As Erika Howsare writes in her new book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, “Deer are bigger and more charismatic than” crows, vultures, or squirrels “by an order of magnitude … there’s something about how a deer looks back.”
In the course of reading Howsare’s book, published by Penguin Random House on Jan. 2, I went on a walk and stumbled into a staring contest with a deer. We looked at each other, not knowing who should go first, and when I retreated, the doe seemed to follow me. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted from me, as I contemplated her shy beauty and potential tick count. I promptly discovered I was blocking where the deer might cross the road and meet her family in a neighbor’s front yard. It was an interaction I can only describe as a misunderstanding with a deer. To be clear, I’ve never reached an understanding with a deer, but it feels plausible that I might, in a way that coming to terms with a chipmunk or a cardinal does not.
This probably has more to do with me than with the deer. Howsare explains, “We carry inside us images and narratives that tell us how to look at the deer before us. They’re a screen upon which we project our conflicting concepts about nature.” Howsare’s ambitious yet intimate rendering covers a wide range of subjects: The White supremacist underpinnings of the conservation movement; the spectatorial positioning in the 1942 cartoon Bambi; the history of Indigenous cosplay, as carried out by Revolutionary soldiers seeking to strike fear in the hearts of the British infantry. Deer don’t just adapt and multiply in life, but in history and mythology as well.
The D.C. area is a particular hotbed of deer-related concerns, with plans for national park properties and public discussions of culling the population making the daily news. The suburban ring around the city is getting into the mix as well, with Fairfax experimenting with its own doe sterilization program. Howsare is not a resident of the immediate DMV, living now in Virginia’s Nelson Country and having grown up in rural Pennsylvania (where hunting is king), but her work on the book has made her conversant on local issues and how they overlap with broader ones.
The Age of Deer blends Howsare’s personal story with literary analysis and in-depth reportage. An established poet, Howsare tells City Paper that she originally conceived of the book “as a series of short essays … The surprise was how much of a life of its own the research took on, especially because I realized some of the questions I needed to answer were way more complex … way more demanding than I had anticipated.” She recalls those opportunities to observe deer culling or to meet a fawn rehabber, which ultimately pushed The Age of Deer in a new direction. “I always wanted to keep hold of that lyric impulse … and make those poetic connections. It just needed to happen around this big scaffolding of fact and first-hand reporting.”
Not all her reporting went in. “I wrote too long … rookie mistake!” Howsare says with a laugh. Her trip to Deer Haven Park in New York’s Finger Lakes, a former Army depot turned tourist attraction for spotting white deer, became the material for the book’s companion podcast, If You See a Deer, hosted by Howsare and writer Tyler J. Carter.
In her investigation, Howsare discovered how the figure of the deer has persisted across various civilizations through time, often representing the twin forces of life and death. In older cultures, stories about humans shape-shifting into deer, and vice versa, proliferate, alongside those of deer functioning, Howsare tells City Paper, “as psychopomps, escorting people to the afterlife.”
By contrast, today, many Americans confront deer as roadkill. Modern conversations around deer reflect the binary, Howsare says, “of our Two Americas,” resulting in arguments around “their numbers, what to do about their population, if anything. [Some] see them as vermin, [while others] very much sympathize with deer.” She recalls watching a Native American woman speak at a deer management conference: “She offered a completely different perspective, saying, ‘We’re not the managers of deer. We can only manage ourselves.’”
In Western culture, Howsare explains, “we put ourselves at the apex of the whole structure … We see ourselves as the managers, the users of everything else … [But] we feel alienated and out of place. She adds, “We see ourselves as disruptors, almost aliens. We don’t belong.” Deer have borne the brunt of this duality, the human desire to control the environment set against our fraught kinship to our neighboring natural communities.
It is this tension between kinship and stewardship that shapes Howsare’s book, a conflict that produces a third way that collapses the traditional hierarchy. What if deer have something to teach us, not just to give us in the forms of their beauty and their bodies? Deer, Howsare stresses, are models for how to survive our age of the Anthropocene: “Deer have proven [themselves] to be excellent at adapting to the changes humans bring to … different landscapes. Seems to me that’s a big part of our task now—to adapt.”
“As I was growing up, there was an illusion we can get back to Eden, [strike] some correct balance between humans and nature,” Howsare says. “It’s become obvious that what we need to do now is adapt to the changes that we have wrought.” For that, it is deer, and not people, who have the most to share and the least to learn.
Erika Howsare discusses The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors at 6 p.m. on April 17 at People’s Book in Takoma Park. peoplesbooktakoma.com. Free.
