How the Hunter Acquired His Horns by Carys Crossen
The hunter had been a man of high renown, in the service of a great Lord during the reign of Richard II. But life had been unkind. His Lord had been unjust and capricious, and now the hunter had no horse and no hounds, only his bow and arrow.
It was dusk and the light had turned misty blue. A smudgy moon rose above the thick-leaved trees, and the hunter strode boldly into the woods. The owls were beginning to stir, screeching their harsh lullabies to the evening. The hunter paid them no mind. He sought fat pigeon, skittish rabbits and hares, lumpen pheasants or, if luck and skill were on his side, deer. His Lordship’s deer, that the Lord fattened his stupid self on while his people ate horse dung to stave off starvation.
The moon rose higher in the sky. The shadows darkened and lengthened. The hunter held an arrow delicately between two fingers, ever in readiness. He moved almost without sound—almost. From the undergrowth a fox crouched still and wary until he passed. No professional courtesy to be had from that trespasser, the fox knew.
The stag was drinking at a stream that was no more than dried earth containing a trickle that sparkled silver in the moonlight. The hunter raised his bow, took aim, breathed out and fired.
Perhaps it espied his movement, perhaps the stag’s acute ears caught the susurration of his sleeve as he drew back the bowstring. But the stag’s sudden movement meant the arrow missed its flank and struck its shoulder.
The stag bellowed, loud and hoarse, more in shock than pain. The hunter cursed, and stepped from his cover, plucking another arrow from his quiver as he moved in preparation for the killing shot.
The stag charged.
All the hunter saw was brown fur, wild black eyes and a mouth flecked with bloodied foam. And then a glimpse of bone and he was hurled into the air. A moment of puzzlement, as his feet left the earth and he soared. Then he struck the oak tree he’d been concealing himself behind and all thoughts were knocked from his skull and all the breath from his body.
When the hunter regained some of his senses, it was full night. It was so dark all he could make out were the leaves above him, a dark blur against the purple of the night sky, with an occasional glimmering star.
The hunter knew he was dying. He tried to right himself and the pain rammed him like a cannonball to the gut, knocking him senseless all over again. When he roused himself once more, the light had turned grey. Dew was draped over everything, including the hunter, and the cold had seeped into his marrow. Dawn was creeping up on the world but it brought the hunter no comfort. His injuries could not be healed, and if he could not move then he would die of thirst. Better to die at his own hand—his fingers groped for his knife, to slit his own throat with, but he could not feel it.
The tears came then. A slow, steady trickle of resignation. The hunter had never cried. Not when he was cast out by his sovereign Lord, not when his favourite hound had died, not when his lovely Agnes was carried off by smallpox. But now he wept for his blasted life and the injustices that would never be avenged.
That was how Satan found him. Satan was out for a stroll before the sunrise, for he had once been the Morningstar and daybreak was his most treasured hour. Contrary to what the priests preached, Satan seldom meddled in human affairs. Humans didn’t need him to punish them or to lead them into evildoing.
So when Satan encountered the hunter, lying weeping beneath an oak tree, his first inclination was to leave him to his death and be on about his business. But the man’s hopeless grizzling was distracting and so Satan paused in his wanderings.
Satan saw at a glance why the hunter wept. His perception was acute, all the more so for his centuries in exile and his residence in Pandemonium. He knelt by the hunter, and bade him stop weeping.
The hunter did so.
‘I know you,’ said the hunter. ‘You’re the Devil.’
‘I am,’ Satan confirmed. ‘And I’m willing to save your life, and give you more life besides, on one condition.’
‘Which is?’ the hunter rasped, images of eternal damnation and torment and the flames of Hell dancing through his dulled brain.
‘That you wear the horns of the stag that gored you for the rest of your long years,’ Satan told him.
The hunter considered it.
‘Why?’ he asked. Satan shrugged.
‘You can’t get something for nothing, you know. Besides, that puffed-up Creator up above made you in His image, and I make it a point of reshaping it whenever I can.’
The hunter felt his life ebbing and his vision dimming.
‘What about my soul?’ he whispered. Satan rolled his eyes.
‘It’s overcrowded in Hell as it is,’ he grumbled. ‘If you do good with your life, then I won’t see you again, regardless of what you wear on your head. If you do evil, then you’ll make your way to Hell sooner or later. I need only wait.’
Ah, Satan, the most patient of huntsman! The hunter felt a frisson of admiration slip through his battered innards. And so he brokenly breathed out his agreement.
There was no pain, no thunderclaps or swirling lights or smoke and flashes or noxious vapours, none of the accoutrements associated with sorcery. Satan merely extended a hand and hauled the hunter to his feet.
The hunter’s hands first went to his middle, poking and prodding to make sure all his hurts were truly gone. Then they went to his head.
The antlers were growing from his temples, magnificent ten-pronged antlers that added a foot to his height. They were weighty, a dubious crown for him to wear.
Satan looked at him with pursed lips before nodding in approval.
‘Thank you, Devil,’ said the hunter.
‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ answered Satan. ‘Good hunting, Herne.’
Satan’s leave-taking was utterly unceremonious. He nodded and strolled off and was swallowed up by the trees before the hunter came to ask how he knew the hunter’s name. But, the hunter supposed, a being who could restore life and make horns grow from a man’s head would have no difficulty in divining a name.
The Lord who had dismissed Herne from his service died abruptly and in eerie fashion. He went out hunting, and never returned. His servants found him strung up from a willow tree, the willow strands twined about his neck as a noose. No-one mourned him overmuch, not his servants and certainly not his wife.
The stories followed, like the wild owls flying out of the darkness: ‘who? Who? Who?’ Tales of a great hunter, a man who wore stag’s antlers, who appeared whenever there was injustice, ready to mete out punishment to evildoers. It was true that wicked men and women had a tendency to die in and around those woods. Some were hung, some gutted like a felled doe, some held down in a stream or pond to drown.
On nights when the rain shook the window panes and the winds howled like hounds, people would whisper that Herne the Hunter must ride that night, on a black horse he took from one of his victims, seeking the justice humankind had denied him.
And as none of the stories ever mentioned that Satan returned for him, Herne must be living in his woods to this day.