Hart (deer) "As pants the hart for cooling streams" for its common meter (CM) rendering of the Psalm 42 text. Hart (deer) Hart is an archaic word for "stag" (from Old English "heorot", "deer" – compare with modern Dutch "hert", medieval French "hart", German "Hirsch" and Swedish/Norwegian/Danish "hjort", also "deer"). Specifically, "hart" was used in medieval times to describe a red deer stag more than five years old. In medieval hunting terms, a stag in its first year was called a "calf" or "calfe", in its second a "brocket", in its third a "spayed", "spade", or "spayard", in its fourth a "staggerd"
White stag James Thurber's whimsical fairy tale "The White Deer" is transformed into a young woman when trapped by hunters, but her only memories are of fields and trees so no one is sure if she was originally a deer or a princess. The white stag played an important role in C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" novel. The Pevensie children (now grown-up kings and queens) hunt the Stag, hoping to gain wishes for catching it. It is in their pursuit of the Stag that they stumble back through the wardrobe and into their own world, returned to childhood.