Winter

Part 1

When you inherited the farm the idea of land stewardship did not really appeal. What had been several fields producing cash crops had been put under scrutiny a few years back and the complicated paperwork that old government departments shuffled around declared all of it to become a border between nature and the actual farms owned by your neighbours. Your uncle had all the seed oil plants harvested for the last time and then strategically dumped a truck loaded with a carefully formulated blend of wildflower seeds on it all.

On the one hand, this meant you did not have to do much manual labour, or suffer waking up early and going to bed late. On the other hand, it got very boring during the winter, which it was right now. It was already dark outside, the nights having grown long. Your single government mandated job today was to look at the automated report generated by some box out in the field and record the result on their website. A tiny variance, as always. How boring. You fall back onto the sofa, put the TV on to nothing and begin to vegetate on your phone. It’s a nice enough house, early 1900’s which had been slowly modernized over time to ruin the style to give it indoor plumbing and wifi. A slice of suburbia in the middle of nowhere.

Your phone dings, a little popup saying there’s irregular activity near the barn. You click the link to the camera, which flicks between useless live feed colour (featuring nothing but black) and a slightly delayed nightvision green. Sure, land stewardship contracts paid less, but no-one could steal livestock you did not possess. Even so, it could be tool thieves after your quadbike. The camera flicks back to fizzy green, its not humans. It’s a Deer, with a capital D. Your farm shared borders with their own, a sort of reserve-cum-micro-nation thing, your uncle had called it the “Hoof-Vatican” with not a lot of goodwill behind it.

You’d seen them before, in the distance, on the cameras, on TV. They did their own thing, you did yours. It wasn’t a hard border, just a legal thing to know where the farmlands and postcodes stop. Even so, they never came onto the farm as far as you knew. The Deer had an impressive set of antlers, which was nearly all you could see because despite crouching in the lee of the barn, snow was beginning to pile up on him. The screen went back to black live feed.

What to do? Shoo him away? They weren’t aggressive, but you didn’t speak Canto to know for sure. Okay, that wasn’t strictly true, living here meant you did do thirty minutes of it a week in school for one year when you were ten years old. You knew how to say ‘My name is Anon’ and ‘I went to the shop’ but that was more rote memory than understanding.

The screen flicked back to green after a long minute. More snow. It really was piling up out there. The antlers shook once, dislodging a flurry of powder. His face looked miserable before he put his head into his knees and drew himself tighter together. He had fur, but then again, they didn’t really “do” clothing outside of an occasional rucksack (it was always odd to see them use modern donated human things like that, it never looked good on them). But even you are starting to suspect he’s in a bad spot right about now.

The screen goes black. You quickly do an image search for how they lived. Communes in yurts, apparently. Not out in the open like he was right now.

Green. No movement now. Damnit. If this was an elaborate means to rob you of your TV, you were going to be so annoyed. You grab a large blanket and the shotgun. Two barrels, one under the other, it was mostly for clay pigeon shooting and for brandishing at teenagers with beer bottles than this. Still, no reason to abandon caution. Open palm with one hand forward, clenched fist with the other behind.

You go outside and bloody hell is it ever cold. Your front door light flashes on and the light strikes the flurrying snow and makes the world seem like old TV static. Your footsteps crunch and squeak as you wade through the snow and the wind is repeatedly slapping one side of your whole body.

‘Hello?’ you call out as you approach the barn, ‘hello?’ Nothing. You trudge around the corner, wide enough to have some distance to not get jumped, before seeing no other individuals hiding. You wave your hand at the camera and the device turns its awkwardly positioned light on, just slightly catching the snow-swathed Deer. You stand directly in front of him and thrust the blanket out. ‘My name is Anon,’ you recite the words. Canto is terrible to teach because a lot of it involves tongue clicks and a few hand gestures. For you all you know you just told him your hovercraft was full of eels. No response. You unfurl the blanket because maybe it’s hard to see what it is right now and blithely wave it for emphasis. Still nothing. You swallow and reach a hand to brush snow off where his face is to see if it needs more eye contact or something.

