Roadkill

Among the places I have lived was Brown County, Indiana. It’s the only place in Indiana with forested hills and beautiful foliage in the fall. Oh Yah! They have a ton of deer too.

Indiana, like most states regulates when and how you are allowed to kill these deer. They have a bow season, a black powder season, a rifle/shotgun season and the really big one… the motor vehicle season. The first three seasons happen from late September to February and bring out what seems to be thousands of game wardens whose primary job is to make sure that no one is trying to kill a deer with the wrong weapon at the wrong time. This would be a most thankless job as the laws governing the taking of deer are based on anything but logic.

The situation is that there are probably a couple hundred thousand deer in the state and nowhere near enough food for them to eat. So while the game warden is arresting some guy for killing a deer with a slingshot during pitchfork season there are deer out devouring farmer’s corn crops and many are still dying of malnutrition.

This brings me to the fourth deer season, the one that does not require any intervention by the much-overworked game wardens. This would be the motor vehicle season, also known as the car season. It goes from January to December and takes about twice as many deer as all the other seasons combined.

Now to the point!

One fine spring evening, it was a Friday I think, I was heading back into Brown County from Bloomington when I spotted a deer running out of the woods to my right. He was about to run across a road full of traffic. I saw him but the guy in front of me didn’t. He proceeded to take out his own right front fender and one large male deer. He pulled over immediately and I pulled in right behind him. I checked on the traffic and then the driver and found him shaken but not injured. We both went back to inspect the deer. I won’t go into his injures in great detail but suffice it to say he would never walk again. He was obviously in great distress and as I was about to retrieve my pistol from the car to end his suffering he let out his last breath and went wherever deer go when they die. This put the young man who hit him in great distress and I sat him down on the tailgate of my station wagon until he got his wits back about him.

I should explain here that I was at that time a Reserve Deputy Sheriff and had actually had a class on how to handle this sort of thing. I talked to the driver a bit. Seems he was a grad student at the university in Bloomington who was heading home to Toledo, Ohio for the weekend. We checked out his car, making sure it could be driven and I gave him instructions on how to report the accident at the Sheriff’s office. This was for insurance purposes, as Indiana does not consider culling the heard a crime.

I got him to help me load the deer into the back of my wagon gave him my contact info for his insurance company then I took the battered Bambi home.

My wife and I were eating "Roadkill" for the next six months. It was really good "Roadkill."


Uncle Dave