Text 1: The roaring season, by Isla Benbow

An original contemporary magazine article.

You hear the rut long before you see it. At first light on an October morning the park is drowned in mist, and out of the mist comes a sound I can only describe as a lion with a hangover: a deep, grinding roar that rolls across the grass and makes the hair on my arms stand up.

Then the mist thins and there he is, a red deer stag, perhaps twelve years old, standing over a group of hinds with his neck swollen and his antlers hung with strands of torn bracken. His breath steams. Every few minutes he throws back his head and roars again, and from the far side of the valley a younger stag answers him.

For six weeks every autumn, this is all a stag thinks about. He barely eats. He loses a fifth of his body weight. He spends his days rounding up hinds, roaring at rivals and, if the roaring fails, fighting them. When the young challenger finally walks down the slope, the two stags pace side by side for a while, sizing each other up, before turning and crashing their antlers together with a crack like a splitting branch. The fight lasts less than a minute. The young stag backs off, then runs.

The hinds, I notice, have not even looked up.

I am not alone. Behind me, along the path, a row of photographers stand with lenses the length of my arm, and the park’s rangers keep a watchful eye on all of us. That is a good thing. Every year, they tell me, somebody walks up to a rutting stag for a selfie, and every year somebody is lucky not to be hurt. These are wild animals, full of hormones and exhaustion, and they weigh as much as two grown men.

By mid-morning the old stag is lying down in the bracken, his sides heaving. He looks magnificent and worn out at the same time, like a boxer between rounds. I walk home quietly, feeling that I have been allowed to watch something very old, and that it was none of my business.

Text 2: A letter from the Highlands, by Charles Ormsby

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1867, a guest at a Highland shooting lodge writes to a friend about watching red deer stags in the autumn.

My dear Fred, You asked me to send you news of my sport, and I must disappoint you, for I have killed nothing, and I begin to think I never shall. Let me tell you why.

On Thursday old Duncan, the stalker, roused me at five, and we were upon the hill before it was light, crawling through wet heather until I was soaked to the skin and could not feel my fingers. At length he laid his hand upon my arm and pointed. Below us, in a hollow of the moor, stood a great stag with perhaps thirty hinds about him, and as I watched he raised his head and bellowed. I never heard such a sound. It seemed to come up out of the earth, and the whole glen gave it back.

Presently another stag came over the ridge to dispute his possession, and for the next quarter of an hour I forgot my rifle entirely. They charged and met with a crash that I heard plainly at two hundred yards, and then they strove together, forehead to forehead, their antlers locked, their hoofs tearing up the turf, now one giving ground and now the other. Duncan whispered that he had twice found stags dead upon the hill with their horns so fast entangled that neither could get free. At last the stranger broke away and fled, and the master of the hollow stood alone, his flanks heaving, gazing after him like a king.

Duncan then placed the rifle in my hands. I raised it, and I had the stag in my sights, and I could not do it. I believe Duncan thinks me a fool, and perhaps I am. But I would sooner keep that stag in my memory, standing proud in the morning light, than have his head hanging in my hall.

Both of these texts are about watching red deer stags in the autumn.

Compare:

• the writers’ thoughts and feelings about the stags
• how the writers present these thoughts and feelings

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