A reindeer stands four feet at the shoulder and weighs about as much as three full sacks of flour and a small boy. I measured the one at Ribeira against a barn door, which I had notched in advance, and the notch was exactly where the hair of his back brushed it. He is built like a barrel on stilts, chocolate along the back, cream on the mane and legs, with a shaggy frosted collar and big, bright, kind amber eyes, and in December his antlers are wound with strings of small golden lights.
The herders of Campo Rojo say you know a reindeer is near by the sound the snow makes. The snow squeaks in four even beats, one for each hoof, with a small happy skip on the fourth. Then the lights show through the trees, low and swaying, and the whole lane goes gold. What the herders do about it is put out apples. They are quite sure reindeer love apples, and the herd comes for them every evening and eats them, and the herders glow with the success of it. What the herders get wrong is the reason. A reindeer's real love is lichen, the gray tufts on the north side of old fir trunks, and he eats the apples out of politeness. I know because I spent an afternoon with a bull called Marta's Boy, who was the neighbors' pet, and offered him both. He ate the lichen at once, with a noise of sheer pleasure, and took the apple with a small bow. When I told Marta Ibarra this she said it made no difference at all. "He's not a lichen kind of bull," she said, and gave him another apple.
Every reindeer in the valley wears a red velvet collar with a sprig of holly, tied on by the children on the first of December, and no one touches an antler. This is the one custom everyone keeps. In winter the antlers are growing, and the velvet on them is warm and tender, and the whole herd is gentle about it, so the children are gentle too. Strings of lights are wound through the tines only after the herd has stood still for it, an operation that takes three people, a ladder and about forty minutes.
At dusk the herd goes up the lane toward the spruce, antlers glowing, and what they leave on the gatepost is a single carrot, bitten in a neat crescent.
- Classification
- Large antlered Arctic deer
- Habitat
- Snowy lanes, tundra and spruce woods
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 4 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Northern tundra and taiga
- Binomial
- Cervalis nivarum
- Diet
- Lichen, sedge, willow shoots, apples
- Temperament
- Spirited, herd-loving, joyful