A Sensory Fortress
A deer bed, photographed by Katherine Wollson for her project Deer Bed
‘The highest aim of every living being is to feel safe.’ - Monty Roberts
During a recent tracking walk I came across a deer bed positioned halfway up a ridge. It was tender to feel the still-warm ground and to imagine the deer, replete with herb and heather, selecting the place where it felt safe enough to ruminate and draw out life’s inherent goodness - even while scanning the surrounding hill for danger. In this case, me.
A few years ago I l was taught by a tracker about the idea of a ‘sensory fortress’ - the places chosen by grazing animals in which to rest while they digest. They are usually on a slope, providing a high vantage point, and positioned in careful relation to the wind. Sometimes they are surrounded by bramble or scrub, providing a further layer of protection.
The root of our word fortress lies in the latin fortis, strong, which evolved into the old French fortresse, a strong place. Another root brings in the meaning of being held or supported, and in this light a sensory fortress speaks less of defence and more of sensory empowerment. The brambles do not create a wall, instead they heighten the deer’s innate capacity to detect danger. Security is desired, of course, but in the natural world this is always of a permeable kind - both life and death can get in.
Aldo Leopold wrote that an ecological education means living in a world of wounds, and my research into indigenous tracking and hunting practices (both human and animal) has often meant learning about nature through the literal wounds that life inflicts on life. It is inevitable that all creatures will die, but learning about the many ways we kill each other can be troubling at times.
Learning about predation is an unsentimental education, a world away from the gentle wisdom of plant-based learning. To study hunting is to encounter opposites - the challenging drives of threat and security. Meat is a life-saving gift for many traditional hunting cultures, and yet one that necessitates loss. Almost all hunters I’ve spent time with live with the sorrow and joy of this paradox, and it sits at the heart of the reverent cosmologies that exist in human cultures towards the animals who sustain them.
© Katherin Wollson
It's also helpful to remember that every eating animal ‘takes’ from the world in one way or another. Even herbivorous creatures we characterise as peaceful, such as deer, are a danger to that which they eat. As Aldo Leopold writes in his essay Thinking like a Mountain ‘I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.’ In the eyes of a birch sapling, a hungry deer is as dangerous as a wolf.
In Scotland, where many hills have been grazed to barrenness, this point is made vivid. Many rewilding projects here are focussed on growing trees, an endeavour that is mostly carried out by culling large numbers of deer. This is a new form of ecological hunting - for neither meat nor sport - and I find it difficult that these efforts to restore plant life bring with them so much animal death.
It’s often said that the highest aim of every living being is to feel safe, but I sometimes wonder if our human desire for security has made us forget how to take part in the dance of precarity and trust that all wild animals learn from birth. Without this part of life - moving with the vulnerability of the hunter or hunted - our own engagement with life’s wild edge atrophies. Deer do not build their sensory fortresses with methods or materials that cut them off from life. Instead they select places that bring them into deeper relationship with it. Without an ability to eliminate danger they instead remain open to it. A deer on a hill listens, smells and looks, alert and waiting. Its sensory fortress is nothing more than a body in tenuous relationship with the interesting world around it.
There is a moment on all our Plant Listening walks when we take time to stop and engage the senses, closing our eyes and feeling our way into the surrounding trees through our own subtle, sensory capacity. It’s something we humans rarely do automatically. In our human-dominated and head-strong culture it can be hard to remember that we’re also equipped with finely-tuned animal bodies that exist in a feedback loop with the world.
In the UK, where we long ago exterminated all the other apex predators that once created a sense of genuine fear, alongside developing industrial farming systems that allow us to forget the effort and responsibility of taking life to sustain our own, we now live with different anxieties. Our worries are still about threat and security, but spun into complex global systems that go far beyond the here and now.
Living with fear isn’t easy, and it can be tempting to barricade ourselves away from, or lash out at, that which threatens our safety. A daily decision remains as to whether we remain curious about, or shut down, that which scares us. It might be easier to tune out the things we’re afraid of, but in the process of doing so do we miss the opportunity to live a wild and trusting life?
The lion is often heralded as a symbol of courage but I would also propose the listening deer. So open and without defence, and therefore so free, these animals accept the large and small events of every day. When you next find yourself in a difficult place, take a moment to simply pause and lean towards whatever it is that life is carrying towards you.
In a wild ecology safety doesn’t involve certainty and a sensory fortress has no walls. What might we find if we stay open in the face of that which scares us? To trust our bodies - these beautiful instruments so adept at feeling rather than conceptualising - is to better acquaint us with life. For the deer that sits on the ridge, there is no separation between itself and the surrounding world. Life is blown in on the wind, that messenger of all that’s beyond our understanding.
© Katherine Wollson