Deer shouldn't bark

If you spend enough time in the outdoors you will encounter something you cannot rationalize

When people ask what I do for a living, I lie and tell them that I’m a writer, that I travel to strange places where weird things happen and investigate claims of the supernatural.

It’s easier than explaining that I’m a venture capitalist who digs up dirt on big national companies so blackmail them into giving me part of their businesss. and pay me a substantial sum for it, so I can pay their former employees more money than they were paying them to do the same job.

Instead of using the profits of those ventures to buy property and amass wealth, I use them to travel to strange places to hunt ghosts and climb mountains.

The follow-up question is usually cautious: “So, you believe in that stuff?”

I lie and tell them that I don’t, but that I like good stories, and that I think people’s belief in things science cannot rationally explain is fascinating, and that we can often learn a lot about a period of history and the people who lived in it if we examine their fears, hopes, and dreams.

It’s easier than explaining that I’m open to the possibility of the supernatural existing, but that I haven’t seen anything myself or examined any claims I believe to be true. People tend to conflate being open to having your mind changed with already fully believing there are things out there that defy rational explanation, which I don’t.

That inevitably leads to the question: “Have you experienced anything supernatural yourself?”

Again, I lie, and I tell them that I have, and follow it up with: if you spend enough time outdoors by yourself, you will eventually experience something you cannot rationalize.

It’s easier than explaining my thoughts on how isolation in nature affects us on a primal level we do not consciously register, how it alters our perception and hinders our ability to determine what is real and what isn’t. And it allows me to tell the story of my encounter with a so-called “not-deer.”

(Not-Deer are supetnatural creatures that disguise themselves as deer, but not very convincingly. They walk strange and have front facing eyes.)

I live on an island, and my company delivers mail there. Because my credit was nonexistent when I started my company, I couldn’t take out a business loan or take on debt, so I had to be very hands-on because I couldn’t afford to hire anyone, and I worked about 100 hours a week for the first three years, delivering most of the mail myself.

(I still can’t get a loan because I never took on any debt, so I don’t have a credit score, which is a very funny position to be in when I’m technically part of the 1%.)

One of our jobs is to go to the mainland, pick up library books from a depot, transport them back, and deliver them to the two libraries on the island.

The ferry only docks on the mainland for about 20 minutes while passengers from the island disembark and passengers from the mainland board. Except for the 9:40 crossing on Wednesdays, when the ferry stays docked for about an hour on the mainland. Most islanders use this ferry to go to doctor’s appointments or to go shopping in Frederikshavn, but I used it to pick up library books from the depot and transport them back to the ferry.

During summer, when tourists come to the island, there are two ferries making the crossing five or six times a day, and therefore there isn’t a need for one of them to stay docked for an hour, because the other one will arrive 90 minutes after the last one left.

But in 2024 there was a problem. The Wednesday one hour dock got axed about a month before the double ferry schedule started, so I couldn’t take one ferry over and another one back, and I ended up stranded on the mainland for five hours every Wednesday.

I decided to make the best of it and use the five hour window to go on adventures. Sometimes I would bring my car and drive out to a museum. Other times I would go on foot and find a hiking trail somewhere nearby and go for a walk.

At some point I noticed that no matter where I was in the city or the surrounding area, I could always see the same hill in the distance. One day, while disembarking from the ferry, I decided I wanted to find it and climb it.

So after dropping off the books at the ferry terminal, I set out and walked through the city until there was no more city, then through the suburbs until there were no more suburbs, and eventually I found myself in what had recently been a forest but was now cleared land with new developments popping up here and there.

I spotted the hill I had seen so many times on my previous adventures, and I walked up it and sat down.

After admiring the view for a while, I realized I hadn’t seen a survey marker. Hills in Denmark are a rare sight, and each one usually has a marker indicating that it’s the tallest point in the area, but this one didn’t.

Then I looked behind me and noticed that the trees were taller than they should have been, and then it occurred to me that the trees weren’t especially tall, they were just standing on a hill taller than the one I was on, and the thick shrubbery was disguising it.

At this point I should probably mention that while this development already had about twenty houses built on it, and several of them were clearly lived in, I hadn’t seen a single person yet, and the entire neighborhood was completely silent.

So, I was already a bit on edge when I heard a sound I didn’t recognize coming from inside the shrubbery up the hill. It sounded a bit like a bark, a bit like a loud bird chirp, but mostly it sounded like firing a Colt M95.

I looked at a map and saw there was a military base just up the hill and figured what I’d heard was target practice, and that made sense until I heard it again.

That’s not an M95. It’s too slow, too bass-heavy, and it sounded ever so slightly different the second time around.

My fear senses were tingling and I was unsure what to do. Something was wrong.

Then the sound repeated a couple of times, and with the repetition of each strange bark, the sound became more familiar, and my fear started to fade.

I mustered up the courage and pushed my way through the shrubbery. On the other side I saw the hill that had been hiding from me, but I also saw something out of the corner of my eye, and it was running toward me.

It was a deer.

It stopped a few meters in front of me, reared up on its hind legs, stomped the ground, and barked.

That was the sound I’d been hearing. The unnatural half-dog, half-gunshot bark.

Deer are not supposed to bark, and they are definitely not supposed to run up to you and act like this.

This was some kind of demon creature.

I froze in fear, the kind of fear that makes all the heat leave your body in an instant and chills you to the bone. My brain couldn’t compute what I was looking at, but eventually it chose between fight or flight, and I turned around and sprinted through the shrubbery and down the hill.

