The sound of the TARDIS engines disturbed the morning calm, and the temporal winds whipped up a veil of snow as if hiding the materialisation process made it any less believable. Fortunately, the Doctor's scanner showed that nobody was around. That was, unless you included the small herd of Irish elks that seemed bemused by the blue box's appearance. He didn't count them, though. And that was all that mattered.
"What are they?" asked Clara, pointing at the screen. "Are they deer?"
The Doctor turned to look at her as though she had just asked him if Earth was a planet. It bemused him to think that this girl had only a few short weeks before not know what the internet was and yet she'd been allowed to look after children.
"Of course they are deer!" he cried, spinning on his heel unnecessarily and clapping his hands. It gave him confidence, the confidence to step out of a blue box that could travel through time not knowing what lay beyond the wooden doors. "These, Clara, are Irish elk. The largest species of deer to have ever existed."
"They don't look very big to me."
"Clara," the Doctor said, doing his best not to patronise her, "they are quite far away. Some of them could be over two metres tall!"
"If you wanted to impress me with animals you should have just taken me to a zoo." Clara folded her arms. "Why exactly are we here?"
The Doctor looked at her. "I offer you the chance of seeing one of the most beautiful creatures before its extinction, and you'd rather I take you to Sea World to watch a dolphin jump through a hoop." His voice was laced with disappointment. Even his hair seemed to flop that little bit more.
"Sorry," said Clara, realising that she'd offended him, "I just thought we were going to go somewhere..."
"Somewhere what?"
"A bit warmer."
The Doctor nodded. He'd thought that too. He'd pulled levers and spun rotating things in the hope of landing in the 17th century and showing Clara a dodo, but what he'd gotten was a different extinct species - but arguably a much more impressive one. It was clear to him that Clara didn't think so, however.
"I tell you what," he said to her, attempting to make the most of what was quickly becoming an awkward situation, "why don't we just have a look around. Ten minutes. If we don't find anything that piques your interest, we'll fly off in search of a planet a bit too close to its sun, okay?"
"Ten minutes?" Clara asked. "Why don't we just go now?"
The Doctor pulled on his jacket. He wasn't quite sure what to say. He knew the reason. He hated arriving in the wrong place, in the same way that you or I would be annoyed if we boarded a flight for Berlin and ended up in Peru. He, on the other hand, had it twice as bad. If you landed in Peru instead of London at least you'd still be in the same year, unless you were flying on New Year's Eve, of course. This was not the case for the TARDIS. You could aim for 1066 and end up in... well, anywhen. And it happened all too frequently. He'd gotten bored of it after the first five flights and vowed to himself that he would always explore the area that his ship had landed in. There were a few exemptions to this rule, however, such as if it landed facing a wall, or materialised in the heart of a volcano.
"Because..." the Doctor thought hard about a clever lie, but in the end decided to tell her the truth. "Because that would not be fun. You'll probably want a coat." He looked down at her skirt. It may as well have been a belt. "And cover your legs."
Whilst the Doctor and Clara had been talking, the herd of elk had slowly been making its way toward this mysterious object that had plonked itself in the middle of their grazing ground. They didn't like new things, especially things that they couldn't identify. The eldest elk, who had half an antler missing, decided to risk what remained of his life and limbs investigating this odd addition to the scenery. He sniffed it. He walked around it. He even dragged an antler along one side. He concluded, to the relief of the other elks, that it was a tree. Of course, as soon as the TARDIS door opened and The Doctor stepped out wearing a deerstalker the elk quickly realised it wasn't a tree at all.
"Clara," The Doctor said, surprised at how calm he was considering he was surrounded by almost fifty tonnes of prehistoric mammal.
"Yes?" called a voice from inside the TARDIS.
"I'm beginning to regret my choice of hat."