For a red deer is no fallow deer
Grown cowardly through park-feeding;
He batters you like a thunderbolt
If you brave his haunts unheeding.
I doubt he could hardly perform volte-face
Had valour advised discretion:
You may walk on a rope, but to turn on a rope
No Blondin makes profession.
Yet Donald must turn, would pride permit,
Though pride ill brooks retiring:
Each eyed each—mute man, motionless beast—
Less fearing than admiring.
These are the moments when quite new sense,
To meet some need as novel,
Springs up in the brain: it inspired resource:
—“Nor advance nor retreat but—grovel!”
And slowly, surely, never a whit
Relaxing the steady tension
Of eye-stare which binds man to beast,—
By an inch and inch declension,
Sank Donald sidewise down and down:
Till flat, breast upwards, lying
At his six-foot length, no corpse more still,
—“If he cross me! The trick’s worth trying.”
Minutes were an eternity;
But a new sense was created
In the stag’s brain too; he resolves! Slow, sure,
With eye-stare unabated,
Feelingly he extends a foot
Which tastes the way ere it touches
Earth’s solid and just escapes man’s soft,
Nor hold of the same unclutches
Till its fellow foot, light as a feather whisk,
Lands itself no less finely:
So a mother removes a fly from the face
Of her babe asleep supinely.
And now ’tis the haunch and hind-foot’s turn
—That’s hard: can the beast quite raise it?
Yes, traversing half the prostrate length,
His hoof-tip does not graze it.