Some kind of deer magic
Patrick Galbraith heads to a new literary festival and comes away thinking a little differently
The journey from Norfolk to the Wasing Estate in Berkshire had been a boring shitshow. I’d left myself a good five hours for what should have been a three-hour trip but on account of 12 people, in six separate incidents, deciding it was a fine day to rear end the car in front of them on the soulless A43, I turned up at the event I was due to speak at with some three minutes to go until the curtain rose.
As for quite what the event actually was, I wasn’t really sure. My literary agent had put me onto it some months previously. “Oh, you really must go and speak at this new event in Berkshire. It’s on some sort of estate or farm there.” Naturally, I had expected there to be girls in horsey girls in white trousers and men in gilets who had studied Land Economy drinking lukewarm pints out of those plastic cups. But it was not, it became clear as I jumped the queue and ran through the turnstile, pursued by a young guy with dreadlocks and a clipboard, that sort of do.
There seemed to be no alcohol at all, plastic cups or otherwise. There was a kombucha stand, children ran barefoot, and the more I looked the more I realised I was an oddity in not having a bindi on my forehead. I was there to speak alongside the author Lucy Jones, and Lulu Urquhart, a herbalist and biodynamic land worker. Jane Owen, who once won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show, for a rainforest garden, which highlighted the plight of indigenous people, was to be the event’s chair.
It’s funny what hunger does to a person – I’d had two Jammy Dodgers that morning and as the crowd grew I started to realise that in spite of us all meeting the previous week to discuss what it was we were going to speak about, I had no idea really what it was we were meant to be speaking about at all. My plan was to just tag along with whatever it was the others said but then we got going and my confusion became even greater. Lulu was talking about “matriarch trees” and everybody in the front row was nodding away. I sat for a bit in silence and then asked whether that sycamore at sycamore gap had been “a matriarch.” Lulu considered this for a moment and then told me that what we can be sure of is that the tree’s energy grew when it was felled because of the love directed to it.
Five minutes later, Jane Owen, seemingly aware I was spiritually out of my depth, asked me what I made of all of this, of the idea of listening to the land, making offerings to the trees, and of their energy. Of course, I did the only thing I could do. I said to her it was absolutely fascinating and assured the crowd that as soon as I got home I too, barefoot of course, would listen to the land – I wanted to hear what it had to say for itself.
My agent, who was sitting in the front row, later told me – when we were eating “seasonal fire food” together that she could absolutely tell I was trying my best but she didn’t feel the audience were fully on side when I started talking about the spirituality of fox hunting. My reflections on wildfowling, or so I felt anyway, had gone down moderately better. Some of the crowd even nodded when I told them about two brothers I know who leave feathers at the grave of the man who founded their goose shooting club. Lulu seemed to get this completely – what that speaks to she explained is the existence of a sort of goose magic. What, she asked me, as though I might know, is that goose magic?
The drive home was better. The roads were quiet and rain, absent from the east of England for so long, started to fall as I drove up the M11, trundling along past spindly hedges and thirsty 90-acre fields.
The following morning I got up at 4.30AM and went for a wander with my rifle – the local shop had just sold out of venison and I told them I’d come by with some more. There are plenty of people who want to eat venison and there are more deer in England than there’ve ever been but that bit in the middle takes time: catching up with them, processing them, and packing the meat.
There were oyster catchers up ahead, as I threaded my way through my favourite meadow, and out to my right, beyond the tributary of a small and much-abused chalk stream, a fox slunk by in the shadow of a hawthorn hedge and then in front of him I saw a roe doe. She stood and stamped, then stood almost completely motionless awhile. I watched her for what must have been 15 minutes or so and then behind her, I saw what I thought I might see: a young buck forty yards back. She proceeded slowly. If I waited and if the buck carried on, on the same trajectory, he would pass into a clear patch where the reeds were low.
The spring sun rose over the meadow casting the chalk stream gold and I realised that, in a way, Lulu Urquhart had been absolutely right. I didn’t take my boots off – I might have done if I’d been wearing wellies but well-tied laces are too tedious to be reckoned with, but I did try to listen to the land. I tried, for Lulu, to listen to what it was saying to me. And when the venison goes out on sale next week, I hope that whoever buys it knows too – in some vague way – that there is deer magic, whatever that means.
Patrick Galbraith’s Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our relationship has just been published by William Collins. The Telegraph called it brilliant and Jonathan Meades wrote, on reading it, that ‘this then is Britain. A perverse treat’.
Patrick, as well as writing, runs a small business supplying venison to local shops and restaurants in East Anglia. Deer numbers in bring stand at 2 million and rising – they pose a very real threat to the habitat of birds like the nightingale and managing them is an essential of wildlife conservation.