A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The mist lay across Richmond Park like something that hadn't decided to leave yet.

Benji had come in through the gate at first light — that particular October light that arrives before the sun does, grey and soft and full of the smell of wet grass and bracken and the overnight cold. His red collar was dark with dew. The path curved down toward the Pen Ponds and he followed it slowly, the way he always walked new places: quietly, nose first, not yet sure what he was looking for.

The park spread out on either side of him in the particular way of Richmond — enormous and open and ancient, not a garden but a landscape, the kind of place that has its own weather and its own rules. The bracken stood head-high in great copper stands on the slopes above the ponds. The old oaks — some of them hundreds of years old, their trunks wider than a car, their bark silver-grey and thick with lichen — stood apart from each other in the way of trees that have had centuries to grow without competition.

And then he saw the stag.

He was standing in the mist on the far side of the Pen Ponds, facing away, absolutely still.

Not the stillness of something resting. The stillness of something that simply is — the particular quality of a creature so settled in itself that the landscape arranges around it rather than the other way around.

He was enormous. The largest land animal Benji had ever seen on the English mainland — a red deer stag, deep-coated in his autumn rust, his antlers branching above him in a shape that was both practical and completely strange. And across his antlers, draped over his shoulders, caught in the points and the brow tines — lichen. Long grey-green strands of it, hanging like old moss from the ancient oaks where he'd been thrashing in the night, the rut-season habit of a stag marking his presence in a landscape he had known, or whose family had known, for more years than anyone had counted.

In the morning mist, draped in the lichen of these old oaks, he looked less like a deer than like something the park itself had assembled.

Benji sat down on the damp grass and simply looked.

The mist moved. The light began, very slowly, to become morning.

After a while, Benji noticed the other deer.

Fallow deer, smaller and spotted even in October, moving at the woodland edge on the near side of the ponds — a group of six or seven, feeding in that unhurried way that deer feed at dawn, heads down, tails flicking, moving forward one step at a time.

And apart from them, standing at the very edge of the bracken where the woodland met the open ground, a young fallow buck. His antlers were small and new-looking, not yet the flattened palms they would become in maturity. He was watching the red stag across the water with an expression of concentrated uncertainty — ears forward, weight slightly back, the posture of a creature trying to decide something.

As Benji watched, the young buck moved toward the pond. Then stopped. Moved again. Stopped again.

The red stag, across the water, had not moved at all.

Finally the young buck retreated back to the bracken edge and stood there, apparently no closer to a decision.