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A flash in peripheral vision -- not even fully processed before the flash became a shape in brilliant beige no more than twenty feet ahead, an obstacle at high speed. I saw it turn its head and shoulders away in the split second before impact, as if trying to dodge, but twenty feet at almost sixty miles an hour is about a quarter of a second. It is long enough to move from the gas to the brakes; to register legs-body-head and for the brain to finish its previous task: "Deer! That is a deer!" moving between nouns from jubilation to terror. I am reasonably certain I had time to scream.
And then the dull thud of collision; the body suddenly airborne and vanishing over the top of the car while my mind spun desperately, ludicrously: How much does a deer weigh? I just had this car fixed. Holy fuck I just hit a deer. And then, sickeningly: Did I kill it? And all the while the thrum and vibration of the antilock brakes under my foot; the car skidding to a halt, somehow reflexively guiding it to the side of the road where I stopped, gasping for breath and swearing in panic.
I did not, in fact, kill the deer. And this is where the story gets progressively more like a nightmare in my mind, so if you are of the softhearted variety you may not want to continue reading.
I got out of the car and looked at the damage before calling emergency services. The 911 operator was very nice and promised she would send someone out immediately. She asked two important questions for which I had answers: Are you hurt? No. Is the car drive-able? No. I was reasonably certain of both, having examined both myself and the car for serious wounds and found one of us more or less intact. She did not ask about the deer.
I called and made sure someone would be able to see my hospital patients: these are things you think about when you are a physician. It came immediately after Call 911 and before I got around to the serious business of adrenaline shock. I packed the whole car into two shopping bags that were sitting in my front seat while trying to stay out of the rain and not think about the deer. Finally I peered back along the road.
If there had been skid marks, the rain had erased them, and it was still dull grey and hazy. For a while, nothing moved, and I started breathing again.
Then there was a dull brown shift in the dark green shoulder -- farm shoulders, a solid drainage area falling away from the road -- and something lifted its head. And moved. Laboriously -- painfully, I could tell even from twenty yards off -- the deer heaved itself to its feet. Its back legs weren't working right, but it could prop itself up on them. It was bleeding, but not much: just enough that I could see the flash of red on the soft pastel brown and white belly.
It worked its way up the shoulder and back into the road, heading back the way it had come. Halfway through the first lane, it collapsed and lay there, now in the middle of the road on the downslope of the sort of gentle country hill that serves only to obscure oncoming traffic's view of the road ahead. I braced myself for someone else to come over the hill at almost-sixty, and tried to stop my mind from wondering what, exactly, would happen then -- and then it got back up and lurched across to the double yellow lines in the middle before falling down again.
The traffic headed that direction stopped for it. Someone rolled down his window and yelled across the road to make sure I was all right. I told him I was. Shaken, not stirred, added my brain, and inside my head I dissolved in hysterical giggles. He asked if I'd called anyone. I told him my ride and the police were on their way. I couldn't stop watching the deer. There was nothing I could do -- nothing to do -- but wait.
Eventually, the deer managed to get across the road and traffic resumed. I couldn't see it any more -- brown in the brown stalks of the harvested cornfield across the road -- and there were flashing lights red and blue and welcome in my eyes, so I stopped looking then. It was city police: come to make sure the deer and the car were both out of the road; there to be certain I was unharmed as had been previously reported. "Just shaken." He nodded. Not stirred! added my brain and something inside me began to giggle hysterically once more. County was not far behind.
I had everything from the car packed; I had my license-registration-insurance card in my pocket. The officer asked me about the deer. I pointed to the field. I went back to looking at my car until I heard someone say something about a camera and then I looked up.
They had found the deer. It had lifted its head and was watching the lights. I watched city raise his revolver -- firing-range grip, two hands, steady as she goes -- and fire. The shot echoed as the deer's head slumped down, and something inside me relaxed a bit. And then it lifted its head up again. Five measured shots later, it had stopped looking at us, and the hysterical thing inside my head was no longer alternately screaming and giggling. "Looks like a buck," someone said, and the giggling started back up again.
A little bit later, while I was waiting for my license-and-registration back, someone else in brown went out into the field and shot the deer again, this time from close range. Then he came over to me, smelling faintly of gunpowder and death. There was a patch on his sleeve that said "Conservation", and my brain spent a while trying to figure out what he was conserving before realizing that he was there about the deer.
"Did you want the deer, ma'am?" he asked me. It took fully a minute for me to understand what he was saying. "Because if not, I have a needy family who can make good use of it." I told him to give it to the needy family. The thing in my head giggled and screamed that this was some sort of superdeer, which had taken a compact car and seven bullets to kill, so if I took the meat it might just rise up out of my freezer and eat me. The Conservation officer tried to smile at me -- I am sure my face looked ghost-pale and haunted. "At least something good will come of this."
Silently, inside my head, something untied itself. Something good. Someone would eat well on venison, at least. The screaming thing hiccuped, giggled, and crawled back away to huddle in a corner, in case later I might need it again.
They loaded my car onto the tow truck. They loaded the deer into the Conservation truck. They loaded me into the County SUV and I tried to call my ride, but our cell phone carrier had apparently chosen this morning of all mornings to decide that nobody got to make outbound calls unless it felt like it, and I couldn't get hold of him, so we lurked in a parking lot until he drove by and then stalked him until he pulled over.
I was at work 30 minutes before my first patient failed to show up; I have spent the morning in all the mundane activities of medicine.
I am a family physician: my patients ask me how I am, how the children are. I have been telling them about the deer. I practice in a small town: some of them heard it on the police scanner -- "oh, that was you?" Some of them were stuck in the traffic and are glad to know what happened. Some of them have their own deer stories. Everyone asks if I'm all right. And I finally said "Shaken, not stirred," and someone laughed with me.
