Oh Deer!

Small town country living has it's advantages.  The half grocery store half hardware store has friendly employees and no wait at the check out counter.  The post office is so tiny, only one customer can fit in the lobby.  Everyone else just mingles and chats by the post office boxes and no one is a stranger.  

But when someone hits a deer on the back country roads, the cleanup crew consists of scavenger birds.  Abby was getting older and it was harder for her to hear but there was nothing wrong with her nose.  In the winter, she was roaming freely in the front yard.  It was night time and she usually stuck close to the house.  I went outside to get her and noticed she was intently gnawing on something.  It was a leg bone.  I was horrified and pulled her by the collar.  Too dark to tell if it was an animal leg or a human leg, we returned to the safety of the house.  Fresh on my mind was the discovery of the missing body of a man just one mile down the road.  The discovery happened because the property owner's dog carried back a piece of leg bone.  I may have an active imagination but this time my uneasiness was based on pure fact.

The next morning, I went outside to inspect the leg still laying on our front lawn.  There was a hoof attached to it.  This meant that Abby went across the street and slightly down the road to drag back her unexpected treat.  This also meant that her digestive system and the deer leg were going to have a battle in a couple of days and I was going to have a lot to clean up.

At the start of summer, we discovered a dead deer in the front part of our woods.  As the temperatures rose, the buzzards gathered.  At the end of the weekend, only a skeleton remained.  Many weeks later, the Englishman decided to let Abby out on a nighttime adventure.  When she returned, I knew that a bath was going to be the first chore the next day.  While I bathed her, multiple packages were delivered to the front door.  When I opened the door to bring the packages inside, I saw a deer leg on the front door.  Mortified of what the delivery driver thought of us, I asked my husband about the bone.  He told me it belonged to Abby.  She brought it back the night before after coating herself in "eau de dead deer".  I was not looking forward to the upcoming days of her grumbling tummy and my clean up duties.

As if on cue, Sunday night, after the Englishman left for a business trip, the fun began.  After a special diet for several days and many snarky comments made by me, I dearly hope the late night solo escapades were over for good.