He makes a muted sound in what you think is Canto, but even you can tell it’s muted from exhaustion more than anything else. What to do…what to do? If he dies on your property, well, the cameras see everything. But then you’d have to look at the footage and say to yourself each morning you liked your TV more than a stranger’s life. Waiting was bad, your nose already stung and it had been less than ten minutes. Interference wasn’t illegal, leaving him alone wasn’t either. The other farmers wouldn’t even bat an eye if you left him out here. They did, on occasion, steal crops. Racism made that sound like they stole whole fields, in reality passing hikers pilfered more corn than the Deer ever did.

To hell with it. If this was all a misunderstanding you can feel stupid about it later in the warmth. You plunge an arm into the snow and with a lot of heaving and encouragement get him onto his feet…hooves. Its like the last little burst of strength you get before collapse as he takes the blanket from you and makes his way with you back into the house. He weighs a tonne. His shoulder comes to your head, his antlers need to duck low to pass the doorframe. Powdery snow is turning to steam and water all over your carpet, white fur is revealing itself to actually be brown.

Without any fanfare he sags to his knees, allows himself to fall onto his front and plants his face onto the rug. ‘Nai'ke [tongue click] uma-th’ he says quietly. You quickly re-open the internet browser on your phone and do your best to repeat it.

‘I unknown verb sleep th,’ the translator proudly showed back. You could have guessed that one, he was snoring. Like setting the table, you billow out the blanket and just lay it over him. He was like a loud, face-down corpse and was ruining the carpet just as effectively. It was dark, but you were not tired. In fact, you were wide awake now. The snow had really perked you up in an unpleasant way and you absolutely did not want to just casually fall asleep with this massive guy in your house.

Part 2

You couldn’t just leave him unattended, even though you are now fairly convinced he is sound asleep and thus no danger to anyone. You go to the adjoining room – the kitchen – to keep line of sight on him and attempt a crash course in Canto. First thing to do was get the important phrases right. You open up a Canto website. A naked Deer (the lower half carefully cut off by the video for decency sake) and a human woman in mono-colour clothing beam at you. ‘So you’ve decided to learn Canto, the language of Northern Pecora People,’ she said, before the Deer said and gestured it all presumably in their language. This was going to be tough. They had three different mouth click sounds and the while the hand signals seemed intuitive sometimes they suddenly made no sense. ‘The lateral click is done with the-’ you skip ahead, at least you knew how to do those. The website had a translator, naturally, which needed a low-quality .gif of the Deer to do the hand gestures alongside the text.

I am not going to hurt you.

‘Nai'ke thara-[lateral click]in-th keh,’ came the reply, the Deer .gif stuttered showing an open palm gesture. It repeated a few times as you read the meaning in the descriptor text ([deliberate peace gesture]). You repeat it a few times to yourself.

Are you okay?

‘Keh [roof of mouth clucking] osa-ma?’
You do your best to get that click sound right, you had done it in the past, you were sure of it. How did your uncle get this far without ever once saying a single word of it?
The next one was surprisingly easy.

I don’t speak Canto.

‘Nai thara-mek Canto.’ Which came with a sort of shrug like gesture and crossed arms with palms on shoulders (I lack ability).

Do you speak English?

‘Keh mek English-ma?’
This one however was deceptively tricky. The looping .gif of the hand gesture was a bit scuffed up. Well, how bad could it really be to get it mostly right?

You watch more videos; the voice of the woman was – for a lack of a better word – painfully saccharine. The people who put the tutorials together seemed convinced you were going to discuss colours and where you went on holiday, and not anything remotely to do with a medical emergency or an intruder. Well, if all else failed, the website did have a primitive voice to text (and image), as well as text (and wrongly selected image) to voice. You load up a bunch of tabs on the browser and decide wait out the next few hours.

