I Run Over A Deer

Once, along the two-lane road, I and the drivers behind me were stopped and blocked by a police car. Some vehicle had hit a fawn, injured but still standing. A policeman took his handgun and shot it in the head. It collapsed, convulsed, then died, and that was the best choice.

Who'd have picked up that fawn and driven it to the vet? Paid for its treatment and rehabilitation? What for? If permanently crippled, returned to the wild it'd be hit again, or coyote meat. Not even the oh-poor-Bambi folks would give several grand a year from their own pockets to keep it in a sanctuary. Unfortunately the increased "development" in this area is herding deer down toward the road. I see about one dead deer per week, and each dead deer might have been a dead person. You have to choose.

Yesterday, after 18 years with about four near-misses, it was my turn with a deer. On the same two-lane road about 6:00 p.m. my car's headlights illuminated a dead doe, a fresh one, lying across my lane with her back toward me, and at 50 mph it was too late for me to swerve. Thump-thump. I heard bones cracking. Sickening. The car seemed fine so I kept going.

Came home later, halted the car to hop out and pick up the mail, and saw that the back license plate looked cracked or "crazed." Poked at it. It was deer hair, sticky. Hair all over the back bumper and a spot of blood. Did not think it wise or see any point in inspecting it further, or taking a photo for you. Next morning, first thing, to the car wash, leaving a nice tip in the tip container for the nice young people about to hose God knows what from beneath the car. Later, concerned about damage, I had the oil changed and hoped they would tell me if they saw bones and meat stuck in the undercarriage.

Why Are Deer So Elusive?

Pulling the car into the garage in early evening I saw in its rearview mirror a doe in the meadow. I did not say "Hello," even from inside the car, because they are so sensitive. Imagine living with the knowledge that your flesh is so tasty all sorts of creatures want to kill you to eat it. That's why they're sensitive. But this doe kept standing there as I watched, leaving me plenty of time to fire up the phone and ready its camera. The doe stood firm even as I exited the car. I thought for sure she'd bolt at the sound of the car door slamming shut, but she didn't move a muscle.

I've seen similar behavior in female animals guarding their babies. One rabbit would not budge although a gas-powered lawnmower passed her within inches. At this time of year, fawns would be brand-new. The doe was standing exactly where a circle has been cut out of the tall grass so I can pitch my tent there. It's a choice spot. She might have been waiting to catch a scent. Or she hoped freezing in place made her invisible. Even when I lifted the camera and fiddled with the zoom function (actual distance was about 25 feet) she didn't move. I turned and pulled down the garage door. It whined loudly and rattled, and that did it. She leaped away, but not far. I then returned to minding my own business and let her go about hers.

C.S.I. = Can See It

Like several other deer around here, this one got hit by a car just before hunting season opened in November and lay dead on the road shoulder about 200 feet down the highway. This past season Franklin County, just inches to our west (I can throw a stone over the county line), had the biggest deer harvest in the state of Missouri: more than 4,000. Sorry, Bambi fans: The herd needed thinning. Worse than seeing a deer in the road shoulder is seeing half a deer.  That's to say nothing of the people in the car. Before you get all Awww about deer hunting, imagine your own car hitting a deer that rolls at 50 mph through your windshield onto you and your passengers.

Three, four, five days and I began to wonder: Who picks up the roadkill in Missouri?

Within a city's limits: Animal Control. (Hey, all of you who love to work with animals. . .)
On a county road: Missouri Department of Conservation, and don't call about anything smaller than a deer because they believe in nature taking care of its own.
On a state road: Missouri Department of Transportation.

They do it on call, but I didn't know that then. When scavenger birds picked at the carcass I looked the other way. Then I got all involved in whatnot and left town for a week. Came back and catching up on work barely left the Divine Cabin for a week to ten days. Then going for a walk I see this. Looks like a young deer (they're the most fearless and ignorant) who was broadsided.

It's Deer Hunting Season

The first Missouri deer-hunting firearms Youth Weekend begins tomorrow, Nov. 2-3.

Regular November firearms deer season is Nov. 16-26. (Out near here it'll be "bang, bang, bang!" all day.)

Antlerless deer firearms season: Nov. 27-Dec. 8, in selected areas. In my area, hunters can take only one antlerless deer.

Alternative deer-hunting methods: Dec. 21-31. This includes deer-baiting and hunting on food plots.

The second youth deer-hunting firearms weekend: Jan 4-5. (Hey, kids, you can take only one deer.)

Information from MDC.mo.gov. I liked the T-shirt.

