Empty Hands

I had read that Nara's deer were tame, friendly, even famous for bowing before you feed them, but I still wasn't ready for how close the first one came.

I had barely stepped off the bus near Nara Park when a deer — a real, actual wild deer, not behind any fence — walked directly up to me and lowered its head, almost like a small bow.

I froze. Around me, other tourists laughed and took photos, clearly used to this. A vendor nearby was selling small stacks of flat crackers, called shika senbei, made specifically for feeding the deer. I bought a pack of ten without really thinking about it.

Growing up near Nairobi, I had grown up around wildlife too — but always at a careful distance, always behind a vehicle window on family trips to the national parks. The animals there were beautiful, but they were never, ever this close, and they certainly never expected anything from you personally.

The moment I held one cracker out, the deer in front of me bowed again, more deliberately this time, and gently took the cracker from my fingers. It felt less like feeding an animal and more like some kind of small, ancient greeting — which, according to a sign nearby, wasn't far from the truth. For centuries, Nara's deer had been considered sacred messengers of the gods, protected and fed by locals long before any tourist ever arrived with a camera.

I fed it a second cracker, delighted, completely charmed.

I should have looked around before I fed it a third.

By the time I noticed, I was no longer talking to one deer. I was surrounded by at least six of them, all facing me, all clearly aware that I was holding a paper bag full of crackers.

One nudged my hand impatiently. Another, behind me, tugged gently at the strap of my bag. A third, losing patience entirely, reached forward and simply took a cracker directly from the packet in my hand, crumbs falling everywhere.

I laughed, a little nervously now, and tried to step back. The deer, unbothered by personal space in any culture, followed.

"They know exactly what a paper bag looks like," a woman nearby said, laughing at my expression as one particularly bold deer nosed at my jacket pocket, checking for anything I might be hiding. "Once they know you have food, they don't really believe you when you say you're finished."

I thought about all the documentaries I had seen growing up, about staying calm around wild animals, about never running. None of them had prepared me for the specific chaos of six polite, determined deer in the middle of a public park.

I still had three crackers left, and every deer in the immediate area seemed to know it. One tugged, quite firmly, at the edge of my paper map. Another simply stood on my foot, patiently, waiting.

I hadn't expected the most overwhelming moment of my trip so far to involve six polite, extremely determined deer.

The woman who had been watching me laugh through my mild deer-related panic finally took pity and offered some advice.

"Show them your hands," she said. "Empty. They understand that."

I quickly fed my last three crackers to whichever deer got there first, then held both hands up and open, palms toward the small crowd still gathered around me.

Almost immediately, the interest disappeared. One by one, the deer wandered back toward the grass, toward other tourists with fresh, unopened packets of their own.

I found a bench near a quiet pond a short walk away, sat down, slightly out of breath, and started laughing properly — the kind of laugh that comes from being completely overwhelmed by something ultimately harmless.

From a safe distance now, the deer looked exactly as peaceful and graceful as they had in every photo I'd seen online — grazing calmly under the maple trees, a few resting in the shade, one young fawn following close behind its mother.

It struck me, sitting there, that I had traveled all the way from a country famous for its wildlife to be genuinely startled by a deer that wanted a snack. Some kinds of wild, it turned out, looked completely different depending on where you found them.

I decided I would definitely buy more crackers tomorrow. Just not quite so many at once.