Deer hunting, Cloyce style

I don't know about in other states, but in Michigan if you hit a deer while driving you can harvest the animal even if it's not deer season. Yet that can be more perilous than you think.

A customer of mine, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, hit a deer while trekking along up north several years ago. It did little damage to his big old van but the deer was killed. Cloyce and a buddy who was with him heaved the unfortunate animal into the back of the van, figuring they would have themselves some free deer meat and deer sausage. There was only one problem. The deer wasn't dead.

Cloyce found that out several miles down the road when the back of the driver's seat got kicked hard. He glanced up to see the deer glaring at him through the rear view mirror. That's when the real fun began.

The enraged and injured deer showed its displeasure by wreaking havoc on the interior of Cloyce's van. It jumped, it kicked, it bit at Cloyce and his passenger and at the walls of the van and seat backs. The motions rocked the vehicle back and forth so hard that Cloyce had trouble keeping his van under control. And the deer, I don't know, brayed, bleated, roared, whatever noise it is that deer make, until the sound itself was deafening.

It took Cloyce about a mile to find a spot next to the road big enough to pull into. When he could finally stop, he and his friend leapt from their seats and into safety. They watched as the van was still being beaten up from the inside, until Cloyce muscled up the courage to open the sliding door. The deer shot out like shells from a shotgun and ran about 50 yards into the forest when it collapsed, presumably really most sincerely dead by that point.

But Cloyce had lost his appetite for deer sausage by then.