February 15 is the Feast Day of the Striped Stag, patron of wilderness search and rescue, park rangers, and hikers. The Striped Stag is a mythical figure, white with dark blue stripes on the legs and lower hindquarters. It supposedly appeared to lost hunters and wanderers and showed them the way home. There is a story that it drove away wild beasts from a young girl who had run away from a terrible situation, and so it is sometimes called upon as the patron of runaways and the lost.
Advertisement