One Form of Deer Repellent

Friends down the road keep two gardens, a flower garden including tall sunflowers we never see around here because deer snap 'em off leaving four-foot stalks, and a vegetable garden. Both gardens are fenced. That's the only way for hobby gardeners to get homegrown produce to the table, because otherwise all we grow is deer munchies. They bite the tops off tomato plants too, especially during this summer's drought when nothing but gardens got watered. Can't blame them for wanting juicy greenery. Friend's husband found this skull, of a buck with only one antler, in the woods and decided to stake it in the center of his vegetable garden -- even though it has wire fencing. It has golf balls in its eye sockets. I think he means it to strike fear into the hearts of deer, who, if they only turned around, could see plenty of other nice grasses and leaves to rip and pulverize with their amazing one-inch tubular teeth with razor-sharp edges. It's also a form of folk sculpture.

Camping in the Yard

If you have a porch or a few square feet of property please try the adventure of summertime sleeping outdoors. Steamy days become cool nights here, 10 to 15 degrees cooler than in the city, sometimes with a delicious trace of ice in the air, and among my chief summer delights is sleeping about three times a week in my old green and yellow two-person tent and a nylon bag and blankets. New this year: mats all across the tent floor for comfort no matter how I roll.

I pitch my tent where the grass is mown and short, which discourages ticks. About 10:30 p.m., settling in with my pillow I watch stars through the ceiling netting; or through the door netting watch the knee-deep tide of early-summer fireflies. Every year on the very first night out there's always an incident, such as a nighttime creature sniffing around the tent. This year my presence in the meadow annoyed a deer who snorted for 30 minutes in a threatening manner, edging closer with every snort. I downloaded onto my Droid the loud and unpleasant "Police Siren" app with flashing lights, and thus established my rights without a confrontation. I've discovered that sleeping on the chilly ground eases and breaks the cycle of tormenting night sweats and hot flashes. The photo is a view through the tent ceiling early one perfect June morning.

I often wake at sunrise to a world filled with humidity embodied as mist and dew, so much it soaks the tent walls; or I oversleep and the sun heats and heats the tent until I'm driven back to the house inspired maybe to make a dreamlike breakfast of berry scones and coffee. Early one morning, creeping out of the tent into an almost psychic orange mist, I saw a buck so majestic I understood why the classics say a god disguised himself as a stag.

Is This Buck Legal?

How to survive if lost in the woods: Build a fire using your waterproof matches or a cotton ball smeared with Vaseline; fire your gun three times after hunting hours; and hope you left a hunting plan and a stamp of your bootsole on foil beneath your car's window wipers. Stay where you are; find or build a shelter for the night; know that you can live for 14 days without eating but only 3 days without water; and no Missouri stream is clean enough to drink straight up. How to hunt turkeys in season (April and November): Don't wear red, white, blue or black, turkey colors; keep your back against a thick tree or rock; don't make too loud of a turkey call; don't shoot roosting turkeys (it's not fair); aim at their heads; put the turkey that just bought the big casino into a hunter's-orange bag, tucking the wings in so no other turkey hunter imagines it's a live one. . .some of the many tips from Missouri's ten-hour hunter's education course. Free to all students 11 and older thanks to Missouri's one-eighth-of-one-cent sales tax that funds our marvelous state parks, conservation areas, shooting ranges and programs. A husband-and-wife team taught us how a muzzle loader works, how to track game, I.D. six kinds of firearm actions, and the six ways to carry long guns safely on the hunt. Much emphasis on safety. A million Missouri hunters have taken this course, reducing the average number of fatal hunting "incidents" from 20 per year to 4. I passed the 50-question written test, earned the coveted orange patch and now with this credential maybe with my squirty little .410 I can tag along with friends who hunt birds at Marais Temps Clair. I've never hunted. My father did, sometimes. He certainly wouldn't have taken a female along.

My coveted patch, earned 3/22/12

Our first speaker, though, was a young former hunter who accidentally killed his best friend's father--involuntary manslaughter normally avenged by eight years in the pen. He got five years' probation and cannot own a firearm or hunt. The best friend and his family withdrew their friendship, which he understands, he said. As the speaker left the front of the room, one man, with great simple American manly grace stood up, took the young man's hand, and said, "I'm sorry, brother."

Why'd I take this course, mandatory only for hunters born after 1966? Because this is the environment I live in and the people I meet.

Fauna

What is it in our spirits that makes us all excited to see a new fawn? The new deer were born in July, two of them, to the deer family that's been on the Divine 100 acres since I moved here 10 years ago, whom I see and meet now and then in the woods, but just the other afternoon I saw the new babies walking down the lane, and then, as I tried to get a better photo, they skip-hopped into the cedar hollow. Here's one of the pair. I love the details: the elegant hooves, the dark sweet nose,white freckles, skinny legs. They're twins, so when they pass it's like seeing double.

