Common Ground (19 page)

Time speeds up again, reeling away like line behind a bitten hook. I presume the deer glides off into trees and upriver, but I don't see that because my body has flinched and sought to protect the central, vital organs by turning itself towards the earth, right arm over my head, legs scrunched, shoulder braced for an impact that won't come. By the time I sit up again, the wood has returned to how it was. The edge-land is going about its business – the plane still passing overhead, jays; it's only me still caught up in the wake. I feel like a hammer has been swung into my diaphragm. Breathless, giddy, I am somewhere between ecstasy and a heart attack. A heaviness thumps between my ribs and a high note whistles in my ears. I feel twitchy, tense. My body isn't behaving how it should – or perhaps it is. Just as a magnet can magnetise metal when rubbed over it, the deer vaulting me has temporarily animalised my nervous and respiratory systems. There is disbelief, relief, then the urge to shout, to release, vent and share what just happened. I instinctively look around for someone to talk to, someone who – by chance – might have witnessed it.
It was right there!
I want to scream at anyone.
Did you see? It could have killed me! Or
– as it comes to me a second later –
I could have killed it
. And as the human impulses trickle back I suddenly start to feel starkly alone, as though I've drifted too far out to sea while I wasn't concentrating. The adrenalin wearing off. I wish there were other people with me. There
should
be other people here. The next best thing is in my pocket, but my finger hesitates over my phone's screen. From behind me, way back in town, a train flying into a tunnel yawns out a long, discordant honk, the note rising at its end like a disapproving question –
reeeeaaa-lly?
I pocket the handset and feel for my notebook. It's probably right. This doesn't need sharing. Not yet. And not like that. Anyway, what could you say? How do you describe these feelings? How can I explain the kind of primitive excitement flowing through my veins to someone who wasn't here? ‘Oh, hi, how are things? I just thought I'd call and say I've glimpsed the immensity of existence.' Because, grand as it sounds, that's how it feels.

A lot of people insist that hunting is in our DNA; some will go so far as to assert it is a fundamental human right, a cultural imperative, even if the necessity for it to provide our food, clothes and shelter has long been delegated to more convenient, efficient or morally palatable methods. Whatever we might think – or not think – of it today, hunting and the process of being hunted ourselves is old programming in the human brain, undoubtedly at the root of the inquisitiveness, admiration, respect, fear and sense of kinship we still feel for wild animals. Prey or predator, the creatures we feasted on and fled from have stalked waking thoughts and nightly dreams throughout our evolution. It's reckoned that between
Homo sapiens
and our ancestors, we've probably hunted animals similar to deer for as long as two million years. The roe deer itself is thought to be unchanged in appearance in the last million. That's a long time to have known one another, a long time to have consigned each other's forms and features to deep memory, especially considering how hands-on and brutal the relationship has been.

Long before its incarnation as a royal hunting forest, the ground I'm sitting on would have run thickly with roe and red deer. Huge numbers of beasts flowed into the Preboreal landscape vacated by the ice as it vanished northwards. Eleven thousand years ago, in temperatures and woodland cover similar to now, Mesolithic settlers – if ‘settlers' can be the right word for hunter-gatherers – moved through this gorge, stalking, slaughtering, skinning, cleaning, cooking and eating these deer, sewing their skins into clothes, stretching their hides for tentage, fashioning weapons and decorations from their antlers and bones. Noses knew the smell of eviscerated guts; fingers the feel of fat and the breaking strength of leg ligaments. Such things were routine, day-to-day necessities, the details of our pre-agricultural dependency on these animals. And from the human perspective, it was nothing less than dependency.

