A story of a young deer and the treacherous life he leads in the forest.

Reproduction of the original: The Story of A Red Deer by J.W Fortescue

Filled with the lyrical beauty of a now-vanished world, this magnificent novel unfolds during the last great ice age, amid the mist-shrouded mountains of the Pyrenees in prehistoric France. When tainted spring water fatally poisons the women of the tribe of the Horse, the clan’s young men set forth to kidnap new women from the matriarchal tribe of the Red Deer—a quest that must succeed or their people will die out. Golden-haired Mar, the leader of the young men, falls in love with the beautiful Alin, daughter of the Red Deer priestess. And though they are born to embrace different traditions, raised to worship different gods, Mar will fight to claim this strangely powerful woman as his own. Against a lush backdrop of ancient magic, mammoth hunts, and secret rites, this mesmerizing novel brings to life the ritual and adventure of a primeval world and tells a timeless tale of conflict between two societies…two beliefs…two sexes…and two people.

When in the spring of this present year you asked of me that I should write you a book, I was at the first not a little troubled; for of making of many books there is no end, and of making of good books but small beginning; and albeit there be many heroes of our noble county of Devon, whose lives, if worthily written, might exceed in value all other books (saving always those that are beyond price) that might be placed in the hands of the youth thereof for instruction and example, yet for such a task I deemed myself all too poorly fitted; for if men would write books to be read of the young, they must write them, not after particular study, but from the fulness and the overflowing of their knowledge of such things as they have dwelt withal and felt and loved beyond all others.