R.I.P. Bambi

Hey! Guess what! There's a dead deer hanging in my shed! And it's not even 8:30 in the morning! Now don't you want to hear THIS story? Thought so.

This morning at 6:15 I was mostly awake, waiting for the alarm to go off at 6:30, when I heard the squealing of brakes on the road out front. I figured someone had slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a deer. But I didn't hear the car drive off afterwards. Ten minutes later, the MiL knocked on our door to tell us that someone had hit a big buck out front. A.'s first response was that we didn't need the meat. And I was grateful, because he shot a deer during hunting season last year. Which we butchered. By ourselves. Thanksgiving morning. It took five hours. An experience I was not eager to repeat.

But then he was very quiet, and I could tell he was thinking. Finally I sighed and said, "You want to go get that deer, don't you?" But of course he wanted to get the deer.

So we got out of bed, got dressed, and went down the driveway. The guy who had hit the deer was parked in our driveway and the deer was damn near on our front lawn. Well. It was obvious we would have to dispose of the thing somehow, or else the dogs would be on it in two seconds. So we stood there talking to the poor guy whose mini-van was now crumpled like tinfoil until the sheriff arrived.

Apparently, the sheriff always comes for road kill deer. He has to tag it, so the DEC knows about it, I guess. But it is perfectly legal for anyone to take the deer when it's been tagged. You don't need a hunting license or anything. So the sheriff took A.'s drivers license information, handed him the tag, and we were now the legal owners of a very dead, very fat, 8-point buck.

We pulled it into the back of the truck and drove it up to the house. Then A. field-dressed it. Meaning he slit it open and gutted it. But it wasn't in the field. It hadn't been killed in a hunt. It had been killed when a large car slammed into it, and it was not neat inside. It was bloody and messy and frankly totally disgusting. Even A. was gagging a little, mostly because some of the intestines had split open. You know what's in the intestines, right? Yeah.

Anyway, he eventually got it dressed and we trussed it up to hang over a beam in the shed to cool down. There is some doubt that the meat will be any good at all, due to the trauma. But we figured that even if we can't eat it, the dogs can, and at least it's off the road.

After we finished spilling blood and guts all over the grass near the shed, A. went off to shower and go to work. I started sloshing water around to clean out the bloody truck bed, the bloody buckets we had used, the bloody shovel we had scooped the insides up with, the bloody watering cans we had used to rinse out the cavity of the deer. Then I dropped our bloody clothes in the wash. And I felt like I had been through a whole day already, and it was only 8 a.m.

Country livin'. Ain't nothin' like it.