deer

The deer is a creature of profound personal significance in Gordon Lachance's memory of the 1960 journey to find the body of Ray Brower. It appears only once, at dawn on the second day, when Gordon sits alone on a railroad rail after his watch. The encounter is silent, brief, and entirely unexpected, and it becomes for Gordon a private emblem of something clean and good in a story otherwise dominated by fear, violence, and death.

Appearance and Encounter

At quarter to five in the morning, after a night of uneasy sleep and the distant, terrifying screams of what the boys took to be a wildcat or a ghost, Gordon scrambles up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sits on a rail, idly chucking cinders between his feet. The new day feels too good to share. As he watches the purple steal out of the sky, he looks to his right and sees a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from him. His heart goes up into his throat; his stomach and genitals fill with a hot dry excitement. He cannot move. The deer's eyes are not brown but a dark, dusty black, like the velvet used to background jewelry displays. Her small ears are scuffed suede. She looks at him serenely, head slightly lowered in what he takes for curiosity, seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuffs and a brown khaki shirt with the elbows mended and the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day. Gordon understands that what he is seeing is some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that is appalling.

Departure and Aftermath

They look at each other for a long time. Then the deer turns and walks off to the other side of the tracks, her white bobtail flipping insouciantly. She finds grass and begins to crop. Gordon cannot believe it. She does not look back at him and does not need to; he is frozen solid. Then the rail starts to thrum under him, and bare seconds later the doe's head comes up, cocked back toward Castle Rock. She stands there, her branch-black nose working on the air, coaxing it a little. Then she is gone in three gangling leaps, vanishing into the woods with no sound but one rotted branch breaking like a track referee's starter-gun. Gordon sits mesmerized at the spot where she had been until the actual sound of the freight comes up through the stillness. He never tells the other boys about the deer. That is one thing he keeps to himself, and he has never spoken or written of it until the moment of writing his memoir.

Thematic Significance

For Gordon, the deer becomes a private refuge. He finds himself returning to the memory almost helplessly when there is trouble in his life: his first day in the bush in Vietnam, when a fellow walked into the clearing with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told them their youngest son might be hydrocephalic; the long, crazy weeks before his mother died. His thoughts turn back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail. The deer represents a moment of pure, unmediated connection with the natural world, a gift that requires no words and that words can only diminish. It stands in stark contrast to the other animals the boys encounter on their journey: the mythical, terrifying Chopper who turns out to be a medium-sized mongrel; the leeches that infest the beaver pond and attach themselves to the boys' bodies, including one that swells on Gordon's testicles and bursts between his fingers; and the beavers whose dam creates the pool where the leeches live. Where those creatures bring fear, revulsion, and physical pain, the deer brings stillness and a sense of grace. It is the cleanest part of the whole trip, a moment that seems to exist outside the narrative of death and violence that frames the rest of the story.