Tristan

Name: Tristan
Breed: Mongrel deer. Mother was ½ caribou, ¼ red deer, ¼ mule deer; father was ¾ red deer, ¼ caribou. I am aware that these combinations would not exist in the first place, let alone produce fertile offspring that could survive in the wild, but you know. Artistic license. x)
Age: 5 years
Height: 115cm at shoulder (45 inches)
Weight: 92kg (202.8 lbs)

Appearance: Tristan is a tall deer thanks to being roughly half-and-half caribou and red deer, and the stockiness of the caribou has been diluted by the delicate attributes of the red, making him hardy yet relatively slender. His markings are a mix of caribou and mule deer. The most striking thing about him, if not his failure to belong to a single deer subspecies, is his antlers. He received a sterilising injury in his fourth year, and thereafter with a disrupted flow of testosterone, his antlers, already an eclectic mixture of caribou and red deer genes, have disobeyed the normal laws of growth, velvet shed and drop; they simply keep growing and adding sticker points, velvet growing, shedding and hanging.
Markings spec: Base coat is a low saturation mid-to-light brown, with darker brown points (knees/hocks and below). Pale grey covers neck and bleeds down inside of the forelegs, plus shoulders, sides and from the underside of the tail down the rump to the inside of the back legs. Black goes from the head marking down the topside of the neck and widens at the back, flaring at the shoulders, sides and hips and continuing onto the upper side of the tail. Face: Pale grey covers the insides of the ears and the eyes, nose and muzzle in a continuous "mask", but this is broken up by the black coming from between the antlers and continuing down the forehead to level with the eyes, where it splits and curves round to in front of the eyes on either side and then splits again, one branch to curve underneath the eye and the other to go down the side of the nose to meet the nose leather.

Bio: Tristan was born in the southern regions of what passes for a Northern Continent, and grew up in a migratory herd consisting mainly of caribou, with a few mongrels created from a random introduction of a few red deer, mule deer, white-tailed deer and other species; he is related to some of these mongrels. On reaching maturity, he ventured out into the big wide world to try his hoof at travelling off the beaten track, and temporarily joined several different caribou herds on his wanderings. He was rewarded for his efforts in his fourth year during the rut, when he misjudged a challenge and received his sterilising injury. He also largely lost his inclination to breed, and became milder and more laid-back in later months.
He’d already produced some offspring in previous years, but at the time the incident was disheartening and he left that herd in shame, wandering again until he found another caribou herd, and joined. He spent the next year with them and, perhaps half due to his lack of threat to their harems, bonded well with many of the stags.
Disaster struck on the first and only northerly migration he made with them; as they swiftly crossed a frozen river close to its thawing date, Tristan, unused to the route and its hazards, fell through a patch of thin ice and was borne away by the current as the ice downstream disintegrated.
Miraculously perhaps, he washed up on southern shores, and his story continues…

…I suck at drawing deer, sorry. xDDD His tail’s meant to be down by default, but it’s some sort of habit of mine to draw deer’s tails sticking up… O.o And…can deer rear up like that? I have no idea. Also aware that his ears are changing size in this ah…“reference”. They’re meant to be biggish, like, well, deer’s ears.

Tristan is © to me (=apocalypsebunny)

EDIT: It's funny how having to paint markings on a model gives you a new perspective on them. x3 Changed slightly (belly markings) to be less Bloody Annoying.