Michael Fry: Why so many close encounters of the herd kind?

I came to a fence. Behind it was a large herd of red deer, young males with antlers. I hesitated. To tell the truth, I felt a trifle nervous because I had read of human beings occasionally being skewered on the end of antlers, which are hard and sharp and can be driven in with great force should there happen to be a deer on the other end of them. This was not the rutting season, but could I really be sure of the beasts?

I conquered my gut fear, took my chances and climbed the fence. The deer took no chances: they all ran away, splashing through a burn and across a meadow on the other side. I continued up into the glorious glen that lies between An Teallach and Beinn Dearg Mor.

A few years later, now if anything better fed but for that very reason still commanding stamina in plenty, I determined to walk the whole length of the northern shore of Loch Maree from Gairloch to Kinlochewe, more than 15 miles and some of it over rough country. It was a sunny day made all the more idyllic by an immense profusion of wild flowers and then by the little roe deer that started out of patches of woodland beside the loch. Like their larger cousins, they took no chances with me.

I had read and loved John Buchan's John MacNab, as well as Andrew Greig's sequel to it, neither of which could have been written without the elusiveness of deer. I recalled Peter Frears' film of The Queen, in which Prince Philip proposed to shake his two grandsons out of grief over their mother, Princess Diana, by taking them out to shoot a stag. Moping about weeping was too sissy for two scions of the House of Hanover, so he had them out crawling up scree for hours. Even for royalty, deer are nowadays to be shot in no more comfortable way (unlike in the time of King Edward VII, when beaters would drive the doomed creatures by him while he picked one off for every glass of champagne).

But some more recent experiences have contradicted my earlier ones. Driving by a field of long grass in East Lothian one day, I became uncannily aware of staring eyes. I stopped the car. Peering from the long grass were a dozen or so roe deer, alert but by no means terrified. At any rate, they did not run away; and this nowhere near any mountains, but in Edinburgh's suburbia, more or less.

Then another day, when I was back in the Highlands, I followed the narrow road along the northern shore of Loch Askaig, right to the head of the glen where the road runs out but a path continues over the mountains to Glenfinnan. This was the route taken in 1745 by the warriors of Clan Cameron when they turned up just in time to save Prince Charles's rising from abortion: in the event, a bad idea all round. I, however, after long years as member of a drones' club, was now too plump to contemplate treading that same track. Still, as if to have made the journey worthwhile, there was waiting for me another herd of young stags, and quite friendly ones.

In fact, one approached me, merely nodding his antlers (which I gather is a sign of wariness rather than hostility). I was wary, too, as a bit of that first gut fear in Wester Ross came back to me. I gave him a segment of orange. He liked it, wanted more and eventually ate the lot, including the peel. If I had my way, I promised him, I would get you served up to me with an orange sauce.

So what exactly is the state of relations today between man and beast, deer and drone? Evidently, the animals have become less scared of people, though this is scarcely wise on their part. There are outlying spurs of the Highland massif that reach right down to abut on some of our roughest human habitations, say in Dunbartonshire or Stirlingshire, where the feral locals lie in wait on the unwary ungulates. Helpless little deer are set upon by pit bull terriers, then butchered with the machetes these folk keep at their council flats.

I suppose it is better for them to vent their violence on deer rather than on each other, and venison will improve the diet of deep-fried Mars bars. It is still rather gruesome that they should leave round their bins the heads and feet they have discarded as inedible (I should add apropos that Kenneth Lo's Chinese cookbook features deer's heel – you stew it with chicken, ham, cabbage, etc – and the recipe might be distributed in Raploch or Renton along with the methadone).

But in the hard times we are now living through, such proletarian initiative can unhappily attract the attention of organised crime, and gangs have been organised to exploit the novel source of protein. Nor are they by any means confined to the Lowlands: on the Highland estates, they are known as syndicates.

There is something wearily familiar about all this. Man's felling of the old Caledonian forests first drove the deer up into the mountains, for which their evolution had not suited them. Yet they multiplied there, whence the necessity of numbers forces them to descend again to take their chances in the human world of today. Will they soon be competing with the foxes in raiding our urban dustbins?

Another difference from the past is that now we have a Deer Commission that is supposed to monitor and control the numbers. It does not seem to be doing very well.

The population of deer may have doubled in recent decades, there being no predator on the beasts except Homo sapiens. Scotland may have as many red deer as Edinburgh has citizens. Counting in the non-native species, such as the Sitka, that have been introduced (and why?), Scotland may have as many deer altogether as Glasgow has citizens.

Is this an aim of policy? If so, who has set out the policy, and what are its terms? In a hard winter, when many of those deer that can survive assault or accident are starving miserably to death, I just thought I'd ask.