You don't need to travel far from here to get an idea how deep the relationship ran. Fifty miles on a rough bearing east-north-east, five miles south from the coast at Scarborough, lies one the most extraordinary Mesolithic sites in the world. The smooth green pasture and plough soil you find at Star Carr today is deceptive: over millennia the build-up of decomposing plant matter remade this landscape, burying under peat all traces of the vast inland lake that filled the area during the post-glacial period. Burying, but not destroying. The peat has preserved much of what is normally lost, like flowers pressed between pages.
Lake Flixton
– as it is known to archaeologists – was a wide, relatively shallow body of water teeming with fauna, fringed with wetland, swamp, thick woodland and seasonal Mesolithic dwellings dotted around its peninsulas and promontories, thought to be used by hunter-gatherers as a seasonal base. The finds have been revelatory – huge quantities of flint-felled timber created a firm platform on the lake's shore; posts for a permanent building with a wooden frame lashed together using honeysuckle stems or nettle cordage and thatched with reeds; hundreds of examples of flint and deer bone worked into bodkins, scrapers, harpoons and arrowheads. But the relics that grab the heart and haunt the eye are the twenty-one headdresses. Fashioned from the frontal bones of male red deer skulls, the antlers still attached, these are frightening, primal things, entrancing and unnerving to behold even when sterile and suspended behind a layer of Perspex at the British Museum. They have a strange presence and an almost human quality. On each, beneath the antlers, just where the plane of the frontlets is flattest, two holes have been neatly bored through the bone using flint. In that peculiar way our minds seek out the form of faces, you invariably see these as bifocal eye sockets, as though you are being confronted with the skull of a small, horned person staring back at you. In fact, the holes were made at the back of these skullcaps so that they could be tied to the head with a leather thong. These weren't hung like hunting trophies today, bleached, mounted on a plaque, nailed to a wall to gather dust; they had a purpose: they were made to be worn. Each was carefully worked on and thinned down in places. Cut marks show that the deer's flesh was carefully removed before the bones of its nose were snapped off and the edges of the skull trimmed. Their insides were scraped and smoothed, made comfortable for specific human head shapes. It was bespoke tailoring. For what, though? Celebrations? Rituals? Shamanistic dances? Rites of passage? Disguises for hunting? The definitive answers aren't preserved in the peat but what the deer bone tools, carved antlers and headdresses make starkly visible is the extent to which our bodies must have been permanently animalised. They speak of a particularly porous boundary between human and deer. And perhaps it needed to be. The act of hunting was fraught with tension and danger: a broken leg could mean lameness, a gored stomach a slow, painful death. Maybe the further we pushed through the membrane and the more we coaxed the animal within ourselves, the more skilful and successful we became. What the relics of Star Carr also exude is a feeling of the local, something that is so often absent in great archaeological finds. This wasn't something that happened halfway around the world; it was right here. The long reach of time has brought distance, but even so, when you think about it, it'd be surprising if there weren't these kinds of involuntary emotional, physical, spiritual responses whenever the relationship is briefly, unexpectedly restored. It's like old lovers randomly bumping into one another in some far-flung foreign city – strangers who are instantly and intimately familiar.

Proximity's the thing, I'm sure. The sort that you feel when you look into a living eye as it fixes upon yours. Old memories are stirred, and not just from the human side. In that second or less, the deer took in my details too. A flash of remembering, that fear flickering down its flank. Until very recently the idea that memory could be passed on genetically in animals would have got you laughed out of any laboratory. Scientific consensus was adamant the slate was always wiped clean from one generation to the next. Yet recent studies in the field of epigenetics have revealed compelling evidence to the contrary. By training mice to fear a particular smell – cherry blossom, of all things – researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, have shown that the experiences of one parent influences the structure and function of the nervous system of subsequent generations, meaning that the same stimuli can elicit the same emotional response in animals that have no reason to possess it. If it proves true across the mammal kingdom that environment, experience and traumatic events are sufficiently powerful to take root in DNA and be passed on, who can tell what a deer might recall in the moment it sees a human shape lying in a hollow below. Who really knows what might be inherited and transferred?

Seeing one deer is never enough. That's what becomes apparent as I crouch in the hollow, looking west and east along the river, willing the shotguns to flush another. A branch snaps and I turn towards it, craving the sensation again. It's not about blood or killing; it is a yearning for closeness, the visceral flood of animal without and within.

