Deer Me!

Join Wimberley humorist Susan Rigby as she attempts to navigate “the small stuff.”

Deer are big, fast, some have antlers and some have babies and they eat everything in your yard. That is the extent of what I knew about them - until this week. I came outside and saw a large deer lying against my fence. She looked like she was ready to give birth. I called my neighbor, a wildlife expert, to see what I should do. He came by and said that the deer was dead and the swelling wasn’t a baby.

I had a few choices, he said. “Some people might drag it to the back of their truck and drive out to the country and dump it. You can call around to see if anyone will take it away or you can bury it.” I couldn’t imagine digging a hole big enough to bury a deer, and there was no way I could ‘fling’ a dead deer anywhere.

Another kind, older neighbor, well more my age, came by and thought we could drag the deer down to her burn pile. My first thought was “Yuck” and the second thought was, “There is no way we can drag it down our street.” She then decided she could bring a wagon over and we could hoist the deer into the wagon to get it to her house. Now the wagon was about one quarter the size of the deer. How could we lift it off of the ground without getting close or touching it? So it was back to the burying plan.

I Googled “how big a hole should I dig to bury a deer” but got no response except for “poor deer.” I might have had more compassion for it if it hadn’t chosen my yard as its last resting place. I finally decided to try to dig a hole close, but not too close, to the deer. Luckily my wildlife-expert neighbor came back to finish digging. As he was leaving, he said “Just watch that dogs or coyotes don’t dig it up.” Dang! I went back to Google and asked “How to keep a deer buried.”