Here’s a tale, the story of the Deer Wife, and well it might be the oldest tale in the world.

One day a man takes his rifle and goes off into the woods, where he sees a pretty little doe. He takes aim, shoots, and hits her in the shoulder, but he doesn’t kill her outright. So he follows the blood-trail into the forest until he comes to a clearing.

But there’s no doe in that clearing. Instead there’s a woman standing there, naked and bleeding. Her hair is like red fire and her skin like apple blossom, and she’s got a bullet lodged in her shoulder.

So he takes her home, digs out the bullet, and binds up the wound. Of course she becomes his wife, and they live together as happily as may be expected until their son is weaned. Then one day the man comes home to find the boy alone and squalling in his cradle, and the Deer Wife gone back to her own.

 

But since that day there’s kinship between us and the people of the woods, and it’s one of ours who wears the antlers in the clearing at the holy tides. Once in every nine years we give one of our own to the woods, as payment in kind, you see. Since then the priest-kind among us eat no flesh food but only once a year, and that at the time of the Midwinter fires. And since then we go naked to our worship.

So there’s the story of the Deer Wife, and well it might be the oldest tale in the world. And there’s an end to it, and there’s a beginning, and let us all say: So mote it be.