After about thirty minutes you instead slump back on the sofa a few feet away from him. The kitchen was a little chilly and you had no idea what else to do with yourself. Every window was steamed up, all the powdered snow had run onto the rug and turned to damp spots and you could only really sit there. It didn’t matter whether you were in here or the kitchen, the guy was bigger than you in ever respect and so the unlockable door wouldn’t stop him. Plus, you were not going to cower in the bathroom.

Halfway through a video he suddenly snorted and jolted awake. You jolted with him and scrabbled to extract your earbuds from yourself to avoid catching yourself out. ‘Um... keh [roof of mouth clucking] osa-ma?’ you fumble out just in case he thought this was a kidnapping as you put the phone on to translate whatever he said.

His voice was deep, a natural basso that would have made any soul singer envious. He could have done a cover of The Sound of Silence with laughable ease. ‘Nai [lower sounding click] eko-lo-ma? Itha-shen-ma?’ he wobbled his palm about as he rolled over on his back, the blanket only obscuring one half of him now.

The phone tried it’s best. ‘I [unknown word]-location-QUESTION? Event-PAST-QUESTION? (see sidebar for useful hand gestures!)’ Even so, it was going to be the same questions everyone would ask: where am I, what happened?

‘I don’t speak Canto. Do you speak English?’ you offer back, complete with bad clicks and gesturing. Even so, he realised you didn’t have the shotgun and he wasn’t restrained, so he chose to sit up instead. He cleared his throat and slowly enunciated in voice that was so deep and thick it could have trapped dinosaurs ‘My name is Then[tongue click]neka.’ Then’neka obviously had also learned all of about three phrases in a different language which he had also never used. He offered his hand out and you feel the social urge to shake it before you realise he’s asking for your phone.

‘Do you know what this is?’ you wiggled it slightly for emphasis.

‘Long speak [worked/knapped] obsidian. Tribe do not pay. Long speak [legal/law/agreement] cost much,’ came the phone as he spoke at it more than at you.

You guess it was a bit racist to think he did not know what a phone was, considering no doubt every human he ever saw had one firmly in their grasp at all times, especially on a hiking trail near where he lived where they took photos. They probably just didn’t want cell towers inside their land and all the infrastructure required to keep it running.

‘Why are you here?’ you recite. He chuckled once and then caught himself before repeating it back to you facing the phone’s camera to help it see his gestures. His hand did a minutely different gesture as he said the phrase back to you twice.

The phone promptly showed that you had asked ‘You are why “here” is.’ Implying, you supposed, that he was some deity of creation in some philosophical sense. The second verbalisation did the meaning properly. Then’neka steps closer hands ending with blunt fingers reaching out to grasp your own. You recoil instinctively before you realise he meant to show you how to do it properly. It was a more tactile language.

‘Sorry,’ he says in English this time, head dipping and taking is hands away. He suddenly looks around again and at you. He speaks something quickly, before slapping his own forehead and saying it again, but more firmly to the phone. ‘Is this your yurt?’

‘Yes,’ you say back, this time in Canto. It’s an easy word: “shai”. This causes him to look around until he spots your front door and quickly go and open it. He stands there, butt naked with his ass to you as the wind and snow immediately barge their way in and send the curtains into a terrible fright. You can tell immediately he really does not want to step out into the snow, but forces himself to do so before you can say anything to this sudden change in events. One step later, he immediately turns on the spot to face you and you clench inwardly as he crouches down and his genitals touch the elements and puts his head onto the snowy ground, the powder already beginning to build up around him.

‘Nai [palatal click]-rest-th lo-ma? Shai'ko?’
‘Requesting permission for presence here? Please (general usage)?’

You look down upon him. He probably wouldn’t die, but you would feel terrible all winter. ‘Shai,’ you give in.

He immediate gets up, shakes the snow off on the outside this time and then purposefully taps his forehead onto the base of the doorframe. That one you did recognise from the cutesy pictures – it was the Northern Pecora People equivalent to taking your shoes off before entering a house. Lower meant more respect, basic minimum was to tilt the head to the side to bonk the closest bit of doorframe. You repeat the phrase again, this time with the proper gesture.

