A while back, I was cruising on a back road at night and noticed a set of glowing eyes in the brush beside the road off to the right. The "deer alarm" went off in my head.

For those of you who have seen my truck, you probably already know that I could have a head-on collision and not really notice the extra damage.

But I slowed for the sake of the deer and just then a wayward critter decided to head butt my bumper. The deer got the worst end of it. After it skidded down the side of the road a little ways, it stopped on a grassy shoulder and was still, so I stopped.

The doe was dead, but its body was unharmed - with the obvious exception of the head. I don't want to sound gruesome here, but I decided I wouldn't want to see a large doe rot on the side of the road when it could be laying much more comfortably in my freezer.

I did wonder if I should go somewhere and call somebody, but as it did no damage to anything but the deer, I decided that the call wasn't neccesary. It would be easy enough to see what happened should a game official come along and see me loading the doe after dark. I would say the still-limber doe weighed in at around 150 pounds. I drug it over to the back of my truck and dropped the tailgate. Every time I got the front end of the deer on the truck, the back would slide off. I really didn't have any way of picking up the entire thing, so I had to rethink my strategy.

I instead picked the critter up by the front legs and climbed up onto the tailgate. I then hooked my heels into the little gap between the tailgate and the truck bed for leverage to help haul the doe onto the truck.

By leaning back, I found the work much less strenuous on my back. But even with the lean, it still was not easy to load the deer.

After a bit of struggle, I managed to get the doe in the truck up to the back legs, which caught on the tailgate. So I did what I thought best at the time: I gave it a big yank to clear the gate.

About that time, the doe came free and became airborne. It was almost like I was dancing with the corpse for a split second (another gruesome thought). Since I was leaning back to put my weight into it, I had no balance after the doe cleared and we both landed on the bed of the truck, me underneath. While this may sound comical to some, it felt rather perilous when that joker landed on me with a thud. As if it weren't bad enough to have the wind knocked out of you by a dead deer, about that time I saw headlights coming around the curve.

Let me paint you a picture - I am laying in the bed of my truck with my feet near the gate, beneath a dead doe, struggling to catch my breath and stand as a car slowly passes. I really hope they didn't recognize my truck. I have often wondered what I would think if I happened upon someone else in a similar situation. I feel sure that I would see the boot bottoms and deer hooves and just laugh my way on down the road. I still marvel at the things I get myself into.

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