"Time Deer" was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1975.[2] The New York Times called the story "elegiac",[3] while Kirkus Reviews found it to be a "deft little fable".[4]
Mike Ashley described it as "jarringly contrast(ing) beautiful Native American imagery alongside prejudice and violence".[5] At Black Gate, Steven H Silver praised the "understated mysticism" underlying the protagonist's altered experience of time, and noted the ambiguity over whether the deer is actually present, but faulted the story as too brief and lacking sufficient "introspection".[6]
Literary scholar Kristina Baudemann considered that the story "allude[s] to colonial horrors, but (...) confirm[s], rather than subvert[s], romanticized stereotypes", and observed that it "offer[s] no alternative plots to the vanishment trope", emphasizing that the deer's empathy with the old man "evokes the romanticized stereotype of Indigenous people as spiritual, close to nature, and endangered by white civilization."[7]