It Started Innocently Enough

I was at the rural primary care clinic where I do my nurse practitioner student hours. Our second patient educated us on how to cook deer meat. As an avid deer hunter he knew all the secrets. Did you know deer meat is much leaner than cow and has a high water content? As a result if you put it in a crock pot with a bunch of water your crock pot will overflow. Accustomed to quickly integrating topics from one world to another I thought about contributing to conversation by mentioning that ostrich meat is another very lean red meat. Over the course of the day I heard more deer hunting stories from patients. Then a colleague told me her husband was in Texas hunting wild boar.

After work, a group of nurses and nurse practitioners were going to an auction. One of the nurse practitioners lamented that she had left her wallet at home. As a result she had no cash for the auction and was left in a pickle earlier as she had to "search for change this morning to buy my biscuit". They invited me to the auction but I declined,  eager to start my long drive home.

Just a few miles from the clinic a giant buck ran into my car. His eyes made contact with mine as his antlers scratched down my windshield. I screamed and by some miracle, he ran off. In shock, bawling and squalling, I drove on. But after a few minutes I decided to take a break and pull into the general store gas station.

At the gas station I told the cashier what had happened and he called the police. Apparently you have to get a police report close to the scene to get insurance to cover it. One by one, the people in the gas station gave me their deer story. One woman hit a deer while her husband was on a separate and unsuccessful hunting trip. The deer retreated to the woods where the husband found it. By the time she got home, the deer had been completely processed by her husband. This was not a planned husband and wife deer killing collaboration.

I stood outside by my car scanning the road for the police car I needed to get my report and get going. A man approached my car to ask about the damage. I hit a giant deer with big horns I told him. "You got him good" he said as he inspected the damage and picked a tuft of hair from a dent in my hood. "Did you see which way he went?" he asked eagerly. "Where were you?" I tried to explain that I was about three miles down the road. "Before or after Mike's Food land? After the baptist church? Which way did he run? I've been hunting a buck all week!" Finally I came up with a clue I thought would be helpful. I told him I suspected he had lost a bit of antler and may be able to find the chunks in the road. I wanted him to find the deer only because I was sick that I had granted it a slow and painful death and that it would die in vain. If this guy wanted to put him out of misery and eat him, I could feel a little bit better on two counts.

Random sighting from a different day

Eventually the police arrived. A little boy in the gas station stall next to mine peered at my car. "Did you do this?" the cop asked him in a stern voice. "No. My daddy did!" the little boy squealed, poking fun with the officer.

The cops took my info and came back and handed me my license and insurance card. "You have two names" he told me. "You haven't changed it?"

"Nope, married six years and never changed it" I said.

"You need to do that!" he exclaimed.

"No, I haven't changed it on purpose" I explained. His mind now blown, he told me he'd been married 40 years and they had the same name the whole time. As same name officer continued to process the though of intentionally not changing one's name after marriage,  I gave officer number two my phone number if they needed to contact me. I saw he already had the local area code written on his piece of paper.

"Nope", I told officer number two, it's 203-123-4567. I turned and looked at same name officer.

"Didn't change that either" I told him. After getting permission to drive my smashed up car, I headed off and away from the depths of rural Tennessee.