsettling than the last. It was long past the first snow when
this strangeness began, and it has lasted until the very end of January. The most recent and
perhaps the most awful example occurred only yesterday—it feels terrible to even talk about,
like I am invoking something that shouldn’t be invoked, speaking things that shouldn’t be said
aloud—but I also feel that I must explain what happened to keep even a shred of my sanity
intact.
Yesterday morning, after breakfast, I decided to go for a walk in the woods. I wrapped my scarf
(a messy, bright red one that I had knitted myself. It wasn’t hunting season anymore, but I figured I was better safe than sorry against some out-of-touch West Virginian backwoods hunter)
tight around my neck and buttoned up the very top button on my jacket. It was a freezing day,
and the ground was coated in pure white snow, piled high on the sides of the road and on the
tops of trees. My breath fanned out white in front of me as I walked down one of my favorite
paths, clutching my deer journal tightly in stiff hands. As I walked, snow crunching beneath
my feet, I came upon a subtly carved trail a ways away from my usual walk. Perhaps deer could
be in the thicket that lay beyond the trees? During the cold winter months, they
tended to brave the wind and snow together in close-knit groups, hidden in patches of especially
thick forest. I was always desperate to see deer, and I happened to be feeling adventurous for
whatever reason, so I fought my way through the thick brush to follow the dark, snowy path.
The walk was quiet and shadowy, and I enjoyed the solitude of it, my ears pricked for the telltale
cracking of sticks, until I began to catch the scent of some kind of dead animal as I kept further
on. I expected it to go away, as I passed wherever the animal’s body lay, but, instead, the smell
only increased the further I went. Soon enough, just when I had decided to turn around—the
path was narrowing, and the cold was creeping its way into my jacket—it happened.
The comforting, ambient sounds of the woods faded away into an eerie silence, which felt less like
a natural hush and more like cotton wool being shoved into my ears. The Appalachian
mountains are more than four hundred million years old. They are older than the rings of Saturn,
older than bones, older than land creatures—and in that moment, I experienced the mountains
as silent as they had been four hundred million years ago. I was the outlier, with my bright red
scarf and my deer journal and the labored puffs of my breath, and my heart began to beat faster
as my nose picked up the smell again.
This time it was worse. It smelled like pure death, the rancid-flesh stink of decomposing roadkill,
all metallic blood and sick fruity sweetness, mixed with something ancient and raw, which nearly
made me reel back and vomit. Somehow, I managed to stay stock-still, gripping onto the rough
bark of the tree in front of me while I dry heaved. I forced myself to stand upright and scanned
the trees in front of me for a flash of—what?
I thought I had seen a deer. A flash of downy tan-white leaped through the trees again, closer
this time, and I caught a glimpse of antlers—a buck, then! The majority of the deer I saw were
does, so I took the risk of edging myself away from the tree to look, trying to ignore the smell
and the innate feeling of wrongness that had been following me since the woods
went quiet. I squinted my eyes and clutched my journal hopefully as the deer began to come
into sight.
For some reason, the shadow was odd and malformed—I saw his antlers at the very top of his
tall silhouette, where his head stood above his legs rather than in front of them. As he walked
into the dappled light, I saw.
He was walking on his hind legs.
He paused for a moment, cocking his head to the side in a sharp gesture reminiscent of a
person, and I held my breath. The feeling of sharp ice flooded my veins.
For all his human-like qualities, he did not walk like one. He shuffled and stumbled, each step
forward making me flinch. His hoofed feet fell upon sticks and frozen snow, but I heard no
cracking or crunching—it was as quiet and still as a grave.
He marched in a lonely procession, head lolling and arms wide out to his sides, twisting and
turning as though he was being blown by the wind, even though the air was unbearably still. His
head began to bob to a strange rhythm I could not follow, and he wheeled his arms around,
continuing his strange dance in a circle, as though to the beat of an imaginary drum.
