Note: Even though this is obviously a koi deer, I went with a different angle to the markings because my imagination ran away with me when I first saw her. I hope this makes sense.-
The tracks in the rock of the mountain were said to be made by a doe painting the cliffside. Her delicate hooves sank down into the ground, it was told, and in the softened stone of the ancient cliffside she carved their people. And it was true. Under the petroglyphs of ancient deer running, bucking, mating, fighting, there were indentations in the rocky ground, almost in the shape of graceful hooves.
Done by a doe that adorned herself with ochre and bone char, a streak across her brow, this ancestor lived lifetimes ago, longer than a deer could count back. Some believed she was only a legend, and others that she truly lived. There were some that followed her ways, handed down through word of mouth, and lived as aesthetics, adorning themselves as it was said she did and making their own carvings, obsessed with their people and beauty.
But none dared mark the same cliffside, the same mountain, as the ancient doe, and none came close in the beauty and skill of their carvings.
And so the deer lived, running, bucking, mating, fighting like deer always have, for many, many generations after the ancient doe.
And the black mountain, the mountain of the cliffs of the carvings, having slumbered for so long, began to awake with the smallest of signals. A tremor here one day, a tremor there several later. Nothing that deer fleet of foot would notice, always on the move and preoccupied with living.
As the black ash began to fall, bit by bit until it grew to be too heavy to bear, panic struck the deer, scattering them, while the aesthetics gathered and walked toward the cliffside. And there, white coat gleaming under fallen ash, was the doe of ochre and bone char, leaving tracks in the black, softened ground and carving their people into the cliff.