The Reindeer

Seeing what’s there and feeling what isn’t

Julius Caesar stands in a shady clearing around noon. He is exhausted, having led his men in a march that started long before the sun came up. He has decided to take a break for the midday meal. While his men collapse to the ground and reach for their drinks, he quietly wanders away from the group. All he wants is to sit by himself and massage his dusty, bruised feet for a while. He stumbles upon the clearing, sparsely populated by some trees he does not recognize. It’s nothing special, but at least it’s quiet. He searches for a place to perch and finds a big, flattish rock. As he turns to walk towards it, something catches his eye — the gleam of the afternoon sun off a long, curved antler. He freezes.

In the years 58–50 B.C., Julius Caesar led a series of military campaigns against the Gallic tribes, which resided in what is now France and Belgium. Rome’s conquest of the Gauls most likely began primarily as a tactic to extricate Caesar from the crippling debt he incurred during his term on the Roman consul. Caesar wrote extensively about his time on the battlefront in his book, Commentaries on the Gallic War. It is an enormous tome that is widely studied not only for its historical importance and literary merit, but also because its simple and unadorned prose make it a mainstay in Latin language instruction.

Commentaries on the Gallic War is also the first known written description of reindeer. In Book XI, Caesar leads his troops to the edge of the Hercynian Forest which stretched across northern Europe. There, in a desolate world seemingly untouched by human hands, he encounters an animal.

There is an ox the shape of a stag, between whose ears a horn rises from the middle of the forehead, higher and straighter than those horns which are known to us. From the top of this, branches, like palms, stretch out a considerable distance. The shape of the female and of the male is the same; the appearance and the size of the horns is the same.

—Book 11, Chapter 26

Was it real? Or was it a strange hallucination, brought on by exhaustion, the unblinking sun, the endless freezing nights? What about the way his knees trembled at the sight of the beast’s sloping legs, its rough, shaggy fur? And the drops of ink, like stars in the velvet sky, that spotted his robe as he furiously recorded his encounter with the beast? And the single horn — a trick of the light? A strange mutation? A mistranslation? Or did he stumble upon one mythological animal and not the other?

The animal did not exist before it walked into the clearing and into his frame of vision. It was nebulous, not yet known. Then he plucked it out of the ether, outlined its hazy form with his clumsy words — and it was forever trapped in this world.

Two weeks ago I found a lump in my right breast. From the moment I noticed it, people have been telling me it’s probably nothing. My friends, my mom, the nurse practitioner at my school’s health center. I know they mean it to be reassuring. It’s a constant refrain: “it’s probably nothing. Probably nothing. Probably nothing.” And yet I lie in bed at night and feel it under my fingers: hard, slippery, about the size and shape of a cough drop that’s been sucked on a little. I like to search for it under my skin, in the soft, top part of my breast that my bra doesn’t cover. I press and there’s resistance, there’s a little pain. It’s solid, persistent.

The nurse practitioner told me to make an appointment with a doctor close by who specializes in this kind of thing. I imagine her waiting room is filled with women who are young like me, healthy like me, worried about “probably nothing”, like me. But then I realize that my insurance won’t cover the appointment, that only certain practices fall under its finicky coverage and they are all in Maryland, a six-hour drive away. I’ll have to wait until the semester ends, over a month, to see a doctor, to get an ultrasound, to learn the verdict.

Until then, I go about my day behind the fragile shield of “probably nothing,” and when I push and poke and probe, it pushes back.

In his 1918 essay, “The Curious Animals of the Hercynian Forest”, Walter Woodburn Hyde writes an exhaustive analysis of Caesar’s descriptions of the various animals included in his Commentaries. Woodburn matches the careful accounts penned by Caesar to the anatomy and physiology of animals that were native to that region. He writes, “all authorities since Beckmann and Buffon agree that this animal is the reindeer — cervus rangifer or tarandus, rangifer tarandus, tarandus rangifer — the large clumsily built deer which still inhabits the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.” He cites the palmated antlers, and the claims that females and males both had horns in his analysis. Everything in Caesar’s account identifies his animal as a reindeer — except for the small problem of two becoming one.

Another, more worrying snag in this narrative: according to The Curious Animals, “it is now fairly well agreed among Caesar scholars that the whole account of the forest and its wonders is merely an interpolation into the body of Caesar’s work by some unknown scribe.”

Caesar is still frozen mid-stride, eyes locked on the animal. His heart is set to burst, his head full of the words he will later put to paper. Will anyone believe him? And as he thinks this, even as he stands there, his heart pumping blood in his chest, his lungs bringing vital air in and out of his fleshly, corporal form, muscles working to hold him upright, neurons firing rapidly, he vanishes. Not a strand of grass is disturbed where he stood. He was never there.

And yet the image of Caesar in the clearing cannot be so easily expunged from my mind. They are only words, after all: no matter their authorship, no matter the binomial nomenclature that chokes and crowds the narrative instead of clarifying it. The words cannot trump the feeling of discovery, of creation.

When I was young, my mom had an ovarian cyst removed. It was benign but huge, and it made her very sick. I remember her lying on the couch a lot afterwards, and the stillness of the living room, how scared I was to disturb her. Even now I don’t know the details. I know that I asked her about it once, or multiple times, but I don’t remember any of her answers. How did you know you had a cyst inside you? Did it hurt when they took it out? Were you scared?

I suppose there are things that I don’t want to know. Maybe my brain is trying to protect me from these details, refusing to soak up experiences that are painful to remember. When you’re young things happen to you, and then you get older and then you understand them. You only get the context later, when the memories are less acute and the details have already begun to blur.

Today, there are eighty-eight official constellations that are recognized by the International Astronomical Union. This leaves countless other patterns throughout history that have been dropped or forgotten, their constituent stars repurposed and redistributed in favor of newer, shinier formations.

One of those obsolete constellations is called Rangifer, or the reindeer. It was introduced in 1743 by a French astronomer, Pierre-Charles Le Monnier. He was a portly man with a wicked temper who held the record for the greatest number of sightings of Uranus before the planet was actually officially named. He traveled to Lapland on an expedition to measure the length of a degree of latitude, and named his constellation after the horned beasts he saw there.

After it was stripped of its recognition by the I.A.U., Rangifer’s stars were never recycled for use in a newer constellation. Instead the small group of faint stars sits unclaimed between the established constellations Camelopardus, the giraffe, and Cepheus, the king. They are formless, hanging there in the sky without a name to string them together.

These days, star charts are drawn with precise lines on computer screens: the beautifully illuminated princesses and swans and fanged sea monsters that once decorated the charts of old are nowhere to be seen. If you look carefully at the area near the North Pole, you can see a small blank area populated by several stars — Rangifer’s remains. I look it up in an old book I find in the library and when I lean in, run my fingers over the empty space, I feel the jutting bones of past constellations pressing against the black paper. The blank cries out to be filled. But then I roll back on my heels a little and take in the vastness of it all, the eighty-eight jagged shapes that don’t quite pass for the centaurs or water snakes they are named after. They blur together and the points of light and the imaginary lines that link them seem to radiate with the energy of the thousands of other connections that once existed. Suddenly I can’t see the blank anymore.

Hea-Ream Lee is writing in Brooklyn.