‘The man (husband equivalent) told me his wife would take longer to come home.’ You give him a slightly puzzled look. He makes another gesture, timidly, with another word equally as timid. Translation: infidelity. ‘She scary, big like angry thundercloud, say to me not come back until snow gone to take my sin with it.’

This guy was massive with a voice you could sharpen hatchets upon. Whoever this matriarch was could probably split logs with a look.

‘Will she come here to…?’ you type in the next word because you don’t know how to articulate it. It turns out they had a lot of words for vengeance. Yet, it also turned out the same word was used to describe ‘birthday present’ and ‘blood money’ for some unknown reason.

He shook his head, antlers swinging quickly. ‘No, no,’ he said in English. Well, what now? You’re both standing there awkwardly waiting for the other to do something. A solution comes to mind and you go back to the kitchen to dig around for a spare phone. There was little point sharing just the one and he clearly knew roughly how they worked and that it could be used for translation. So, you stick it on to charge and you sit there watching old cartoons. The advantage there being only small amounts of dialogue and a mixture of humans and animals, so the appeal was largely universal. What caught you completely off guard wasn’t when Then’neka laughed at the right moments, but when he seemingly knew what was going to happen on the odd occasion.

‘Have you seen this before?’

‘We had yurt with small picture obsidian. It older than all yurts. Mr Bean used to show young human can do stupid thing too.’

‘What powers it?’

‘You want picture obsidian you turn handle many times. We took turns and sat together. This picture obsidian much better. They do Canto shows on air wave 405.’

You are suddenly really curious as to what a Canto-language show would even look like, so you flick up the channels to it, going past the popular initial 100, the indie 200, the religious and telemarketing of 300 until you got to foreign languages 400.

You couldn’t pronounce the words in the title without the website, so you didn’t bother. It was like some bizzarro backwards world because there was just the one human amongst a cast of various Deer and he was at best a background supporting role who sold…things? It was hard to tell. The main plot seemed to largely concern some retelling of some mythical event, which was incomprehensible because of the poor production quality.

‘It the 1980’s remake of Theft of Springtime. This one,’ he pointed when the obvious lead role came on screen again, ‘he called Toosokk, from around here. Dyed his fur for this movie I am told.’

‘Is that bad?’ your face must be a picture with how weird this evening is going. The huge guy took up your largest armchair like you would a school chair.

‘Big thing back then. Could not come back. Dead before we changed our minds. Good movie though, like mother told it.’ Then’neka leaned back as he fondly reviewed the memory.

You look up the internet article about it. It had one measly paragraph: The Theft of Springtime is an epic poem from the Northern Pecora People (see Pecora Anthro) retelling the journey of Lunnsied (see Canto language) to steal back the season of spring from the mountain kin. At this point you just embrace it. You put the subtitles on.

The best way to describe it was wooden. The acting, the location, the lack of budget. Wood, wood, wood. Deer did not attend prestigious acting guilds, or have a huge budget and at the time CGI was still expensive and it very much showed. If this was the remake, you had no clue how bad the original was. The mic boom was practically a character in on itself with how often it could be seen sneaking into shots. The camera was surprisingly good, but whoever was holding it clearly was losing their strength as the film went on. You watched as Lunnsied, as played by Toosokk, fought the same five or so other Deer in different costumes several times as your guest spoke along with the dialogue at key moments and then laughing to himself. There were no adverts, so cheap was this channel that they couldn’t even afford that. Besides, who would they advertise to? these people without internet and a TV older than a significant amount of the world’s population? They probably collectively had one bank account which saw government money go in, only to go out to pay that same government. Even so, everything was filmed on location. You could, in theory, hike there (come spring) yourself. You had not picked up a single new word of Canto however.

Edit

Pub: 03 Feb 2026 21:58 UTC

Edit: 04 Feb 2026 17:40 UTC

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