I have got a crazy story for you all! Ready? Okay. So, I am in this Museum Studies class, in which we learn principles and tenets of museuming. We usually do one class a week of lecture, and the other is a field trip in which we visit one of the many, many fine cultural institutions in the greater Savannah area.

Recently we were on our way to a Civil War fort outside the city, in a marshy area. I was on the windy little woodland road, following another girl in my class. I went around a sharp turn and saw her suddenly pulled over on the side of the road, out of her car and standing at the edge of the woods. I pulled over to see what was going on and she was freaking out that she had just hit a deer. Dun dun dun!!!

We looked just inside where the woods began, and I saw it. It was lying down quietly, wheezing. An adult female deer. The girl told me that there had been a bunch of them, including a fawn (!) (Bambi situation!), and all the rest had run off into the woods. I peered at the deer, and it was alive and just lying there. I wanted to go to it, or at least to get it put out of its misery.

I told the other girl, “Okay, why don’t you drive ahead to the fort and get one of the guys to come out and, like, kill it. They must have a gun, right? It’s the middle of the woods. You’re wearing shorts and I have jeans, so I’ll stay here with it.” She agreed, but told me not to go and touch it. I said I wouldn’t, but I knew that I would.

I am a big animal lover, and have been since I was little, so I felt very strongly that 1, someone needed to kill the deer quickly, and 2, it shouldn’t have to lie there alone and scared while it died.

So she drove away to the fort, and I stepped down the incline into the woods. It got nervous as I got closer, so I sang it a little song, which was basically, “Deer, deer, deer! It’s okay, deer! Here I come, deer!” and held my hand out like you do to a dog. I crouched down right next to its head. It was wheezing painfully, with blood coming out of its mouth. There was blood on the forest floor near its head, and it was the reddest blood I have ever seen. On its body there didn’t seem to be any damage or carnage, but maybe that was on its other side, the one it was lying on.

I stroked its head, in the same places you do on a horse (I used to ride horses). I stroked its ears. It was the closest I have been to a deer before. It quieted down and was still breathing heavily, but very calm. I petted it for what felt like a long time. Every so often it would struggle to lift its head, to look at its body, but I held its head down gently, to quiet it. It was dusk, and I am a notorious mosquito attractor. Where I was crouched over and my shirt went up in the back, I later found that I had dozens of bites and welts just above my pants line. The deer, too, had mosquitos swarming around it. I tried to maintain patting it with one hand, while swooshing the air just above its fur with the other hand, to keep the bugs from landing.

Minutes went by, and its breathing was the same, and obviously not going to stop anytime soon. Its little white tail twitched every so often. After an eternity, but really only five minutes or so, a truck pulled up. Three guys from the fort had arrived, and I stood up to talk to them. I never really got a last look at the deer, or said anything to it at the end.

The guys wanted to just leave it there to die, but I made an impassioned plea which relied heavily on skills I learned during 10th grade Debate class. Finally one agreed to kill it. I will spare you the details of the killing, because this post is pretty damn long already, but we will just say that they refused to “discharge their firearm,” and so the deer I’m sure had a much painful end than it needed to have, but at least it was quicker than if we’d just left it there on the side of the road. It was the first time I had ever seen anything die before.

I got back into my car, drove to the fort, washed my hands, and joined my class for the talk. The girl who had actually hit the deer had never come back to the scene. She was just standing there with our classmates, waiting for the talk to begin. I guess not everybody is an animal lover.