Deer as Metaphor: Part II

Photo by Dallas Penner on Unsplash

[read Part I here]

We live in a rural community, but it’s an HOA and there are people who can help in circumstances like this. The office gave me the number of the head of the wildlife club, Elizabeth, who said she had two animal rehabber contacts and would get back to me. When she called back she said neither of them was available on short notice that day, so the only thing to do was call Animal Control.

The woman there told me the usual advice was to wait a day or so, since Evelyn could simply be recovering from exhaustion from her struggle, which might have lasted all night. I described her head-back posture, though, and she said it might be best to call the county’s rehabber for an assessment. I did and left a message with him.

Every now and then, Evelyn would lift her head and try again to get up, failing each time and letting her head fall from the effort. Sometimes she appeared to have given up and died, but looking closer I could see she was still breathing.

Soon Elizabeth called again and said one of her rehabbers was now available and could get to us in fifteen minutes. We dropped everything and waited for him, and soon a sixty-something gentleman in a Harley Davidson t-shirt and camo baseball cap pulled up. Gene was his name, and he was all business, wanting to see “the animal.”

Gene and I made our way down the slope to the corner where Evelyn lay. He thought she was already dead, but we both saw her belly moving with her faint breaths. She stared into space, unafraid of us or, more likely, unable to do anything about it. Gene knelt beside her and felt her chest to judge her heartbeat, declaring that she was in really bad shape and wouldn’t make it. He had his 9 mm with him, accustomed to these situations when hesitation doesn’t do an animal any good.

“I’ll have to shoot her,” he said with a matter-of-fact tone, then looked at my wife and said, “You might want to turn away, ma’am.”

He was already preparing his gun. I interrupted him to ask who we could call about removing the body, and he said, “I was thinking you and me would haul her out of here and leave her on the side of the road. I’ll call the HOA office and they’ll send someone over to pick her up.”

I hadn’t imagined that morning that I’d be dragging a deer corpse up the steep slope that led down from our house, but the situation called for it now and I wasn’t going to argue with Gene about alternatives. He was moving on anyway, his pistol in one hand as he lifted Evelyn’s head by the ear with the other. Her eyes were empty of fear. She was yielding herself to Gene’s confidence. He cautioned my wife one more time, and I tried to offer my own respect to Evelyn by looking away too, but Gene’s momentary pause made me look back again and that’s when he shot.

The report of the pistol was louder than I expected, echoing up and down the canyon like a lightning bolt of mercy.

Evelyn was motionless as Gene felt her abdomen and said she was already gone. “Sometimes you don’t get it just right and it takes time for everything to shut down, but this was a good kill,” he said. “You have to place it just behind the ear.”

He parked his gun on his hip and gestured with a nod that we would now each grab a leg and start our climb. Immediately, I got a gauge on Evelyn’s weight and estimated it to be 120 or so. We started trudging up the dewy green hillside, pulling her in a steady sled path as best we could, stopping for a better grip now and then, our breaths getting heavier, our feet slipping occasionally, with Gene throwing in an encouraging “heave-ho” as we passed the middle of the slog. As I regripped I saw a wound on one of Evelyn’s back legs and realized she had struggled so hard against the fence that she wore through her skin and I was seeing the white of her bone. I had to put her suffering out of my mind to make it the rest of the way up, over a set of cement-block steps, and onto the flat walkway by the house. We dropped her there and rested for a minute.

The shock of the preceding moments was fading while Gene called the office and told them it was over and the guys should come by for the pickup. We regrouped and dragged Evelyn out to the street, to a grassy spot under some blackberry vines, and there she would lie with open eyes until they came to haul her away.

The name of Gene’s job, he told us by way of conversation, was “dispatcher.”

My wife and I talked with him about his work and his sensitivity to the dignity of these animals. He refused any payment. He told us he’d had to kill about thirty-five deer in his nine years in the community, and it was never easy. He hated to have to dispatch the fawns. He was used to death though. He had worked in a hospital for a few years and would attend autopsies sometimes just to see. It was fascinating, he said, the human body.

Sooner than we expected, the two-man crew arrived and tossed Evelyn into a trailer filled with brush. One of them said they dump the dead animals onto BLM land adjacent to our community, where predators feast on the easy pickings. Lately, though, the bodies weren’t getting eaten and had started to pile up. Possibly the mountain lions were hunting elsewhere these days.

Later, our dogs couldn’t get over the undetectable (to us) essence on the ground of what had happened. They circled the spot at the top of the steps where Evelyn had lain before we made that final push to the street. Though there was no blood, they seemed to know something serious was written into the earth there.

My wife and I hoped out loud that the next rain would wash it away.