By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Popular Christmas carols, and a well-known poem by Clement Moore, paint a happy symbiotic relationship between Santa Claus—Saint Nicholas—and his local deer herd at the North Pole. The relationship between a saintly Utah monk named Nicholas and the deer creatures in his life was more complicated, but is just as interesting.
I know because I wrote a book about my own wonderful boyhood experiences with the same Utah Trappist monks (cross your fingers that a publisher likes it). Afterwards, I started to research and document the friendships between the monks and their local Ogden Valley neighbors, many of them Latter-day Saints. Almost every neighbor mentioned one particular monk.
His name was Clarence Prinster, born in 1927 to a family of hardworking businessmen living in Grand Junction, Colorado. Rather than becoming a grocer (like his uncles and brothers) or even a doctor (as he once contemplated), Clarence surprised everyone in 1949 by joining a newly-established Catholic monastery called the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, located in Huntsville, Utah.
He took on the religious name “Nicholas” but everyone knew him as Brother Nick. Like his saint-namesake, he was extremely generous. He excelled at many parts of the monk job description, but was best known for his farming and ranching skills, including managing a large beef herd and extensive alfalfa hay operations. In its prime, the monastery’s mountain ranch grazed several hundred head of cattle and produced tons of hay on 1,800 lush acres.
Brother Nicholas’ outdoor work assignments brought him into regular contact with his Ogden Valley human neighbors, as well as with the deer and the elk—a larger form of the deer family—who resided in the mountains and canyons south and east of the Abbey. The humans all adored Brother Nick for, among other things, his expertise, hard work, and kindness. Unlike his namesake residing at the North Pole, however, the good Utah monk had a bit of a like/hate relationship with the local deer and elk.
It’s not that Brother Nick did not love all God’s creatures. He did. His friends Lyle and LaVon Allen called him the “Gentle Giant,” but like all his ranching neighbors, from time-to-time his work put him in conflict with Mother Nature’s trespassers, poachers, and vandals. Especially during the hard and lean winter months, the nearby deer and elk herds owned by the State of Utah targeted the Abbey and its dry delectable hay stores as a readily-available source of cold weather food.
The deer and elk did not care how they got to the food source. Over the years, Brother Nick repaired many monk fences and enclosures broken or trampled by marauding wildlife. For months, he matched wits with a determined deer herd he thought was jumping over his feed enclosure fence. He built higher and higher fences but the raiders somehow still got in. Exasperated, he arrived at the enclosure early one morning to catch the deer in the act…of crawling under the fences!
One other late night, trying to sleep on the simple cot in his monastery cell, Brother Nick heard especially loud elk bugling originating from the vicinity of the hay barn. The next day he discovered that two bull elk had battled in the enclosure, locked their antlers together with fence wire, and collapsed with exhaustion. They were in that very position when the worried monk arrived on the scene.
The monk and the local state game agent together tried to separate (and thus help) the 700 lb. beasts. It turned out, however, that the prone bulls were just on a break—only resting between rounds of their colossal encounter. When the monk and the game warden approached, the powerful entangled animals snorted, rose, and resumed their combat. They even tossed the poor state agent, who flew past Brother Nick and well clear of the scene!
Brother Nick also got into his own tangles, once with state officials who in his humble opinion did not always do enough to keep the elk away from the Abbey winter storehouses. After a state agent did not respond to several calls about a pesky bull elk hay raider, an exasperated Brother Nick grabbed his shotgun and BOOM! He took care of things himself. Sources tell me state enforcement officials detained him for alleged poaching, but did not have the heart to keep the kind monk in custody for too long.
They also probably let him go because he was a true man of the land, and not just concerned about the Abbey’s hay and fences. It was hazardous for the elk and deer to intrude into enclosures designed for cattle. One news account tells how an elk cow, unfamiliar with the cattle feeding system, climbed into the monastery feed bin, rather than just sticking her head in to eat. She slipped, got stuck, and broke her back trying to escape.
The shotgun was Brother Nick’s weapon of last resort against trespassing wildlife. Sometimes he gave the pesky deer Nick-names like “Margo” or “Josie” as he tried to shoo them away via peaceful means. And then there was his very patient response to a mixed-up young elk. One day, the monk noticed that his cattle herd included a rather odd-looking new member. A young elk, from the nearby wild herd, had convinced himself that he was a cow and joined the monastery’s grazers, who in turn had accepted him as one of their own.
Brother Nick’s good friend and neighbor, Marsha Kenley, named the newcomer “Edgar” (see attached photo). The local news media loved and reported the story in the 1970s. Brother Nick welcomed Edgar the mixed-up elk to his herd and let him stay and graze all summer. Agents from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources relocated Edgar to a more appropriate location when winter fell.
I love hearing and singing about the annual winter holiday seasonal legends like Rudolph, Dasher, Dancer, etc., and their good Saint Nick. This Christmas, however, I am charmed by new and non-traditional stories too, about another good man named Nick and his adventures reining in his own deer neighbors. Brother Nick did not have a bright red nose, and his name may never be shouted out with glee, but—to steal a line from a familiar song—he also should go down in history.
In unexpected ways, that’s just what has happened.
As the Trappists say, the good monk graduated to Heaven in 2018. He is buried
in the simple cemetery at the now-closed monastery. The great granddaughters of
his cattle—he always called them “the girls”—still graze contentedly nearby,
tended now by Craig Cross, another old friend and neighbor.
On cold nights like tonight, wild deer and elk—some perhaps resembling
Edgar—amble down from the mountains. They pause in the December moonlight,
almost instinctively, at a small white cross that says “Brother Nicholas.” And
then with bounding leaps and great strides they are off to match wits with the
fences and hay enclosures of their own generation.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah
