Fair Game Reloaded

The pheasant was not my first attempt at harvesting road kill this last year. My first was a stag.

It was lying invitingly by the roadside, a whole truckload of venison on the hoof. All I needed was a truck.

So I called up various truck-owning friends. None of them, to my disgust, were prepared to sully their vehicles with a dead stag whose innards were in not as innard as one might wish. So much for getting down and dirty in countryside. Designer smallholders, to a man.

So I gave up, decided I could just about squeeze the corpse into my hatchback, and returned to its side.

I hadn’t realised how heavy deer actually are. They look so lightweight, flitting about on those spindly legs. I could barely lift the head of this one. I might possibly have been able to haul him into the car in stages if my back held out, but I was fairly sure what I was doing was illegal (it isn’t) so didn’t want to hang about for too long, and those bulging entrails did look rather green and viscous. So I chickened out. And when I passed the spot a few hours later, the deer had flown. Some lucky stiff had nabbed it.

My parents killed a deer once, in the middle of Guildford.

They hit it head-on and it flew right over their car, crashing lifeless onto the tarmac behind them. My parents walked up the road to phone the police and confess all. By they time they returned, the deer had vanished. The emergency services arrived speedily and in force, sirens blazing, under the misapprehension that the reported death was a human one. My poor parents didn’t even have the corpse to show them.

Venison is tricky stuff.