In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.
They had happened into my dimension
The moment I was arriving just there.
They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood
Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal
And hesitated in the all-way disintegration
And stared at me. And for some lasting seconds
I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign
That the curtain had blown aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road
The deer had come for me.
Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs
Away downhill over a snow-lonely field
Towards tree dark - finally
This line is a pivot, a dramatic climax, also open to interpretation. The poet may feel a threat, as if he has intruded into the world of ‘deerhood’ and must be punished. Or else, the deer are welcoming him to their sphere. It is ambiguous. 
 The sentence is notably sharp, emphatic and monosyllabic, coming between two long sentences. It is also colloquial, contrasting with the lyrical lines that precede it. 
 An added significance may be seen in this line, that fate played a part in this encounter. As in his other work, Hughes attributes symbolic significance to such experiences, believing they foreshadow future events in his life.
Roe-Deer