International: Deer & Men

How could the mild-eyed creatures know, munching their hay in the ship’s hold, that they were a token in a play of forces called history? History to a reindeer is the rising and the setting sun, begetting and dying, the north-and southward seasonal flight of birds. How could the two deer know that if a man named Hitler had never been born, if there had never occurred that crisis of European civilization one of whose phases is called Naziism, if the Germans had never invaded Norway, if the British had not come to help, they would still be nuzzlers of Lapland lichens in subarctic Norway, instead of the week’s most curious travelers?

The two reindeer were a present from Major General Arne Dahl, commander of the Norwegian Army of the North, to the London Zoo. They had already traveled from Alta to Bergen, and had rocked along (their six stomachs somewhat queasy) from Bergen to Newcastle on the S.S. Jupiter, then by rail from Newcastle to London.

But the deer were not quite alone in the strange world of ships, railroads and medical inspection. Someone watched over them. Attending to their simple diet and deerish comfort was one Jenferksen, General Dahl’s Lappish batman (see cut). He would stay with them until, after 28 days of quarantine, the deer were exposed to the stares of Zoo-goers—a token of Norway’s gratitude for Britain’s aid.

But almost as incomprehensible as history is the fact that nations are sometimes grateful, and that their gratitude takes (to deer) peculiar (and, as human beings say of themselves) all too human forms.