It was a dark and stormy night. Well, okay, it wasn't stormy, but it WAS foggy, last night on my way home from work.

As I pulled onto Rt. 28 off of Gude Drive I was wondering if I should start posting a "Wildlife Count" here on my blog. I didn't know I was going to have a close encounter of the worst kind with a member of that parallel world of the woods.

Rt.28 is basically a very wide residential street, with a tree lined median strip in the middle. In the day time it's very pretty. It's charming looking, though I imagine it must cost the GDP of a small nation to live there. It's a busy street too, even at night. I'm hardly the only one on it.....

Anyway, maybe the deer just got tired of being stuck in the median strip. Impatience, perhaps, leads to recklessness no matter who you are.

All I knew was that, out of the corner of my left eye my brain registered "Antlers!" and before I could even depress the break the deer had hit the car or I had hit the deer. I put out my right hand to protect my face - a was fairly sure that the substantial rack of antlers I'd seen was coming through the windshield.

Instead, through some bizarre law of physics the deer was flung OVER the roof of the car. I bet that was a hell of a shock to anyone who happened to be behind me. Since all breaking hard would do would be cause a collision with any vehicle behind me, I slowed down and looked for a place to pull off. I pulled off onto a residential street and got out to have a look at the damage.

It was considerable. The left headlight was completely out and the hood was dented. There was fur stuck under the hood. I lifted it out, and caught the smell of musk.

Surely, I've killed it I thought. I had a grim micro memory of the deer clearing the roof, it's eyes rolling, it's neck at an unpleasant angle. It's not a crime to run over a deer, not even in Montgomery county. Still, I had a natural obligation to go back and make sure that the deer was not suffering.

Truly, I couldn't imagine it being alive. But it was. I'll spare you the details. Though I admit to having a soft heart, I'm not really squeamish nor easily overset problems of a physically grotesque nature....but the poor animal was injured in an especially horrifying way, yet he was alert. When I got out of the car to take in the magnitude of it's injuries it raised it's head and looked me right in the eye. Only a person who didn't have a human heart could keep from crying.

Unluckily, once I let myself cry, I sometimes have a hard time stopping. I tried the "non-emergency police" number I'd heard that some counties have, but either I hit the buttons wrong or Montgomery County doesn't have it, so I called 911. I was horrified that I couldn't remember, nor could I see a sign for the name of the road that I was on. I could see the cross street, but the dispatcher couldn't reference the cross street with route number I kept giving her. "I don't mean to be stupid, ma'm, but I really don't know it by any other name."

Meanwhile, the deer began to bleed from its nostrils, giving me the hope that it was in shock - the kind that blots out pain - or at least would not suffer for very much longer.

Finally, she said, "We have another report. Don't worry, someone else called it in. We'll send someone."

I know I ought to have waited with the deer until it died or until someone came to put it out of it's misery. I surely felt sorry for that person.

I suppose if I had been paying more attention in the past, I could have had my friend Mike show me how to firmly break the neck of a deer. He hunts with a bow and arrow. Like most bowmen, he hunts with the highest ethical standards. Seriously, he belongs to a hunting / conservation organization which has a code of ethics like a chivalric code. Most hunters are not dumb hicks with no regard or respect for wildlife, but the few who are like that have given the whole thing a bad name. He would come back many many times talking about a buck he MIGHT have gotten, but would not dare take the shot because he could not be certain it would be lethal. Bow hunters, and, from what I understand, most people who hunt with rifles, take very seriously the obligation to track a deer they have wounded and kill it least it die a slow and painful death. Mike would usually take one or two a year, and he and his family ate the meat. He said he had only had to break a deers neck one time, when he was less experienced. He said he was glad he had to do it, because it made him anxious to never have to do it again, and easier not to draw back his bow. But Mike is a much stronger person than I am so it's probably better that I had no such idea at the time, least I would have caused the poor creature to suffer even more.

And certainly, I wished this creature had met with Mike's arrow rather than my car! I never thought that I would be in a situation where I would need to know how to put a deer out of it's misery. It just goes to show you that only the things that you don't worry about are the problems you actually have.

The other problem I had was that my car was smashed up and I had called The Hub to tell him so when I was first out checking the damage. But we had a bad phone connection, and all he had understood was that something was wrong, and he couldn't reach me back. So if I didn't get home soon he was going to be mighty worried. So, still crying, I started out for home.

When I got there the dog ran out of the house, furiously sniffing me and trying to nose me into the house where he ran around me in circles looking anxiously at The Hub. The poor dog only relaxed when The Hub made me a cup of tea and I settled down to try to sleep on the sofa. Not that I could sleep. All I could see was the deer.

This morning, The Hub got up with his terrible head cold and went out to look at the car. He said he thought he could fix the headlight to make it street legal for long enough til we could get some money together to repair it. I don't dare file an insurance claim - I've had too many accidents, regardless of who was at fault. We had to go to two places to find the right bulbs, but The Hub, God bless him, was able to get them in in time for me to show up for work, with my hands still shaking.

There's a branch of Christianity called the "Gnostics", which some people considered, and maybe still do consider heretics. I'm not sure about the heresy part. The Gnostics have the idea that the entire material world is evil. The believe that people are trapped in material bodies, that our pure spirits have gotten seperated from God and trapped in the created world. I think my collision with the deer would be a prime example of what they are talking about.

Most people said, "It isn't your fault. It was an accident".

And that's true. It was an accident. Nobody is more watchful for those deer than I am! And I certainly didn't go out driving my car looking for a deer to get into an accident with. Yet, no one else was driving the car but me.

"It was the deer's fault. He ran into you." The Hub said. I guess he knows me well enough to know that the generic "not your fault" pitch wouldn't work for me.

Well. Okay. Maybe I'm willing to split the fault with the deer, but the consequences were EVER so much worse for him than for me! And if the deer was, as some people say, "just a dumb animal" then how could it be even partially at fault for anything.

Then whose fault is it? The builder of the road? The builder of the car? The inventor of the car? Our society in that I have to go to work? Our society in that it isn't the done thing to hunt in Montgomery County any more?

Nope. Not the builders or the inventors or the over reaching members of "society" were driving, nor were they running in the road. This is between the deer and me. And we were both, at the time of our encounter and the end of his life ( at least he did not appear to be a particularly young buck) trapped in our seperate material worlds. I, presuming I had the higher intellegence, could see the situation more clearly, but couldn't communicate "I didn't mean to hurt you! I didn't see you! Forgive me!". As for the noble animal who knows what he saw when he lifted his head and looked at me? Maybe they can't see well, maybe I was a crushing, horrifying scent of auto exhaust, synthetic clothing and all the chemicals of my perfume and shampoo. He didn't look at the car as a creature, though, he looked at me. What does a sobbing human sound like to a deer? And is it a good or a bad thing that I didn't touch him, thinking that an animal unused to a human touch would only be frightened, not comforted, and I wanted him to have whatever dignity a deer lying in a road dying can have.

This morning, I pushed some rice crispies around in a bowl of milk but couldn't eat them. I thought about the law of averages. It's just fate, just chance. It's the same force in the universe that makes some people lottery winners and some people chose the second before it collapses to step onto the bridge. Two things working the way they were supposed to work ( my car, functioning, and me, driving back along the legal and customary road from work and the deer, following his instincts or matters of his heart, or other calls in the life of deer we know nothing about) but at odds with one another. The trap of the material world. Because it is material, it is, therefore, imperfect.

Being more intellegent than the deer, though, is useless in my heart. I can understand the law of averages very well. But I don't have to like it.