Word: deering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Prospectors told of a lush almost tropical country where the river never froze even when the temperature sank to 50 below in the surrounding mountains. Great herds of fat deer and caribou, they said, cropped the green pastures. Last week the tales had grown so fantastic that the Vancouver Sun's columnist, Jack Scott, burlesqued the Nahanni as a "bodyless valley where ripe bananas hang from the boughs of pine trees [and] dusky native girls swim about in the deep, warm pools...
...creatures know, munching their hay in the ship's hold, that they were a token in a play of forces called history? History to a reindeer is the rising and the setting sun, begetting and dying, the north-and southward seasonal flight of birds. How could the two deer know that if a man named Hitler had never been born, if there had never occurred that crisis of European civilization one of whose phases is called Naziism, if the Germans had never invaded Norway, if the British had not come to help, they would still be nuzzlers of Lapland...
...deer were not quite alone in the strange world of ships, railroads and medical inspection. Someone watched over them. Attending to their simple diet and deerish comfort was one Jenferksen, General Dahl's Lappish batman (see cut). He would stay with them until, after 28 days of quarantine, the deer were exposed to the stares of Zoo-goers-a token of Norway's gratitude for Britain...
...almost as incomprehensible as history is the fact that nations are sometimes grateful, and that their gratitude takes (to deer) peculiar (and, as human beings say of themselves) all too human forms...
...Yearling's dramatic scenes are cunningly, almost too-knowingly manipulated, but they are nonetheless effective: the bear hunt, the ruinous rainy spell, Pa's near-fatal snake bite, the deer killing, Jody's perpetual wonder at a wonderful world, Penny Baxter's deep and tender understanding of his wife's and son's troubles. Underscoring all these emotion-mauling theatrics is a musical background that sounds as if it might have been recorded by the Heavenly Choir itself...