When Mesolithic hunter-gatherers stalked here roe deer colossally outnumbered humans, but by 1800 they had almost been driven to extinction in Britain. Now they are common again in urban and rural areas. Edge-lands, overgrown and largely people-free, provide perfect corridors between terrains and plenty of rough cover to hide, feed and breed in. Two months ago it was as though a pair of does was waiting for me twenty metres or so east of the holloway. An early morning mist cloaked the field. Their heads barely broke its surface. At first they seemed like giant rabbits, ears twitching and turning as they ate. Then a motorbike accelerating hard on a road triggered their flight reflexes and they bounded off in silence, disintegrating through the stubby spikes of hawthorn hedge, like leaf-smoke. Thrilling enough, but it's different when you could have reached out and touched a living deer, when you might have stroked, or stabbed, the flank flexing in front of you. That kind of physical intimacy doesn't feature in our daily lives any more. It must have started to fade as the shift towards settlement and farming took hold, before being denied completely as hunting forests like Knaresborough became the fiercely guarded demesnes of royalty. For most of us today the only connection is through the filter of a screen. The watcher has replaced the hunter. Watching was always a vital part of hunting, of course – following slots imprinted in the ground; noting movement, behaviour, location, weaknesses – but now it is the entirety of our engagement. Wildlife documentaries do astounding things in bringing us closer to species we would never otherwise learn about, taking us on voyages to the deepest parts of the ocean or stretches of remote jungle, revealing sights inconceivable to our ancestors. Even so, they are only ever a passive process, cerebral and reserved; there is a far more complex, complicated and profound wonder to seeing wild animals close-up and in the flesh. Interestingly, though, for all the separation that's occurred, the connection still refuses to leave our systems. The affinity is there in the nature-craving TV schedules, in our fashions, even in the brand names of our cars. Science and technology – fields that at certain points in history almost defined themselves by their distance from, and mastery over, nature – are returning to the source for inspiration. Biomimicry – the study of nature's designs, organisms and ecosystems to solve human problems – is a fascinating and expanding business. I've read of car companies using the scales on butterfly wings as a model for solar panels, and American running-shoe brands creating soles that replicate the traction functions of a mountain goat's hoof. In this emerging area deer are proving their worth to humankind again. Scientists at the University of York are working on replicating the structure of antler as a basis for incredibly tough, resilient materials. They found that on the verge of the rut, just before bucks or stags duel, their antlers dry out. Instead of becoming brittle and breakable as you might imagine, this process actually makes antler two and a half times stronger than wet bone. York was a Mesolithic site itself, probably chosen for its position at the confluence of the Ouse and the Foss rivers. Over the same earth where edges of worked flint once cut deer skin and flesh, scalpels are being drawn and microscopes zooming in, still in the interests of sustaining our species. Or, at the very least, making life more durable.

And as I'm sitting here waiting, another thought hits me. Last week my brother dropped off a boot-load of stuff at our house: hand-me-downs from his kids for when the baby comes. The rich haul included a whole box of books and if I think about it now, every one of them had a different animal or bird on the cover: hare, snake, elephant, lion, panda, penguin, whale, bear, fox, owl, swan, mouse, deer – even the mythical creature on the front of the dog-eared copy of
The Gruffalo
is a composite of wild creatures. Surely it's not a coincidence that the names, shapes and characteristics of wild animals are among the first things we teach our children, or that these are the books they love and lap up most readily. It must go deeper than just exotic colours or shapes on a page. I will do the same with our baby, no doubt, and as soon as it's old enough, I'll bring it down here to the edge-land. We're still conditioning and teaching a process of watching from earliest days; there is still an undeniable affiliation. I wonder if it's because in contrast to our vastly altered existences and increasingly unsure world, wild animals remain relatively unchanged, even if we have changed their environment beyond recognition. The deer that jumped over me was a single animal but it was also a link in a chain, an assertion of place, history and time. My shock and excitement weren't because it was alien; it was the opposite – a half-remembered thing, known, forgotten and recalled. A ghost in the woods and in the genes. What that adds up to I'm not sure, but seeing it felt like closing a distance, scratching an itch from somewhere back down the line.