Elder and Sister Shurtliff: Pictures, October 2017: Dyrehaven, Mom's Birthday, Tivoli

Dear Grandchildren,

Today Grandpa and I went to visit a place called Dyrehaven which means the ‘Deer Park.’ It is a huge park that has nearly 2000 deer living there. One of the Danish kings who liked to hunt, decided to keep this area of forests and fields. In the early days of , he put a fence around it and drove herds of deer into it. That is why there are so many deer now.

The kings liked to hunt. They would use dogs to hunt. The king and his hunters were on horses and together with the dogs and horses they would chase a stag all day until it was exhausted and fall down. Then the king (or other important person) would approach the deer and kill it with a short sword. One time the king went to kill the stag and it kicked him and hurt him very badly. He died the next year from this injury.

Today the park is not used very much for hunting. The park is open so people can visit. We saw people walking, riding bikes, and riding horses. We were hoping to see some deer but after walking for half and hour, we still hadn’t seen any and almost gave up. But then we saw four deer in the woods. We were so excited. And then we saw another deer. We were counting each deer we saw and got up to 13 deer. And then we came to an open field and we saw herds of deer—over 100 deer, and we stopped counting.

Here are some pictures of the deer. The building in the picture is the king’s hunting palace. It was built in the 1700’s. The picture with Grandpa and me is in front of the gates. All the gates to Dyrehaven look like this.