My Deer

Saturday morning I got up, put on my snappy all-cotton genuine Japanese kimono and walked downstairs. I turned at the bottom of the stairs, heading for the kitchen and then stopped, thought for a second and walked back to the front door.

Did I really see what I thought I saw?

Why, yes. I did see what I thought I saw.

There was a dead deer on my front lawn.

Now that was something I never saw in L.A. Dead cats once in awhile, yes, usually with their innards chewed out by a coyote who went only for the tasty parts. Perhaps by a raccoon. I'm not Daniel frikkin' Boone.

But not a deer.

You'd see them sometimes in the Hollywood Hills, very occasionally. A few times I'd seen them at the corner of Coldwater and Mulhullond and they WERE near Dead Man's Curve, but the deer were alive. Once during a heavy rain I'd seen a family of deer on the 405. Well, actually I'd seen them on the side of the 405. Traffic moves slow but still not slow enough for deer.

But even those deer were alive.

But this one on my front lawn was dead. I could tell it was dead because it wasn't moving. And its eyes were open.

One of the most surprising things about having a dead deer on your front lawn is how fake it looks. It looks like a prop. It looks like a fiberglass shell covered with hair or maybe a really good airbrushing.

There are deer all around here. Deer and turkeys. I think they work together but I have no proof of it. I've seen them in the neighborhood and was almost hit by one right before Christmas. He was walking in the road late at night when I was driving. He walked toward me. I stopped. We looked at each other and he decided to let me go.

But he was alive.

This one was dead.

I didn't know what you did when you found a dead large animal on your lawn. I asked Patricia and she hadn't seen it, but she went to the front and looked at it. I asked Connor and he hadn't seen it but he went to the front and pronounced it gross.

But it was still there.

I was kind of hoping it was sleeping. But I looked again and it was actually slit open and it's guts were visible.

I called the police. Oh, yes. They knew about it. The deer had been impaled on a fence and as long as it was left

Huh?

It was on the list but the guy who picked up the dead deer hadn't called in yet.

Okay.

Patricia called the neighbors until she found out that the guy behind us had gotten up in the morning to let his dog out and had seen the deer impaled (a new favorite word of mine) on the back fence. The less-than-three-foot-tall back fence. He called animal control and they'd come out and determined that the deer had some how torn an Achilles tendon and had been impaled (see! again) itself trying to get over the fence -- perhaps to a sports physician. He said that they also determined that the deer had bled out and when I looked out the back, indeed there was a huge amount of blood in the snow and a fence post covered in red.

So there it was. A dead deer on the lawn. Um-hum.

He sat there all day and the next morning we called again. We were on the list. They guy who was going to pick it up was a private contractor and he called in every day and then he had 24 hours to pick up the dead animal. It would be picked up by Monday at 11 AM.

Instead it was gone by 6 on Sunday evening.

But it did leave me with a thought:

Someone woke up one morning and thought: "Hey! You know what? Picking up animal corpses. That's a business to get into!"

COPYRIGHT 2010 by Shaun McLaughlin