Deer fall from mountain

The air hung thin and sharp, tasting of pine and ancient rock. Elara had found her usual perch — a weathered granite slab overlooking the vast, silent amphitheater of the High Peaks. Below, the valley floor was a rumpled quilt of evergreen, stitched with silver threads of thawing creeks. Above, the jagged teeth of the ridge clawed at a sky that bled from sapphire to an impossible, ethereal blue.

She had come for the silence, for the unyielding truth of the mountains. But today, the truth revealed itself with a sudden, violent grace.

A flicker of movement caught her eye. High on a near-vertical scree slope, where only a goat or a dream could navigate, a young buck picked its way. Its coat was the colour of dried bracken, its new antlers still nubbins of velvet. It moved with the impossible ballet of its kind – a delicate hoof placed, a ripple of muscle, a tilt of the head, a quick scan of the dizzying world. It was a creature sculpted for this impossible terrain, a living testament to adaptation.

Then, a whisper of a sound, almost imperceptible. A shifting patch of shale, no bigger than Elara’s hand. The buck’s hind leg slipped. For a microsecond, it was a tableau: the deer rigid, muscles tensed, eyes wide, as if time itself had snagged on a snag.

Then, the world tilted.

It wasn’t a fall so much as an unraveling. The initial slip became a scramble, a desperate, clawing struggle against the inevitable. More rocks gave way, a granular avalanche cascading around it. The buck went down, not with a cry, but with a sickening, internal lurch. Its body, so recently a symphony of grace, became a broken puppet, tumbling end over end.

Elara watched, transfixed, her breath catching in her throat like a physical knot. The thudding, scraping sound of the fall echoed off the rock faces, a brutal percussion in the vast quiet. The deer seemed to bounce, a dark, heavy sack, off a minor outcrop, then cartwheeled in a blur of brown and white before disappearing behind a shelf of rock lower down. A plume of dust, fine as flour, bloomed briefly against the stark grey.

And then, silence. A silence even deeper and more profound than before.

Elara felt the cold dread creep up her spine. She waited, straining her ears, for any sign, any sound. Nothing. The hawk, which had been circling far above, continued its patient gyre, seemingly unfazed. The wind whispered its ancient secrets through the pines. The mountain, immutable, indifferent, had simply reclaimed a piece of itself.

Slowly, carefully, Elara descended, her own steps suddenly feeling clumsy and heavy. She picked her way down the precarious path, her eyes scanning the rock face where the buck had vanished. She found it, wedged against a clump of gnarled juniper.

It lay crumpled, an unnatural angle to one leg, its head twisted at an awkward angle. A dark stain bloomed on the ochre rock beneath it. But even as Elara’s heart sank, she saw it: a shallow, ragged breath shuddering through its flank. Its eyes, wide and clouded, stared unseeing at the endless sky. A soft, almost imperceptible tremor ran through its body. It was broken, but not broken enough to escape the lingering pain.

Elara stood there for a long time, the raw wilderness washing over her. There was no rescue here, no intervention possible. The mountain had spoken, and its words were of unforgiving gravity, of life’s fragile tenacity balanced against the brute force of the earth.

She thought of the buck’s initial grace, its effortless mastery of a world that had so suddenly turned on it. And she thought of the mountain, beautiful and deadly, a perpetual forge where life was tempered by hardship, and sometimes, extinguished with a single, unceremonious fall.

With a heavy heart, Elara turned and began her climb back to her perch. The sun was dipping now, painting the peaks in fiery hues. The silence, though still vast, was no longer peaceful. It hummed with the echo of that fall, a stark reminder that even in the most serene places, life walked a precipice, and the mountain always had the last word.