Deer Teeth

Found this back in my woods; it's a deer's jaw. Much bigger and sharper teeth than I thought. Of course they eat a lot more raw greenery than humans do. Left it where it was.

Follow the Game Trail

One day a couple with a young son came over, and the boy, preferring to be known as "J.T.", had a GameBoy with him and barely lifted his eyes from it to say hello, and was directed into a corner where he could be entirely absorbed in it. The couple went for a walk, leaving me to entertain J.T., and I chatted boringly as adults tend to do, and then I mentioned the game trails. He perked up at the word. "Game trails?" "I said, "By 'game' I mean animals," and I lost his attention at once.

Snow makes the game trails more visible, and I get the urge to follow in this case the deer tracks, and see where they lead, here into the cedar forest. All animals (except man) take the path of least resistance. Beautiful walk through here, following the path of deer who sidestepped fallen trees, backtracked, and I liked imagining I was a deer, but prefer to be me who sleeps in a heated house.

Purple Paint = Don't Hunt Here

Here's a tree I purpled some years ago -- with a brush, because there was no handy can of purple spray paint -- with a sign that was nailed up many many years before that. Since 1995,when the Missouri Purple Paint Law took effect, in Missouri purple paint on trees or posts means, "Don't trespass. Specifically, don't hunt here." For anyone who needs to know: "It is illegal to hunt deer on any land that has a "no trespassing" sign put up. . . . A land owner may place purple paint on trees or posts to mark their property. This purple paint is to be treated the same as a no trespassing sign. According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, purple paint is bound by a court of law as a legal method of informing hunters of no trespassing." I purpled again this fall, but know enough now not to do it on a shaggy-barked tree like this one.

Deer in the Ditch

On a walk along the edge of my own property, about 4:00 p.m. yesterday, I found a doe in a roadside ditch, eyes closed but still breathing. She didn't look all that torn up but I was so shocked I didn't do a full inspection. After sunset, the coyotes would come whether she was dead or not. I raised my eyes and saw bits of car parts in the road.

My options: Ignore it; try to put her out of her misery with my .22 long rifle (the biggest gun I have); or get someone braver to do it. I thought all sorts of things: "Let nature (!) take its course." "I can't shoot it, it'd be too horrible, I'd never forgive myself." "Should I shoot it in the head or heart? What if I did it wrong?" "For this I need a bigger gun." "Maybe she's just stunned and will get up and walk away." "Am I obliged to do this?" "Whom should I call?"

I did nothing. About 7:30 p.m. just as total darkness fell I heard one terrific shotgun blast from that part of the road. Haven't been back there to look.

Deer Season

The grimmest story ever told on this 100 acres:

One Christmas Day I decided to walk in the snowy oak-and-hickory woods for an hour and think good things. The silence was the big winter kind that felt like deafness. Animal tracks led me along a known game trail. Barely out of sight of the road, a dead deer lay split open, red exploded all over the white snow. Without looking too closely, I saw it was the young buck from the family I'd watched strolling down the road every dusk for more than a year.

Clearly the coyotes had got it. I was rattled enough that I didn't go walking anymore that day.

Next day the landlord's handyman, who was new then, came by to work on Shelley's house. Then he knocked on my door and said, "Need anything?" - which he never did unless I called him. He's a busy man.

I told him about the dead deer in the woods. He said he'd taken a walk, seen it, and got a good look, and its antlers had been roped to a tree. He figured a trespasser wounded and left it, maybe thinking to return and finish it off. But the hunter never came back and the coyotes got the deer. Alive.

"Oh, how horrible!" I said.

Deer firearms season had been closed for a month. He said, "That was poaching. Why didn't you report it?"

It came out that, for God's sake -- he suspected that maybe I'd done it!

No hunting is ever allowed on this acreage. Just to make sure everybody knows, a month before this deer firearms season opened (Nov. 15-25), I sprayed purple paint -- signifying "no hunting" -- on tree trunks all around the property's edge. When I see a deer I deliberately shoo it toward the center of the woods, where supposedly nobody can hunt. And if they do they'd better be humane enough to kill.

How You Get Born

The strange night sound from the meadow kept repeating itself. Sounded like a buck snorting -- but over and over, rhythmically. Never heard the like, and nervously I stepped out on the porch a few times over the evening hours to listen. It didn't go away. And with my wild, city-bred imagination that is full of ax-murderers, etc., I decided not to get a flashlight and venture out to seek the source. Locked the doors and went to bed.

A week passed and toward dusk I saw the local doe and she was nosing along a very small fawn -- "a football with legs," a friend had described it. Just one fawn. (She usually has two.) But just this one. And I added 2 plus 2 and realized what I had heard that evening was the doe in labor. I could have seen a fawn being born under a meadow of summer stars! I missed it because I made myself afraid!