Dear, Deer... how much I hate you!

So I had one scary night last Thursday. I had just gotten done at work and was heading up to my boyfriend’s house for a little while. It was a little bit after 9’o clock at night and I was heading up the hill to his house. The road he lives on is gravel and way out in the country. Every night he warns me to look out for deer because there are so many of them up there.  Along the road to his house there are cornfields. In the fall they cut down the stalks for the most part, but still there are some random ones that are still there. The deer love to nest and eat in along these fields.

            So that night I was driving along this road and that when out of the corner of my eye I saw something that just didn’t look like a old dried up corn stalk. Just then it started moving and I knew it was a deer, with antlers. The buck took off running right away and it was coming for me. I knew there was no chance that I would be able to stop in time, due to the fact that I was on gravel and it is very difficult to stop a vehicle on it. So I laid on the breaks as soon as I could. Next thing I knew the deer actually ran into the side of my suburban on the right side of the vehicle between the mirror and bumper. The deer went flying across the hood of the vehicle and landed in front of me.

            This is when I actually hit the deer because in a matter of seconds the suburban was still not completely stopped yet. When the deer when across the hood, I was just praying that it wouldn’t hit the windshield because its antlers were quite large and I feared it would shatter the windshield and come through the vehicle. But I was fortunate to have gotten the vehicle to slow down a bit by the time it hit. I was going about somewhere between 25 and 30 miles an hour at the time on a 55 mile an hour road. Thank god I wasn’t driving 55, or this could have ended very badly.

So sure enough once the deer landed in front of me, it couldn’t get up, it began to kick and roll around until it could get up, which at the time it got up, it took off and ran down into the woods through the opposite field that it had been in prior to it getting hit. I was so scared. My heart was just pounding after the whole ordeal. I immediately called my boyfriend and told him what had happened and he said he would be out right away. I was only just a little bit a ways from his place, so I just drove on the rest of the way. When I arrived I got out of the vehicle immediately and ran around to the hood to inspect the damage. Turns out it wasn’t too bad, there was a about a 5 inch dent on the front of the hood from the deer’s antlers, and I had a few cracks in the grill and one around the framing in the light on the left side.

My boyfriend could believe I had so little damage, he figured it would look about as bad as my dad’s truck did when he hit one a few years back. To describe how it looked, it was comparable to a one-eyed Cyclops. So shortly after we hopped in the truck and went driving through the fields to see if we could find it dead at all, but we could find anything. Ironically two days later when hunting opened, one of his uncles shot a buck that was nice size, but when they looked to inspect it, they found that it had a broken jaw, but it hadn’t been broken for very long, because it was not very skinny yet. Is this the deer I hit or not? I have no clue, but either or at least I ok and there was very much damage to the vehicle.

Now when I drive up their at night I’ve been a lot more cautious and aware, because I scared to dead another deer is going to run out, and it could have a much worse outcome.