I killed my first deer last night.
(Hence the reference to Natty Bumppo, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Deerslayer")
It was a doe. Not a big one.
But big enough to bust the front grill and dent the front right corner of the bumper of my beloved Cruella.
Did I mention I killed this deer with my car?
Yeah, I felt sick. After all, it was only a week ago that I'd been going down essentially this same road (by "same," I mean driving through central Mississippi on my way back to Gulfport), spun out on a ridiculous patch of ice, and busted up Cruella more than I thought.
Cruella DeVille - my old Cadillac.
I felt sick because the right front headlight I'd just replaced about six months ago was busted up pretty good, with little tufts of deer hair caught in the broken glass.
I felt sick because even though I thought the Caddy came out of "Skating With the Stars'' in pretty good shape, turns out she hadn't. She was loose in the front, and somewhere along the way the rear bumper skirts came off, leaving much of the old girls' bottom exposed.
I felt sick because sometimes you can't help but wonder, "Why me?"
Oh, and I felt bad about the deer, too. What tragedy compelled this poor little doe to throw herself out in front of an on-coming car in the dark of a January night in Mississippi? I know she saw me coming - I saw her tiny little fearful eyes looking at me as she leaped (leapt?) in front of my headlights at the last second.
Thousands of birds drop dead out of the sky in Arkansas; a hundred thousand fish show up dead in an Arkansas river; two hundred cows keel over in a field in Wisconsin.
And one sucidal doe throws herself in front of my on-coming car somewhere south of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
What's going on here? Signs of the coming apocalypse?
On the other hand, this is something like a rite of passage for a man, isn't it? Killing game?
See, we didn't hunt when I was a kid. We played ball - football, basketball, baseball. But nobody in my immediate family hunted (except my mother, who could stalk a sale from one side of Atlanta to the other and never came home empty-handed).
I had uncles that were hunters. At family gatherings I listened to their stories of hunting wild hogs and turkeys and coons and, yes, deer. I had an uncle that trained coon dogs and I remember my Dad - also a non-hunter - telling the story of the time my uncle Woody took him coon-hunting.
I remember the first time I went fishing. I was so excited. I had visions of casting my line and then battling some monster of the deep back to shore. I'd seen "American Sportsman" and those guys on the back of boats whose hands were blistered and raw from hours of fighting to land a giant blue marlin.
Instead, I stood on a bridge over a little stream, dropped a line in the water, and waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Bor-ing.
When I was older, some men in the church decided to take a couple of us deer hunting. Again, I had these visions of stalking deer, creeping through the undergrowth, checking to stay downwind - all those things I'd read about in James Fenimore Cooper books.
(By the way, Cooper was ridiculous. You want a good laugh, read Mark Twain's essay on Cooper's litterary offenses at http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/rissetto/offense.html . Then read Twain's commentary ridiculing the Book of Mormon .... oh, just go read Mark Twain, despite the current controversy).
Of course, the reality is they took us out before daylight, stuck me on a tree stand, and told me to wait.
And wait.
And wait some more.
Bor-ing.
I finally got down and found my best friend who was equally bored. We walked back to the road where we thought the trucks were parked. While we walked and talked, a rabbit jumped out in front of us. Mitch was so excited he started pointing his gun and pulling the trigger, but the safety was on. The rabbit was a very good sport and waited until Mitch could get the safety off, at which time it darted away as Mitch fired off one round - and blew the heck out of a small pine tree.
"Looks like you got a nice 127-pointer there, Mitch,'' I said. "Do we skin it here, or drag it back to camp?''
That was my last time to go hunting.
So as I got older and the guys would sit around talking about hunting and fishing, I'd have to sit there and keep quiet and listen. I have to admit, they made it sound so much fun, so Southern and macho, that I was tempted ... but then I kept reminding myself that these stories were about five minutes out of who knows how many hours, if not days, of hunting/fishing trips.
Now I had killed my first deer. I believe I remember the proper response is to cut off the bottom of my shirttail and dip it in the blood of the kill.
However, when a deer is killed by an on-coming car there is no real blood to speak of, and my shirt was a nice, black-on-black dress shirt from Macy's that I really like.
Besides, I didn't have a knife or scissors with me anyway to cut off the tail of the shirt even if there had been any blood to dip it in.
And, honestly, it's not like I really felt good about killing Bambi.
As Bumppo himself says when he and his friend Hurry Harry fell a doe and Hurry is feeling proud, "Nay, nay, Hurry, there's little manhood in killing a doe ..."
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