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general mess as possible. But today, because of the big deer drive, he saw no need to hurry. The king’s servants would all be up at Lyndhurst where the deer would be caught.
    There were several woodland settlements in the middle section of the Forest. First there was Lyndhurst with its deer trap. Since
hurst
in Anglo-Saxon meant “wood,” the name probably signified that a grove of lime trees had once grown there. From Lyndhurst a track led south through ancient woodland until, after four miles, it reached the village in a break in the woods known as Brockenhurst, where there was a hunting lodge in which the king liked to stay. From there the track continued south beside a small river running down in a tiny, steep valley, past the village of Boldre, where there was a small church,towards the coast. The little hamlet containing Pride’s homestead lay over a mile to the east of this river and nearly four miles south of Brockenhurst, at a point where the belt of ancient woodland gave on to a large heath. Even as the crow flies, the hamlet was nearly seven miles away from Lyndhurst.
    The huntsmen, he knew, were going to drift the deer down from the north into the trap. Every one of the king’s Forest servants would be up there; none of them would be coming down his way that morning.
    With an almost deliberate slowness, therefore, he was taking his time, inwardly chuckling to himself at his wife’s anxiety and annoyance.
    So he was more than surprised, a moment later, when he heard his wife give a little cry of alarm and looked up to see two riders approaching.
    The morning had gone by quietly for the pale deer. For several hours her little herd had remained feeding in the open as the sun rose higher.
    They were all does or fawns, since the adult males had mostly begun by this season to dwell apart. A slight swelling of their flanks indicated that a number of the does were pregnant; in another two months they would give birth. The fawns who still accompanied them were weaned now. The male fawns exhibited the bumps which later in the year would grow into their first horns – the little spikes which, when they are yearlings, give them the name of prickets. Very soon, now, the prickets would forsake their mothers and move away.
    Time passed. The birds’ chorus subsided to a tuneful twittering, which was joined, in the increasing warmth, by the quiet whirr, drone and buzz of the countless forest insects. It was mid-morning before the senior doe who was the leader indicated by stalking into the trees that it was time to go to the day rest.
    Deer are creatures of habit. True, in spring, they might wander away in search of choice feeding – visiting the fields of grain by the forest edge or, leaping his fences like silent shadows in the night, raiding the smallholdings of men like Pride. But the old doe was a cautious leader. Only twice that spring had she left the square mile that the herd usually inhabited;and if some of the younger does, like the pale deer, had felt restless, she had showed no sign that she meant to satisfy them. They followed the same path, therefore, that they always used to reach the day rest – a pleasant and sheltered glade in the oak woods – where the does obediently sank down to their usual position, lying with legs tucked in and head erect, their backs to the faint breeze. Only some of the prickets, unable to contain themselves, moved about, playing in the glade under the old doe’s watchful eye.
    The pale deer had just lain down when she thought about her buck.
    He was a handsome young fellow. She had noticed him at the time of the last rut in the autumn. She had been too young to take part then, although she had seen the fully grown does being serviced. He had been watching with the other junior bucks beside one of the lesser rutting stands; she had guessed from the size of his antlers that the next year he would be ready to claim a stand of his own.
    The male fallow went through a series of