The goitered gazelle

The goitered gazelle is a creature of open, stony ground: sand-coloured, white-rumped, built for distance. It takes its English name from the male, whose throat swells during the rut. Females are usually hornless or nearly so. In Iran it lives on the plains of the central plateau, in places such as Kavir National Park, Touran and the Mooteh refuge near Isfahan, and it is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, its herds thinned by poaching and competition with livestock.

The eye of the gazelle

In Persian the gazelle is ahu, and few animals have done more work in poetry. The beloved's eyes are gazelle eyes, cheshm-e ahu: large, dark, startled, and always about to turn away. The gazelle is also the beloved who cannot be caught, and Hafez opens one ghazal by calling out to a wild gazelle and asking where it has gone, a lament for a companion who has fled into the desert. The poem works because the image is exact. Anyone who has watched an ahu look up, hold still for a breath and then vanish knows the feeling it describes.

Musk and mercy

Classical Persian also used ahu loosely for the musk deer of Central Asia, so the ahu of Khotan in poetry carries the scent of musk, moshk, the perfume of the beloved's hair. In Mashhad the gazelle belongs to devotion as well. Imam Reza is known as Zamen-e Ahu, the guarantor of the gazelle, after a much-loved story in which he stood surety for a captured doe so that she could return to feed her young. She came back, and the hunter let her go.