In the middle of the day the big doe exploded into my path and things began to happen very quickly. It was a sunny day, mild for November. My wife and I were out for an afternoon on the blue Super glide, tooling along on a straight stretch of two lane at about 50 mph. Warm brown weed fields bordered the highway, the same warm brown as the hide of a deer. The thick trunk of a massive roadside maple hid the furry blur until we were almost upon it, and then it was there in front of me, eyeballs wide with fear, hooves slipping on the asphalt, instinctively, my brakes, front and rear, were locked up tight, and my wife and I were screeching into the unavoidable collision.
The front wheel banged her squarely in the left hind quarter and she spun off and brushed my leg as we passed. I managed to control the wobbling front end and scrubbed off the remaining speed to stop in my lane. In my left mirror I saw her skid awkwardly across the road and go down hard in the ditch on the opposite side, all four feet flailing in the air. I hurriedly put the kickstand down right there in the lane as there was no shoulder. “Get off,” I said to my wife. Looking back, I suppose I could have been somewhat nicer to her while she struggled to get her leg up and over the bike. But the blood lust had begun to set in. She said something like, “Oh my God.”
I ran back to the spot where I’d seen her go down. I used to be a hunter and I had a good, sharp knife with me. I figured she was mine. A quick vision ran through my mind. I would gut her right there on the side of the road and let her “bleed out” a for a while. While I was doing this, my wife would hitchhike into town and get a six-pack. Then, after we drank the beer, I would talk my wife into draping the carcass over her shoulders and around her neck. We were only a half hour from home and we would proudly parade our trophy through town. She could hold the front legs in one hand, the back ones in the other, and her neck would be kept nice and warm, kind of like wearing a mink stole. We could wash the blood off later. It all seemed very feasible in my quick-thinking mind. When I got to the ditch where I’d last seen her in the mirror, she was gone. I figured she must have slithered on her belly out into the field to expire, so I stomped around in the brown weeds for a while, knife in hand and ready to pounce, until I realized that she was probably not that badly hurt. But alas, she was gone. No stew tonight! I’m not sure if my wife would’ve gone for it, anyway. It was then that I saw her, standing on the far edge of the brown field, brown on brown, and she looked nice, like on a postcard, but maybe just a little shook up and sore. It looked like she was trying to figure out, “what the hell just happened?”
The skid mark in the road measured around 25 or 30 feet, dark black at the beginning, tapering off to lighter just before impact. The skid mark in my drawers was probably much shorter, and nowhere near as dark. There was a lady in a van who stopped and asked if we were OK, and a group of guys on Harleys asked if we needed help. I thanked them for stopping; it was nice of them to offer. They seemed relieved when I put the knife away. Now it was time to check the bike.
I saw no visible damage. There were a few stray brown hairs and a sprinkling of what looked like “Mountain Dew” on the lower fork tubes. Did I knock the living piss out of her? So we got on and rode. At first, we took it slow, and using the set screw, I locked the throttle and let go of the handlebars. There was no discernable wobble and the bike seemed to be tracking in a straight line. I did the same test at high speed, and everything seemed OK, so we continued on our afternoon ride. Every once in a while, one of us would blurt out, “Holy Shit!” and we’d shake our heads in agreement.
About a half an hour later, we found ourselves on a road near the edge of the mountain that we’d never traveled before. There were some nice swooping curves and roller coaster “whoop-dee-doos.” We whipped through them like we were on a carnival ride and when the road leveled out and came to an intersection, we passed a humble looking tavern, seemingly, in the middle of nowhere. We made a quick U-turn, and it was there that we drank a pint or two with some of the local folk and toasted the deer. “Bikers One; Deer Zero,” I said as I hoisted my mug. I was glad that the deer went down, and we didn’t, glad that the bike was OK, and glad that I have good brakes and tires. It doesn’t always turn out that way. And I was glad that Lady Luck was on our side that day. We left that little tavern, fired up the bike and headed back on down the road in time to catch the last few rays of late autumn daylight. I never actually told anyone, but I was glad I was wearing brown drawers that day.
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