Small stag head at the nape

The stag came down to the lower wall again this morning, the way it has every October since Brother Anselm was buried under the yew. Brother Tobias says it is only a hind's son grown bold on our windfall apples, but I stood at the gate with the bread still warm under my arm and it looked at me as if I owed it an answer.

You will laugh, but I have started drawing it. Brother Columba lent me his pen and the good iron-gall ink he keeps for the lectionary, and I have made a dozen tries on the backs of spoiled vellum. The antlers are the hard part. Each tine must branch from the one before without crowding, the way the hawthorn branches above the well, and I keep making them too heavy, like a rack nailed to a barn door. The face I have nearly mastered. A few short strokes for the brow, and the eye left empty so the ink does not decide what it sees.

The abbot asked to see the sheets yesterday. He held one up to the window for a long while and then said that a thing drawn so small would have to be carried close to the body to mean anything. I did not know what he meant, and I still do not, but I have been turning it over all day, the way you turn a stone in your pocket.

I have decided to ask him for leave to work in the far cell, where the light stays grey until noon. If he refuses, I will draw the stag on my own skin with a reed pen and a little soot and let the brothers wonder. Write back soon, and tell me whether the bees swarmed in the orchard, as they did last year when you were still sleeping with the kitchen cat.

Your brother in the lower scriptorium, Edwin