Cloaked against the bitter cold but hardly warm, the only consolation was that it was an absolutely still day, the whole world frozen and utterly silent but for the soft brush of snow in the lonely branches above and the clumsy crunch of my own feet.

There had to be something somewhere. Days like this, frozen, when any approach would be audible and send them flagging away, the deer were always out, searching for the barest scraps of sustenance in these numb depths of winter. Hungry times for all that walked these woods, myself included. But even the birds had been few and far between.

I spotted a windblown dove on a high branch, calculating while he regarded me with a wary eye, but the difficulty of the shot coupled with a sympathy for the poor frozen creature left him unmolested, and I passed on. Some time later, I saw two ragged pheasants huddled in the brush just shy of the river, and they too ducked when they noticed me. I could take a shot - either hen would make half a meal. I'd lose an arrow, though, if I missed, and my quiver rattled unsettlingly these days. I didn't have one to spare on chance of such a meagre gain.

So my senseless legs kept moving as a breeze begin to stir now and then, and the snow fell faster, thicker. Even here in the valley, the wind was a fearsome thing in winter, and the thought of the weather picking up dismayed me. I shouldn't have come. Better hungry than under this forbidding sky; the air tore sharply at my nose as I breathed. The trees seemed to loom, here, jagged harsh shapes against the stony gray of snow clouds, and the whole place had begun to take on an unaccustomed severity. I was out of bounds. I did not belong here, and were the woods to judge me for it, the penalty might be dire.

I turned to make for kinder groves and realized I did not recognize where I was. I was appalled - had I gone so far from the path? I had believed I knew those woods - each tree in the same place it had always been, landmarks made up of high-grown roots and startling green patches of juniper among the great, towering, empty trees. And yet none of this was familiar, the language of place shattered into cacophonous disarray, meaningless and frightening.

And my tracks were gone, buried under the new snow, which even now slowed in coming, from heavy flurries back to the delicate, steady fluttering that made the trees seem to rise upwards with me amidst the sinking air. Disoriented, I froze as I thought I heard some noise of movement ahead of me.

Then, natural as breathing, my bow was in my numb hand, my swollen fingers tingling as they brushed the fletching on an arrow, and the waxed string cut soberingly at my flesh even through thick callouses. I saw the tines of antlers between the branches of a copse of juniper. I hardly dared inhale for fear of the sound I might make; I was exposed as it was, clad in dark shades against the brilliance of the snow.

My eyes darted around the half-glimpsed arc of bone as it danced ivory beyond the cedar's shadow-green, catching a shocking red - a cardinal erupting from its perch - distracted - there he was, about to emerge into view. Just about to raise and draw, I was confused; I had never seen such a dark hide on any buck, and as he stepped out --

I froze in the preparation to draw, arrow nocked and ready but my arms down in front of me, the bow still turned on its side. I gaped, so stunned that I was not even frightened, my eyes trained wide on his face, his eyes, as he turned to look impassively on me. His eyes, dark and luminous at once, those of any deer, were set in the fair face of a man, framed by wild dark hair I had mistaken for a pelt. And he was beautiful, for all that he was strange, with mistletoe wrapped in the great antlers that sprung from his brow, and the shapes of the forest etched into his very skin.

Transfixed, it was all I could do to blink away the frigid water that welled in my eyes in disbelief of what I saw, and be vaguely startled by the sensation of the hot-cold trails it left across my cheeks. He had stopped in his tracks, and I was somewhere dimly aware that his feet were bare, and that in fact his only garment were long breeches, and that this should be strange in such cold. But it was not strange, and rapidly my eyes seemed to forget the shock of his antlers or his marked bare skin or his upswept brow, and saw only the graceful line of his jaw along to his pointed ears or the elegant drape of hair bound in the mistletoe above his head. And his hair blew, and the snow fell, while neither of us moved for quite a time.

I realized my arms ached, and I lowered them slowly, the arrow falling loose of the string and dropping harmlessly into the snow as my useless right hand released it. It broke both of us of the trance, it seemed, as he observed the sound, his eyes fell to the grey goose bolt at my feet, and he shook the snow from his shoulders and hair. I ducked my head, uncertainly, slowly, as low as I could with my shoulders in place, all the while watching him through my brows, and straightened again, a bow as graceless as it was reverential. His deer's eyes followed my face the whole time, inscrutable, until I held my head high again; he blinked, turned, and walked on, and was gone.

~~~

I have seen him often, since, walking through the forest as if in a dream, inexplicable and reserved and silent, under the summer rains and the snows of midwinter as I first recall him, smelling of dust and deer but appearing as a man. And though I never feared him as I saw him, I always recognize after he is gone how vulnerable I must have been before him, and how easily he might have harmed me if caprice had dictated it so. I have been judged in my coming to this place, and can only be grateful, deemed so fortunate as to be fit to remain.