January 2012 - Helen Chappell

Deer Dents

by

Helen Chappell

And then, there’s the deer dent. It looks like no other collision evidence on a vehicle. In general, it can be seen on the side of a car, generally on a front or rear fender or a rocker panel. It is about two to three feet wide. And this time of year, it is more likely than not to have an encounter with a deer that will leave this badge of Eastern Shore living on their car, truck or SUV.
From around the end of October until January, the whitetail deer goes into rut. They not only hear the call of romance and reproduction, they become obsessed with it, to the extent that they forget everything else.
Deer are not possessed of a great deal of smarts in the first place, and they will do anything, go anywhere and ignore everything else in pursuit of sex. If there is a doe around, a buck will move heaven and earth to pitch woo.
Deer don’t see your car, either. They sense there might be another amorous deer on the other side of the road, and that’s all that matters to them. You and your vehicle don’t exist for them. It’s all about the canoodling.
We all know we have too many deer around here, except for some people who moved from the western shore and think Bambi is adorable. Well, Bambi is adorable until Bambi crosses three lanes of traffic and a median strip so he can hit your windshield, crash through it and kick you to death, which has actually happened.
Since this actually happened to me, on Route 50, at eleven at night, I know of which I speak. Now, obviously, Bambi didn’t kick me to death or I wouldn’t be writing this, but that did happen to some poor guy a few years ago.
I’ll tell you this ... when Bambi came looming out of the darkness into my peripheral vision, out of nowhere, looking like it was the size of a rhinoceros, hit the side of my car enough to push it onto the shoulder, rolled over the hood and disappeared into the woods, well, I knew what my last words would be. “Oh, sh**!” Dignified, right? I was lucky I didn’t get kicked to death! Not a good way to go.
After pounding a deer dent out of his truck, someone I know called deer “country roaches.” Since you may have to pound a deer dent out of your car one of these days, let’s have a brief overview of how it’s done. First, remove the panel. Then place it on the ground, painted side down. Next, get a two-by-four and a mallet. Place the two-by-four across the high ridges of the dent and start pounding. It will still look as if your car has been through the wars, but I promise you, if you pay the deductible and take it to a body shop, you will get another deer dent on the other side within a month. No one knows why this is; it just is.
They may be country cockroaches, but deer are certainly the most beautiful destructive beasts around. I loved watching the one that crossed my yard at twilight browsing on the foliage at the edge of the woods. Eventually, she learned I was no threat and brought her fawn along with her. Beautiful!
But with no natural enemies except man, deer are breeding themselves to death. It’s not their fault. We have pushed our suburbs and our developments into their territory. I have friends who hunt, and I eat venison. It’s a country thing. Maybe the coyotes, which have pushed their way eastward, will start running down deer. Who knows?
Also unlucky was an editor friend of mine, a Manhattanite born and bred, a city girl who came down here to visit the Land of Pleasant Living in her city beater, a car she called “The Toaster” because it resembled that appliance. Wouldn’t you know, somewhere around Chestertown, where we’d gone for a book signing, she hit a deer. As it lay there in its death throes, she handled it with far more aplomb that I did.
I called the State Police to come dispatch it with a service revolver. It didn’t fluster her. She was a big city girl, hardened in a tougher crucible. After all, she’d one seen a man shot and killed on the IRT 14th Street Downtown platform.
As we were standing by the side of Route 213, surveying the soon-to-be-deceased, a pickup truck pulled up beside us, and a soignée couple, beautifully dressed for an evening of line dancing, disembarked. The gentleman, resplendent in Nudie western shirt with spangles and embroidery, quickly and cleanly cut the doe’s throat, killing her mercifully. They were happy to get the deer. For them, it was a freezer full of meat, and a clean roadkill, since none of the organs were damaged. Such are the things that happen when you hit a deer.
But my absolutely favorite story, and one I have used in my fiction, happened twenty or thirty years ago. A friend who worked in Caroline County for the Department of Social Services left Denton late one night, heading for Easton and home. Somewhere around Baltimore Corners Swamp, she hit, you guessed it, a deer. The car was okay, but the hapless deer lay dead in the road.
She got out of the car to survey the damage. Not being from around here, she was uncertain what to do. The fender of her car was bent dangerously into the wheel well, and she wasn’t sure she could make it home. On the other hand, spending the night on that particular swampy, scary stretch of road wasn’t such a fabulous option either, in those days before cell phones.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, an ancient, primer-colored pickup, long past its prime, rattled up. Its lights were off, and the tailpipe, long mufflerless, was spewing black smoke. From her own headlights, she noted that a large flat board was strapped and bolted to the front of the truck. A window slowly creaked down, and a toothless ghoul poked a head out of the window. Pot smoke rolled around the head like fog.
“Yew want that deer?” The ghoul asked.
My friend could only shake her head, terrified.
That was the only signal the people in the truck needed. About five guys climbed out, each one grimier and more gormless than the last. They offered her a swing from a bottle of rye they were drinking, but she refused.
As she watched, they field dressed the dead deer, and then tossed it into the back of the pickup truck, where it joined several others. They explained that it was their hobby to strap a board to the truck and drive around the hinterlands between Sudlersville and Goldsboro, hoping to hit enough deer to fill their freezer for the winter. They didn’t need no hunting licenses and they didn’t need to rent no farms. They lived off the land.
As three of them dressed out the deer, two others pulled the dent out of her fender so she could make it home without shredding her tire.
As suddenly as they appeared, they were gone, leaving the powerful smell of gas, dope and rye whiskey hanging in the air behind them, never to be seen again.

Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam And Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen name, Rebecca Baldwin, she has published a number of historical novels.