Wyld Stag

Staaag.

I dart behind a tree in Harvard Yard, hoping that it will provide some cover in the gloom of early evening. Leaves crunch under my boots and threaten to trip me up, but I step careful.

Staaaag?

The bodies in the dark get louder and closer, and I’m honestly, ridiculously, a bit scared. Their weapons are fake, but in the dark it’s hard to tell.

STAAAAAG!

I break free and run, yelping in spite of myself, as a pack of students smeared in blue paint chase behind, all yelling for my blood. I’m towing the line between fake-scared and real-scared, ironic running and holy-shit-how-did-I-end-up-in-Lord-of-the-Flies running, and my principal thought is that I want to avoid being ceremonially slaughtered and eaten, screw the renewal of energies for the coming winter.

But let me back up.

I first heard about the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association’s annual Halloween Wyld Stag Hunt through a friend who enjoys seeking out these kinds of willfully bizarre experiences. Oh, God, I thought to myself as I clicked past the email calling for volunteer prey, what poor idiot is going to get roped into that? Enter me, said idiot.

The Stag Hunt is a celebration of the changing season, a ritual steeped in vaguely pagan and new-agey ideas about the renewal of energies in preparation for the coming winter. Self-proclaimed “out-of-shape” members of the science fiction club dress as pict hunters, early medieval tribespeople who used to inhabit the plot of land that is now Scotland. The hunt falls somewhere between an initiation, a Halloween party, a parade, and voluntary hazing; against my better judgement, I volunteered.

So Saturday night found me gamely (pun very much intended) applying some eyeliner to non-eye parts of my face in an attempt to look deerlike. A triangle-ish nose? Freckles? Should I do something with my hair? What even is a “wyld stag?”

I was surprisingly pleased with the results until we arrived at the pre-hunt costuming session, where one of the SGFA picts looked at me with a frown. “What’s on your face? Is that for this?” he gestured to the other club members, who were in the process of affixing leaves to their hair and taking practice brandishes of largish foam weapons. I said that it was, lamely and apologetically adding that it had been a rush job. “Oh. Well…you do look vaguely like a mammal,” he conceded. I decided not to point out that none of them exactly looked much like picts: The costumes ranged from a tall pink warlock, completely unrecognizable in flowing robes and silvery hair, to swirling black skirts to elaborate dresses.

The stag hunt was proving to be about as non-threatening as an event which advertises an end in ceremonial execution can be. Or at least, it was non-threatening, until we walked out of Eliot into the chilly night.

We had been armed with a map of the route, from Eliot through the Yard and back again, which included a few squig gly areas which we were to interpret as free reign to dodge and hide accordingly. I was absurdly worried about getting lost in the heat of the chase, which proved not entirely unfounded.

We left Eliot in a slow procession, walking with just slightly quickened steps a few paces in front of the SGFAers. One of them started yelling. They all did, then we were running, screaming down Dunster Street and into the shelter of the dark of the Yard, the snickering irony of the whole situation suddenly gone. We terrified some tourists, who were unprepared for the sight of shirtless screaming picts outside of Lamont. I gave myself shin splints for the first time since high school track. Our chase took us zig-zagging through the corners of the Yard and back through the square to Eliot where the four of we stags hugged each other against a tree before being rather anticlimactically prodded slightly with foam swords. “You should fall now,” someone said. We did.

The Wyld Stag Hunt is patently absurd, and all it takes is a second of self reflection to realize this and become overwhelmed by the inherent silliness of the whole thing. But there’s also something else, something a little magical about abandoning good sense and self consciousness in the name of something more primal. As I ran through familiar streets made half-menacing by the threat of being overtaken by screaming Science Fiction Association members, I felt the kind of gleeful terror which hadn’t been a part of my Halloween for a very, very long time. If Halloween is about a liberation from our daily selves, a giving in to the atavistic fear of the night and the cold and the dark, then the Stag Hunt is the perfect way to spend Oct. 31. After all, if we can’t dress up and scream wild on the streets on this one day of the year, when can we?