Fast cattle: the problem with deer

UPDATE: The column was lost during production at the paper, so this will actually run in the hard copy of the paper sometime this week. This is only relevant if you like to clip these and put them on your fridge, which even my mom stopped doing years ago.

UPDATE 2: The column actually ran Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008.

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Nov. 16, 2008 Hibbing Daily Tribune. I read a version of this piece for my Saturday essay on KAXE yesterday.

Fast cattle: the problem with deer
By Aaron J. Brown

Yes, I hit another deer. This was not the first time I’d put fender to fur. I’ve smashed almost every vehicle I’ve ever owned against a deer at least once during the time I drove it. I’ve clipped running deer, flattened standing deer and I’ve even seen deer barrel into the side of my car. The sights and sounds are so familiar. The thud, the breaking glass of my headlights, the skittering sound as the deer attempts to run away or as it rolls over and over, its hooves and/or antlers tinkling across the pavement until it lands somewhere. Then comes the swearing as I fumble for my hazard lights and look for a place to pull over to survey the damage.

First, let me stop and explain something. Some will cringe at the my lack of compassion in this narrative. Indeed, if I kept running over people or dogs or pretty much anything with a name with my car, my tone would be decidedly different. But I have gradually lost my sympathy for highway deer because there are so very many deer out where I live and they possess an illogical behavior around cars that defies both God and Darwin. Why? Why do deer wait until they’re inside your braking distance to dart out of the ditch? Why do they double back and forth in front of you when picking one direction would literally save their lives and, unbeknownst to them, your insurance deductible? Why doesn’t a wise old deer – someone like Bambi’s dad – take the other deer aside and talk some sense into them? “Bambi. Cars are fast and very hard. They will crush your rib cage and the DNR will take you to the dump. And I recently learned that we have no eternal souls, making all of this an exceptional bummer.”

This brings me back to my story, a tale about the reality of a “post-deer collision” world. This past month I did something for the first time; I ran over a deer that was already dead. I know. I KNOW! How does that happen? What were you doing? How fast were you driving? Fool! Shame!

Let me explain. I live a half hour from everywhere in the woods just north of Northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. This means I leave for work early, often when it’s still pitch black. I was driving around a bend in the road and suddenly, WHAM, my headlights catch a pile of fur in the road with approximately four legs sticking up from it. Some logging truck or the like had obliterated the deer earlier, leaving the carcass in the road for me to run over. Because the deer was on the ground my car scraped over the top of it, ripping both my undercarriage and the deer remains to pieces. My car looked like I had been running down zombies in one of those new zombie movies where the zombies are fast. Liquid flowed onto the ground, mixing with deer blood, creating an oily concoction that smelled like a crime scene. Three guys stopped to help and I thought they dragged the deer off the road, but it turns out most of that deer was up in the innards of my car.

Long story short, the car spent a week in the shop where a crew worked on A) fixing the car and B) getting the deer parts out. I know one of the mechanics and asked him what it was like afterward. His eyes got kind of distant, sort of like you see in victims of post traumatic stress disorder. “It was bad. Really bad.”

And that’s why my car still smells like fur when the engine gets warm. I expect this will last through most of the winter. Happy hunting!

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at his blog, MinnesotaBrown.com. His new book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is out now.