The age of deer : trouble and kinship with our wild neighbours

A stag leaps on an ancient brooch. A doe and a fawn step across a field at first light.

A pair of antlers is silhouetted by the side of a busy road. From the earliest cave paintings to the present day, humans and deer have a long and complex history.

Royal harts were the coveted quarry of European kings, while the first Americans relied on deer for everything from buckskins to arrow heads.

Once hunted to the point of extinction in some parts of the world, deer numbers have exploded in recent years, causing tension between scientists and conservationists. And yet, this is our own story, as the fortune of deer is inextricably bound up with the actions that we humans take on the world around us. Weaving together history and reportage, in The Age of Deer Erika Howsare deftly explores the relationship between our two species in the line where wildness meets humankind.

It is a reminder of the poetry and violence of the natural world, from an exciting new voice in nature writing. AUTHOR: Erika Howsare is a writer, journalist and teacher.

Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rumpus, and she is the author of two collections of poetry, How is Travel a Folded Form? and FILL: A Collection (with Kate Schapira). She lives in the Blue Ridge in central Virginia.