A Tiding

or: a day on the river

The Defenders Almanac is out now! This is the animals-versus-machines tabletop roleplaying game I worked for years with an incredible team of people, a companion book and game for the boardgame Defenders of the Wild. I wrote a lot of strange lore and fiction for this thing, and I suspect there’ll be something for you whether or not you’re trying to actually play.

A Tiding

The deer out here are skittish. I don’t blame them—there aren’t too many people around, and most of them hunt. In my parents’ neighborhood, the deer prefer freeze to flight, and they stare at you dispassionately when you walk the streets and the park. Rintrah, my dog, doesn’t understand city or suburban deer. He barks at them, he lunges at the end of his leash, but they just meet his gaze and wait for us to walk further along.

Out here, the deer run, though still unhurried in that peculiar way that deer have. Rintrah’s bark sends them calmly dashing into the middle distance, hopping over the pervasive fences that cut across the mountains. Deer don’t much respect property lines.

Yesterday, though, a deer—scarcely more than a fawn—was in my front yard when I went out to my car. It backed off twenty feet and watched me, the closest a deer has let me approach since I moved to this part of the country.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not a symbol of how I’m getting closer to my own vulnerabilities, how I’m learning to not run away from everything that scares me. That part of my interaction with the deer is only in my head. It’s just a deer. One of the most ordinary, commonplace animals in North America is still one of the most meaningful to see, to hold eye contact with.

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We need symbols and signs, I think. The most rational people I know will talk with awe about encounters with animals on hikes or while camping, because there’s something magical about interacting with the sentient-but-unspeaking creatures with whom we share the world.