No mistaking the calls of rutting red deer stags

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/18/eversholt-bedfordshire-rutting-red-deer-stags

Version 0 of 1.

Just after dawn, as we walked along the village cricket pitch boundary, we first heard the sound. It was so distant that we could not pinpoint where it came from. We heard it again when we slipped round a chicane of sleeping houses and from there it might have passed for the lowing of an unusually expressive cow. We entered Woburn Estate through a gate in an iron fence and went into a tussocky field. Now there was no mistaking the frequent, irregular calls of rutting red deer stags. Some say the animals bellow, but to me they were wringing out anguish. We crossed the first field to the edge of a copse, where a flock of 40 or so greylag geese straightened their necks, shuffled a few steps, then lifted off in rising panic. They passed overhead in a honking mass, but I was still watching the trees, seeing the tracer fire of their shadows on the foliage and two feathers floating down to join the scatter on the ground.

Into the next clearing we went, and though we thought we were moving closer, the red deer stags sounded no louder, always promising, still not revealing. We swished through long grass and startled a roe deer doe. Her big ears twitched and swivelled, she gave us a dark-eyed backwards glance, then bounded into the trees behind, spindly legged and slender, signing off with a flash of her raised white tail. We followed her into the wood. At the bottom of a slope I saw the great wall of the deer park, a boundary of brick perhaps 12 feet or more high. We could hear the animals over the wall, but not see them. Those wild cries were emanating from a domestic herd. The real wild animals were the free-ranging dainty deer, on the outside with us. As if to emphasise the point, a hidden roe buck barked a few feet away. It was a savage sound, a hoarse expletive, half-shout, half-cough, the roar of a lion from the body of a lamb.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.