Question

Is it the underlined one---
or
the hilghted one---the deer

Answer 1

I'd say "there was ...." because parallelism is repeating the same kind of grammar and words so the "there was" is closerto it.

Answer 2

The parallel structure is in the birds and the wind. The small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. The wind is mentioned again in the foxes tails and snow. Once you have lived in country where there is wind, you never forget how dominant it can be. Hemmingway reminds of this with his constant reference to what it does and the sentence structure concerning the wind is somewhat the same.