All of a sudden, he stopped, and I clutched the tree harder, shaking with cold and fear as he
began to turn his head in my direction. It was a motion so unlike a deer that I struggle to recall it
even now—it was slow and deliberate, meant to show me he knew I had seen him, and that I was not
supposed to. It felt in that moment like the very earth was charged with
something older than is conceivable, the purest kind of uncaring nature, the closest thing to
what is real, and it was not for my eyes.
He turned the rest of the way quickly, small, cold black eyes meeting mine, and I stifled a
scream, my eyes watering against the nauseating smell of death. My stomach twisted into knots
and so did my legs. I was paralyzed in place against that tree, my deer journal laying
helpless and forgotten in the snow beside me.
He had seen me looking at him, and I knew at that moment that I would pay for it—perhaps,
even, spend the rest of my life atoning for that particular sin.
Slowly, as I whimpered and shook behind that tree, the suffocating silence began to wane and,
eventually, the familiar sounds of the forest emerged once again. A gentle wind caused the
leaves to whisper, and the hum of nature returned. I peered back around the tree, but I knew
he would not be there. He had disappeared as quickly as he had come, and I was left alone
in the dark.
I hardly remember the walk home. I stumbled my way through the woods on shaky legs, looking
behind me every so often, though in my heart I knew he was not following me. I was in a
daze, relying on my muscle memory to get home: open the door, lock the deadbolt, put the tea
kettle on to boil.
It was only as I sat at my dinner table waiting for my tea to steep, that I began to cry.
That night, I closed my living room curtains tight, so tight I couldn't even see the moonlight
peeking through, and I tied them together for the first time. My bedroom window, normally open
after dark to let in the night air, even during winter, was shut with such vigor that the bang of it
made me jump, as the breeze carried from the woods the sick rot of old, forgotten flesh and the
stifling sound of ancient silence.
I tried to calm my racing heart while I drew the curtains, tied them, and crawled into my bed,
a steady, poisonous dread consuming me. It took me almost no time to fall asleep, once the
adrenaline had drained out of my body and left me tired and limp, and I laid in the peaceful
blackness of nothing until the dreams began.
I was in the same woods, and a deer walked towards me on four legs, his antlers sharp and
twisted in the pearly light of the moon. I approached him, the snow on the ground burning my
bare feet with its cold, and reached up to his left antler with a steady arm. An echoing crack shot
across the woods as I broke it off. The sound bounced off the trees that surrounded us and that
seemed to loom closer every second. He opened his mouth, and I saw his awful human teeth. I broke off his left antler and stabbed myself with it, straight through
the heart—he stood up straight and tall on two legs and stared at me with his black eyes before
leaning down and whispering a garbled, twisted string of words in my ear. For all he spoke, I
remember nothing.
When I woke, it was 4:00am and my covers were on the floor. Though the heat was on, I felt
frozen, and my body was racked with shivers that weren’t only from the cold. I felt feverish and
terrible. I wrenched myself out of bed to get some water to cool my parched, sore throat, but stopped at the living room window.
The curtains had been drawn back from the inside of the house, and the white yard was visible
only by moonlight, which cast everything in an eerie, white glow. There was a shadow in the
distance, stumbling forward on two long, skinny legs, on its way to my window.
In my heart, I knew that it was him. I felt a dread I cannot describe flood my chest and turn
everything in my body frozen and still, like an animal waiting to die. I was an observer of my
body as I stood in front of that window for what felt like hours, watching the shadow approach
the window and listening to the muffled animal sounds of huffing breaths and smelling the rankness
of rotten meat. Eventually, I closed my eyes and began to pray (to whom I prayed is a
mystery) and opened them once more. He was gone. The snowy yard was clear and dark.
And now, I am here. The sun has just begun to rise, coating the world in pure yellow light. I woke
up this morning feeling heavy, but less sick. I am drinking tea with excess amounts of honey, and staring at my doorstep.
Laying there in the melting snow, its pages crinkled and wet, is my deer journal, the sketched doe on the front cover now bearing a pair of messily drawn antlers.
I was reading about Appalachia the other day because I find it really fascinating, and I love Cryptid Eldritch horror kind of stories, so I wanted to write something inspired by that.