Outside space and time the deer wander, at once swift and languid, and no one knows whether their true place is in immobility or in movement; they combine the two in such a way that we are forced to place them in eternity.
Inert or dynamic, they keep changing the natural horizon, and they perfect our ideas of time, space, and the laws of moving bodies. Made expressly to solve the ancient paradox, they are at once Achilles and the tortoise, the bow and the arrow. They run without ever overtaking. They stop and something remains always outside them, galloping.
The deer cannot stand still, but moves forward like an apparition, whether it be among real trees or out of a grove in a legend: Saint Hubert’s stag bearing a cross between his antlers, or the doe that gives suck to Genevieve de Brabant. Wherever they are encountered, the male and the female compose the same fabulous pair.
Quarry without peer, all of us mean to take it, even if only with the eyes. And if Jan de Yespes tells us that what he pursued, when hunting, was so high, so high-he is not referring to the earthly dove, but to the deer: profound, unattainable, and in flight.
Juan José Arreola 1969