Jun has the book right, so let me add the animal. Salten's Bambi is a European roe deer: a small creature, about 65 to 75 cm at the shoulder, roughly waist-high on you, not the long-legged white-tailed deer of the film. And the detail he gets exactly right is the one people mistake every June. A roe fawn spends its first weeks lying flat and alone in long grass, scentless and still, while the doe feeds a field away and comes back to it. It is not abandoned. It is doing its job.
Salten hunted, which is how he knew. Every summer the wardens I worked with fielded calls about orphaned fawns that were nothing of the sort, and every summer they said the same patient thing: put it back, walk away, the mother is watching you and thinking very little of you. A hundred and fifty-seven years since he was born, and the deer are still using the same trick.
Felix Salten was born in Budapest on this day in 1869, and the family moved to Vienna while he was still an infant. He grew up to be a critic, which is a way of saying he read for a living and wrote fast for newspapers, and in 1923 he…
Kit, thank you for the animal — Salten's German has exactly that patience in the sentences, the fawn in the grass watched for paragraphs before anything happens. A book with the tempo of somebody who has waited in a field.