I
killed a buck on Halloween night two years ago.
It was late, almost midnight and I was driving
home from a night of watching movies and eating
pizza. I’m a notoriously slow driver, so I wasn’t going
very fast as I approached a curve on Cloverdale Road
south of Eugene.
I never saw the buck before I hit him. I never hit the brakes.
He leapt out of a ditch and in front of my Jeep Patriot, and all
hell broke loose.
I sat there stunned, as the smoke from the airbags and
my smashed engine cleared, before getting out to assess the
damage.
The buck was dead. So was my Jeep.
Oil was pooling under the car and trickling toward the
muddy ditch where the buck lay sprawled. I called my friend
Leslie to come pick me up, then my insurance company and
a tow truck.
Leslie looked at the mess and declared me an honorary
Republican for a day. I’d killed a deer, caused an oil spill and
potentially contaminated a waterway (all of which I pointed
out to the nice deputy sheriff who pulled over to ensure no one
smashed into us as we waited for a tow).
The next day I got three main questions: “Are you OK?”
Followed by: “I’m sure you must feel terrible that you killed that
deer,” from my Eugene friends. And: “Did you take him home to
butcher and eat him?” from the rural Lane County crowd.
In answer to the first, I was sore and whiplashed and wound
up with a couple months of chiropractic. Did I feel bad? A
little. I’m an animal lover, but there’s no way I could have
avoided hitting him. As for eating the deer, I’m a vegetarian
and that precludes me from wanting to eat Bambi, let alone a
Bambi soaked in oil and ditch water.
Also, it’s not legal to eat roadkill in Oregon.
Or at least it hasn’t been. But as of Jan. 1, it will be legal
to butcher and eat your roadkill deer in the Beaver State, and
that’s good to know, because you might have noticed that
there’s an awful lot of them careening into the roads right
about now.
Before you whip out a knife and start skinning your buck,
there are some details you need to be filled in on.
eugeneweekly.com • November 21, 2018
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