Stylised stag with long legs on upper back

Mum says you have stopped writing because the post keeps losing your letters, so I am sending this with Dan's van on Thursday. You will think I have gone soft, but I have been sitting up at the top orchard each evening since the Bramleys came in, watching the light go off the far hedge.

Last Tuesday a stag came through the gap by the old cider press. I say stag, but he was all legs, as if someone had stretched a deer over a frame and forgotten the middle. His antlers were the colour of the wasps' nest we knocked down in August, branching out like a dead elm in the wrong season, and his flank had a red to it, as though he had stood in the sunset for an hour and taken some of it on. He stepped over the windfalls one leg at a time, very careful, the way Dad used to cross the stream in his wellies.

I did not reach for the shotgun, which you will be glad of. I only stood by the ladders and let him look at me, and he did, for a long while, before he went off down towards the river with the mist coming up behind him. Next morning the apples under the gap were untouched, which Mum says is not possible, since the rooks take everything.

Come up at the weekend. Bring the good knife for the scrumping and tell me whether you still think I imagined him.

Your brother, Ed