🦄

oh no. no no no.

It is a fact of life in the time and location in Ohio where this story takes place that the deer population has no natural predators in the area. Regulated human hunting is necessary to keep the population to a healthy size. 

And deer season opens in staggered brackets, right? Bowhunting opens first, to give people using bows and arrows a chance to get their shot in (no pun intended) before people with loud guns start scaring all the game away. Bore-loading rifles open next, works up to shotguns, etc. If you want to hunt deer with a machine gun you have to wait until everyone else has had their turn, basically.

So while my dad’s friend here does enjoy hunting for sport, he doesn’t need the meat the way some people do and as such he doesn’t feel right using guns; anyway, he likes the extra challenge of bowhunting, and it makes him feel better knowing that the deer have a sporting chance. 

So he’s out there with a bow and arrow right when deer come into season.

Hits one. Clean shot, deer goes down, so the guy pulls out his hunting knife and walks up to this deer, which has just been shot and is by all rights already dead. He’s just doing the humane thing and checking to make sure so that he can give it a mercy stroke if it’s still clinging weakly to life.

This deer ain’t clinging weakly to shit.

So the poor man squats down next to its head, holding his hunting knife responsibly with the point facing down so that if he stumbles and falls he won’t impale himself. It’s what you’re supposed to do.

Dying deer looks him in the eye and has a split second in which it telepathically communicates: Fuck you.

Kicks out exactly one time.

Hits the knife perfectly and drives it into the guy’s thigh up to the hilt. And then dies.

Anyway there are some pretty fucking important veins and arteries in your thigh, which the deer’s Taking You With Me move thankfully missed. So this man who just wanted to give deer a fair fight ended up in the middle of the woods with a gushing thigh wound and almost bled out before he managed to get himself back to his car and very, very carefully make his way to the hospital.

(By all accounts he was very good-natured about the whole thing. Once he was no longer in immediate danger of dying he thought it was hilarious. In his own words, “It’s not like I can blame him, you know? I mean…that’s fair. That’s fair.”)