Pair of antlers on an ankle

My grandfather kept a pair of antlers over the bar in Leith, a stag's pair, shed up in the Pentlands the winter he was nine. He'd walked up with his father for rabbits, and the snow came down so thick they lost the path. They sat in the lee of a dyke and waited, and that's where the stag found them, standing close enough to touch, breathing like a bellows. Nobody moves when a stag looks at you. That's the first rule.

The boy didn't move. He counted the tines instead. Five on the left, four on the right, one of them snapped and splintered at the tip. The stag lowered its head and walked on through the drift, and where it had stood there was a pair of antlers lying in the snow, their branches pricked with frost, as if somebody had dotted the dark into them one point at a time. His father wanted to leave them. The boy carried them down the hill under his coat, and they cut his ribs all the way to the bus.

Every year after, on the night the first snow came, my grandfather took them down and set them on the bar. Nobody asked him to. The room went quiet, and the old men nodded at the antlers the way you nod at someone who has got home safe.

So when they ask me why I keep the pair on the wall, I tell them the truth. They were never his to keep. Only his to carry down.