About halfway down, I realized that demons aren’t real, and I stopped running.

The sound had stopped.

Did that even happen?

Or had I just run into a confused deer at the exact moment someone fired a gun in the distance, and my brain assumed the deer had made the sound?

Yeah. That sounded more likely than demonic creatures being real.

I let my heartbeat settle to a bearable pace, then turned around and began walking back up the hill toward the shrubbery.

I felt something staring at me, and it stopped me in my tracks.

I scanned the houses behind me, figuring someone had finally come home and was wondering what the homeless looking idiot was doing up on the hill, but I felt no eyes on me from that direction.

I turned back toward the shrubbery, and through a tiny gap in the leaves I could see the deer perched on the hill. Deer can’t see very well, but that thing was definitely making eye contact with me, and when I took a step toward it, it barked.

I threw myself to the ground, which I’m still not sure why I did, but then I went, “Fuck you, demon,” got back up, charged into the bushes, bolted up the hill, and started chasing after it.

It ran ahead of me at a speed that was clearly nowhere near its limit, and it let out a succession of shorter barks that felt almost mocking in tone, like it was laughing at me.

I lost sight of it about halfway up the hill when the incline became so steep I had to climb on my hands and knees.

Reaching the top, I scanned for the demon deer and locked eyes with it. It had already made it to the top of an even taller hill, and it was glaring at me menacingly.

It barked again, and I began walking toward it.

Something inside me screamed to look at my feet, and I did, and saw that I was just about to step into a massive hole in the ground. I realized what was happening just in time and awkwardly stumbled sideways and fell over.

I looked down into the hole and saw that it was some kind of bunker, probably from the Cold War, or maybe even from the occupation.

The adrenaline powering my fight against the demon deer was wearing off, and I could feel dread creeping over me. It started in my extremities and slowly worked its way upward through my limbs. In another minute or so I knew I would panic if I didn’t get out of there.

I yelled at the demon deer and threw a branch at it, then hurled myself down the hill, tumbling through the shrubbery and landing in the field below.

I was safe.

I don’t know how long I stayed there in the grass looking up at the sun, but it was a while. I tried to process what had just happened and gauge how much of it had been my mind playing tricks on me, and how much had actually happened.

Not sure why I chased after it. I don’t think I wanted to hurt it. I think I just wanted to confront it.

I had managed to film some of my encounter with the demon deer, and when I showed it to people, it freaked them out. The kind of reaction I had seen before, when someone is confronted with something they don’t want to acknowledge might be real, so they quickly change the subject, and if you later remind them of it, they claim to have no recollection of seeing it at all.

So, I stopped bringing it up and archived the footage on one of my hard drives.

Over a year went by.

Then one day I heard a commotion outside my house. It sounded like someone was murdering a kitten, so I ran outside and saw a deer chasing one of my cats. I grabbed a rake and hurled it at the deer, and it did a backflip and retreated for a bit before charging at me.

I prepared myself to get the shit kicked out of me by a deer, but just as I was about to close my eyes and accept my fate, the deer stopped and reared up on its hind legs. It stomped around for a bit and headbutted the air a couple of times.

But it didn’t attack.

While it was doing its little dance, I got a better look at it. It had patchy fur, was making a weird raspy sound, and looked scared and malnourished.

A car passed by on the road near the house, spooking the deer, and it ran away.

The next day I was talking to my neighbor about something else, and I mentioned that a deer had attacked one of my cats. He asked if it had looked “right,” and I said it had looked patchy and malnourished.

He told me it was probably the wasting disease infecting the local deer population. Apparently, there’s a parasite that attaches itself to the inside of their throats, and as it grows it gradually blocks the deer’s ability to eat, then drink, then eventually breathe.

It had been ravaging the population over the last year, and during the final stages it could make them behave quite aggressively.

I asked why he had wanted to know what it looked like, and he explained that deer can also behave that way during mating season. On rare occasions they’ll attack people if they feel their territory is being threatened. It’s just not something we see very often in this country because there’s usually plenty of space, but elsewhere, especially in urban environments, it happens more frequently.

“You can usually tell if there’s an aggressive one nearby,” he said, “because it makes a sound a bit like a dog barking.”

Instantly, I was transported back to what had happened the year before.

The puzzle pieces fell into place.

I hadn’t been stalked by a cryptid mimicking a deer. I had trespassed into an animal’s territory during mating season, and it had warned me exactly the way nature intended it to.

The new development nearby had reduced its habitat by about ninety percent and cut it off from the wider forest. Its back had literally been against the wall, and it had simply been defending what little of its home remained.

I hope he found a doe that year. And I hope he eventually found a new home.

And that’s how these stories often go, in my experience.

The forest does something to your mind. Even when you consciously know you are safe, there is still a primal part of you that becomes hyper-alert when you are isolated. On some level it must interfere with your reasoning abilities, making unfamiliar things harder to rationalize and the urge to flee much stronger than it otherwise would be.

I have been in situations where I could tell isolation was impairing my judgment, and I think if I had seen that deer in my own yard it would have clicked instantly, but because I was alone out there, it became a cryptid.

I’m not saying there’s no possibility that undiscovered creatures exist. I’m not. But I think the vast majority of Bigfoot sightings and stories like that are people making bad judgment calls because their mental faculties are impaired by isolation and heightened senses.

I think if we return to the places where we had these encounters, we might discover there was nothing supernatural there at all.

Maybe your not-deer sighting was just like this one: a horny little buck telling you not to cockblock him.