Many of us in the Upper Valley have a deeply felt relationship to the natural world. We walk in the woods, photograph rivers, feed birds, hike mountains, share bear sightings. We go out to be in nature. In Deer Man: Seven Years of Living in the Wild, just published in translation from the French, author Geoffroy Delorme feels this urge to an overwhelming degree.
Throughout his school years, Delorme slips into the forest more and more frequently until, at the age of 19, he disappears into it entirely. He spends seven years living in a territory of about 1200 acres in the Forêt de Bord, a national park encompassing 10,000 acres in eastern Normandy. This is not survivalism for its own sake, not Alone in France. For the first several years he returns to his childhood home every few months in the middle of the night (he is estranged from his parents) to bathe, raid the fridge, swipe matches. He finds the smells and sounds of the human environment increasingly unnerving, and eventually ceases these forays.
He lives mostly on roots and leaves, drinks water collected from the crotches of trees, hides tinder and twigs across the landscape for emergency fires to warm himself. He has no shelter, no home base. He drifts with the deer. But while we hear of his techniques for not dying—of cold or hunger or sickness (he comes close several times)—that is never the point. He is drawn into the woods by the roe deer, by a feeling of kinship that he has never felt with people.
It is only after the fact and with a certain startlement that we realize the point of view has slipped from first person singular to plural, that enough of what happens is communal that he can write, “We spend whole days in the undergrowth, waiting patiently for sunset so that we can leave for the glade, the meadow, the field, or simply the edge of the path. You have to imagine the intense joy that we feel when we dare to venture out into open ground to eat plantain, wild docks, dandelions, and many other succulent plants, sweet or starchy, salty or spicy.”
He slowly becomes of the forest as well as in it. Adaptation is painful but effective. “Your metabolism changes. Your mind changes. Your reflexes change. Everything changes, but slowly. ” And with it he finds happiness for the first time in his life. “To live in harmony with the roe deer, and to be able to walk behind them, I also cast off the swirling habit of thought, which acts like a parasite on my experiences. That’s certainly the most difficult thing. But after a year I come to see the human world as ignorant in a way. …I am just happy to be here, with them.”
The narrative is marked by moments of great beauty, of increasing intimacy with the deer—the first time Daguet sleeps body to body with him, or when Star feels safe enough in his presence to give birth 10 yards away—but also terror, and grief, as when the guns and hunting dogs of the battue come crashing through the forest and Star is shot and dies in a thicket, feet away from where Delorme has placed his body to shield her scent with his to hide her from the dogs.
Foxes, badgers, wild boar–all learn to be comfortable with his presence, though none so closely as the deer. From a black fox vixen he calls Terylle he learns a great secret, a new source of ever-scarce liquid and protein, when he follows her through the forest to a field of cows in the neighboring farmland. She approaches one cow after another with little testing advances until she finds one that will tolerate her, and licks milk from her swollen udder until she’s full. Delorme adds this trick to his repertoire of survival techniques.
Deer Man is strangely anti-autobiographical. After a prelude in which the author describes his alienation from school and from home, we are given little other information about him. We see more of him in how the world looks to him than in what he says about himself, and this reflected portrait is an enigma: what psychological forces drive a man to live with animals? But the lush, perilous beauty of the world he loves shines through on every page, and that, at least, we can understand.
Eventually, he finds his body wearing down from protracted hunger and exposure to cold. And in the end, human depredation of the land that threatens the deer also depletes his own territory; clear-cutting drives him from the forest. ”Everything has been cut down: the wild cherries, the archangel, the nettles.… I have to travel for several miles to find anything to eat.” And so one day, when a woman is walking her dog on the forest paths, he comes out of the undergrowth and says “Good evening,” and she says “Good evening, monsieur,” and it’s all over, though with a surprising twist at the end.
At times Delorme wonders whether he might be anthropomorphizing the deer, but he doesn’t spend long on the question because the answer doesn’t matter to him. He has no other place to be—these are his family, his friends, his home, his world. He reports his joy at moments of intimacy with his companions as unreservedly and unironically as he describes their feelings of affection, trust, and curiosity toward him. We are trained to think of this as anthropomorphism, and of course it is, but one wonders, when lives are so intertwined and animals of different species are grazing and grooming and napping together—when the deer have accepted him as one of their own—are they also “cervidizing” him? (Roe deer belong to the Cervidae family.)
Regardless, Deer Man is a fascinating account of a human being who leaves society to live in the forest with other animals, a quiet tapestry of natural history, survival writing, lament, and communion that is rich with sensory detail and incident, and richer for the questions it raises about our relationship to the natural world.