I grew up in London where the only deer live in Richmond Park, belong to the queen and will cost you £50 if you hit one with your car. At least, that’s what my dad used to tell us anyway. Maybe he was fibbing just because it makes a good story. I don’t mind.

Anyhow, I’m out cycling. Because I don’t live in London anymore, I’m cycling in a forest because there’s one ten minutes away from our house and why on earth wouldn’t anyone be in a forest whenever they have the chance? And it’s nearly sundown and there are deer watching me. I know this because every now and again I catch glimpses of their erect necks, still with fight/flight poise, framed in the three-quarter light. They never run unless I stop, and I never stop because I like that they’re there.

You see, it’s getting dark outside and, as anyone who’s ever been under a thick blanket of trees at dusk can tell you, darkness is born not from the sky but from the forest itself. It heaves and grows up from the soil, the light under the trees a hundred times thicker than the light above them, and it poisons the imagination as it does so. Every beast of Bodmin news story and Cryptomundo posting creeps out from behind happier thoughts, transformed from a curio, ‘And Finally’ news item, to some kind of hidden and monstrous threat.

Each occasional blob of blackness in the trees is now a puma, a leopard or a panther (they’re all different things right?), wild and hungry; the grandcub of some trophy pet released into the forests of Sussex by a 1970’s movie star. However it is the reasoning behind these things goes.

And I pedal harder and faster despite the broken logic of the situation: the fact there are deer happily watching me streak past, and that nearby fields are filled with peaceful sheep who’d have smelled danger long before I dreamed it.

Despite all of this, I’m wondering how it would play out if something did jump out from behind the trees and go for me. How would I roll, where would I put my hands? Do you shout, scream and run, or hush, quiet and lay down? Grizzly Man would totally know.

In Call of Duty 4′s single-player campaign you’ll occasionally be chased by a mad Alsatian. The idea is that you shoot them between the eyes before they reach you but, if you’re too slow or too distracted and they manage to pounce, you’ll fall to the floor under the weight of the dog. Then you’ve a couple of seconds to click the two analogue buttons in. If you manage to do so in the window of opportuntiy, your character will grab the dog’s head and snap its neck.

Maybe it’s that role-play image, or maybe just the fact we live in England where, generally, there aren’t bears or big cats and we’ve no sense of their power and threat, but I think that most men think that, iin the event of a wild cat attack, they’d somehow get away. Despite the fact a big cat would have your neck torn open sooner than a tabby with a field mouse we, at least we Brits, really do think we could out-run, out-climb, out-think, out-ride our predators. Maybe all humans have that self-belief? Perhaps it’s common to all creatures?

Then I break through the other side of the forest, the lights come back on and I feel silly for reasons too numerous to untangle.