#88 Oh Deer

Soon as I got past the sheep shed in the back field I saw something on the other side of the barbed wire I sure wasn’t expecting. It was two deer. Took me about two seconds to realize they were both fake. Their fur weren’t quite the right color, kind of too reddish, and one of them’s antlers was missing a prong and I could see the plaster, or plastic or whatever they were made of, white in the broken place.

Who woulda put two great big lawn ornaments like that out in the middle of a sheep field? I looked around on the other side of the barbed wire and didn’t see any houses. There was a vineyard, a corn field, a stand of trees, a big ol’ hay stack made of yellow bales like gigantic bricks, but no sign of anything that would tell me what these deer were here for.

They sort of made it look like it was Disneyland, like I was on the jungle cruise ride and there were some fake animals peeking at me from out of the shrubs. Curious, I climbed through the barbed wire and went up real close to one of the deer. I’d almost touched its nose when I heard the crack of a rifle and a prong exploded off the deer’s antlers.

I dropped on my stomach in the grass and yelled, “HEY!” as loud as I could. Why would someone be shooting at me just for touching their stupid fake deer? Another shot made the fake deer above me jerk. It settled a little crooked in the grass. It wasn’t me they were shooting at. These deer were here for target practice!

I couldn’t quite tell where the gunshots were coming from. I crawled along through the grass, trying to put distance between me and the deer before I tried to stand up. Then I put a little more distance just in case whoever was shooting was a really bad aim. Then I decided not to move until the gunshots quit. I took off my baseball cap and flagged it in the air, in hopes of signaling the fake deer hunters that they’d better knock it off or they might kill someone.

Whoever it was eventually ran out of bullets, I guess, and after I’d counted to a hundred I felt safe standing up again. There were a couple of kids coming across the grass, big kids in plaid shirts, each one carrying a rifle. It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t on Grandpa’s property, and I wanted to be on the other side of the barbed wire fence by the time they got over here.