A stag stands as tall at the shoulder as a grown Human’s chest and carries branching antlers as wide again, shed in late winter and grown anew by autumn in velvet that he rubs off on the saplings. A hind is smaller and bare-headed. Both are red-brown in summer, greyer and thicker-coated in winter, with a pale rump patch that flashes when they run. Calves are dappled with white spots for their first months.

Deer move in stillness and bursts: long minutes of grazing with ears turning, then a bound and gone. Hinds bark a short alarm. In the autumn rut the stags roar, a deep groaning bellow that carries a long way through the woods at dusk, and the woods smell of their musk.

Deer live in woods with open glades, on woodland edges, and in brush. They are most at home in the Elderweald and in the broken woodland of the Briarreach, and are common in the foothill woods of the Headwater Marches and the brush between the farmlands. Where farming is dense they come out only at night, to raid fields at the wood’s edge.

Hinds and their young keep together in small herds led by an old hind; stags live apart in bachelor groups and join the herds only for the rut. Deer graze grass and browse leaf, bark, acorns, and young crops. They are wary, keen of nose and ear, and flee first. A stag in the rut is the exception: he will fight other stags to the point of locked antlers and death, and he will turn on a hunter who comes too close.

Calves are born in early summer, one to a hind, and hidden in the bracken while she grazes nearby. They follow the herd by autumn. A stag grows his largest antlers in his prime, perhaps eight to twelve years old, and few live much past fifteen.

Deer give venison, hide for soft leather, antler for knife handles, combs, and tools, and sinew for bowstrings. In the Elderweald hunting is real but answerable, and a grove that over-hunts its ground hears about it from the next; in the Briarreach hunting is one of the circles' ordinary works. In Human country the deer of a lord’s woods are his, and taking them is poaching, which is why poachers learn Hunter’s Decoy to send a phantom stag crashing through the brush while they slip away the other side. Skilled trackers notice the missing scent and weight.

The cost falls on farmers whose fields border the woods, and who may not kill the deer that eat them.

A white stag is held by many Humans to be an omen, of a lord’s death or of a road that should not be taken, depending on who tells it. Elves of the old groves say a deer killed without need leaves a debt in the ground it fell on.

Deer are the lords' beasts in the Human lands: poachers who take one hang if they are caught, and outlaws of the forest edge live on venison and on the songs about them.