Another Shooting

 I don’t usually blog on Saturday, but since I only posted once during the week, and since I have something to say today, here we are. 

I don’t know if I’ve written about my trails in the woods before. At least two or three times a week, more in the summer, I take Dino the Wonder Dog for a walk around my little four-acre patch of heaven. I have a trail behind the house which goes up a hill, along a ridge and then back down to the yard near the end of the driveway. Another trail between my driveway and our swamp and a third very short one just west of the house. I’ve thought about measuring the distance of all three trails, including where I have to cut through my yard to get to each one. I’ve tried timing myself and when I feel up to an actual workout, will run the route twice, once in each direction, which, with the hill to be scaled is probably a decent workout.

And of course, Dino the Wonder Dog loves the run.

The other favorite activity in my yard is watching my deer. You well know about this as I post probably too many pictures of the deer who wander through my yard year-round, many times passing by my office window as I’m trying to write. A well-worth-it distraction.

It’s been hunting season here this week. A very big deal in this part of the country. People take the entire week off to sit in deer stands, dressed head to toe in blaze orange, rifle at the ready, waiting for that prize buck.

When I was a kid, growing up on our patch of ten acres, Mom wouldn’t let us out of the yard, barely out of the house, during hunting season, on the off chance a stray bullet would shatter a window and hit one of us. (Who knew that she was almost right, if you read a previous post.)

Even though I only have four acres, with houses on two sides and roads on the other two, Mom’s directive still hangs over my head. I haven’t been on my trails all week.

Last night, as we were working on supper, I sent the boys (son and son-in-law and four dogs) down to get the mail at the end of our tenth of a mile long driveway. They returned and casually mentioned a spike buck dead in the yard. I thought they were talking about the buck my son-in-law shot earlier in the week and didn’t think anything of it.

But the more they talked, the more I realized that, no, a deer had been shot somewhere in the neighborhood and had decided to die in my yard.

“No, not in your yard,” my son corrected me. “In the woods by one of your trails down by the end of the driveway.”

Are you kidding me? Are you KIDDING ME?

“Go drag it out to the road, then.”

“We can’t do that. Mom, it’s got a bullet in its side. We can’t drag it anywhere.”

“Why not?”

They all gave me the look like I was completely daft. I guess there’s some law about touching the deer someone else shot, or something. I don’t know. Don’t want to know. Don’t want to deal with it. I am sick about it.   

The boys assured me that some animal would eventually drag it off, that something had been eating on it already. Really? Coz I didn’t need to know that.

But nope, it’s not time to move to the city, no way will I give up my four-acre paradise. Not yet, not until I can afford a ten, twenty, or forty acre paradise. In the meantime, maybe it’s the circle of life, maybe it’s just the isosceles triangle of life.

Now it’s up to my hubby to tell me when the coast is clear and I can walk my trails again.