“I don’t know how I missed it on my way in,” my sister Megan called to say, just moments after she left a visit to our cabin. “There’s a dead deer on the side of the road.” “The road” is the half-mile long driveway. No one could have accidentally hit it there; there’s no way to get up enough speed. It looked like it just fell over, leading to concerned speculation of chronic wasting disease, or an overdose on corn meant for the turkeys. Our neighbor John called to say he was going to go move it; would Bob and I be able to help? Bob looked up from his computer, said “I’d rather not, no,” as if I’d just asked if he’d like to pick up dog shit with his bare hands, and went back to the computer. “Yes, we can help,” I told John.
This current life is so far removed from anything Bob ever pictured for himself, I can sort of understand how he thought he could just say “no, thank you” on a dead deer job, and need to be reminded that he lives in the woods now and carcass disposal is a thing that happens in the woods. He’s made other progress, fully internalized his woodsman role, splitting and hauling all the firewood to keep the wood stove blazing. He’s just not big on deceased animals.
We gathered around the deer, and John spread out a blue tarp next to it. The tarp had tiny holes burned in it – from the night he burned his big brush pile. The tarp had been keeping the pile dry until it was time to burn. I’d mentioned that I had a little bit of old gasoline in a can that I needed to get rid of, and John told me to bring it over. My dad had lectured me extensively on never putting gasoline on a fire – only diesel fuel. But this was just a little bit of gas, and if John thought it was okay, it was probably fine. Well. I handed the gas can to John, and he dumped it on the brush, and dribbled out a little gas fuse on the snow, lit the fuse…and then it was clear why you don’t burn gasoline. The whole thing exploded in a booming fireball. John (luckily) didn’t ignite, but he had to feel to see if he still had eyebrows. Moments later, my classmate Tony, who has a place one lot over, came trotting down the frozen lakeshore, phone in hand to call 911. It sounded, and looked, like one of the cabins had blown up. No, no…just grown adults burning gasoline. Everything’s fine.
But the blue tarp, pulled to the side of the brushfire, took some of the burning fallout from the explosion, making little holes. It was still plenty useful for moving a dead deer.
We flipped the deer over onto the tarp; then we could piece together what had happened. There was a large scrape on one flank, and moving the deer caused it to start leaking from injuries that weren’t apparent before. It was likely hit by a car out on the big road, and made its way down the driveway before collapsing. We got it on the tarp and into the back of John’s truck.
My father, patriarch of the property, was directing the job from the comfort of his warm living room in town. He’d decided we should put the carcass by the osprey nest on the hill so the eagles would see it. Which is how Bob came to find himself stumbling up a slippery wet hill, dragging a stinking dead deer in a tarp. I was supposed to be helping with that part, too, but I’d worn the wrong footwear and was doing more actual falling than helping, so I just recorded the moment for posterity.
And since you can’t move a body around here without attracting attention, it wasn’t long before another neighbor pulled up to investigate. It was quite the party. This is how it goes, living in the woods.
