Cerynian Hind
The Ceryneian Hind, also called Cerynitis, was an enormous hind sacred to Artemis; it had golden antlers like a stag and hooves of bronze or brass. The capture of the hind was one of the twelve labours of Heracles.
When Artemis was a child, she found five gigantic hinds grazing in Thessaly and captured four of them to draw her chariot. The fifth had escaped across a river to Mt. Cerynaea, on the border of Achaea and Arcadia. Heracles chased the hind on foot for a full year through Greece, Thrace, Istria and the land of the Hyperboreans. In some versions, he captured the hind when it stopped to drink, rendering it lame by shooting it with an arrow that had not been poisoned with centaur blood, as most of his arrows were.
Eurystheus had given Heracles this task hoping to incite Artemis' anger at Heracles for his desecration of her sacred animal. As he was returning with the hind, Heracles encountered Artemis and her twin, Apollo, and begged the goddess for forgiveness. Artemis forgave him, foiling Eurystheus' plan.
Roes bearing antlers were unknown in Greece, but the story of the hind is suggestive of reindeer, which unlike other deer can he harnessed and whose females bear antlers; so the myth's archaic origins may have been northern, Robert Graves thought.
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