Jason’s Life

So I grab my keys and hop out the door because I’m already running late for another Bad Movie Night at my friend’s place. This particular one just happened to be on the fourth which is the same day that my rent is due. Being the last minute kind of guy I am, I figured I now would be a good time to drop off that rent check that’s been sitting on the counter for the past few days. I drive the SUV up to the office and happen to notice a deer politely grazing on the grass…

Before I continue, let me give you a little background about where I live. My apartment complex is on the edge of Finch Hollow Nature Preserve, so the entire area around the complex is completely safe from the intrusions of hunters. Apparently this gives the animals a sense of security, which I’ll explain in a moment.

I park my SUV and step out onto the parking lot, I realise there’s actually a couple deer over by the entrance along with two more up on the edge of the office. I really not that worried because I figured as soon as I start walking towards the entrance to the office they’ll take off. This turned out to be a very incorrect assumption. As I approach the deer are obviously wary of me, since they are all looking at me, but none of them take off as I expected too. I managed to get within 10 ft of them before I actually started to worry that things were going very wrong.

Now I realise that deer aren’t blood thirsty animals, but you have to understand that I had have just recently seen The Ring Two, not even a week ago, and there’s this frightening seen where a herd of deer attempt to kill the main characters. On top of that, I’ve heard stories where people have been kicked by deer and apparently sometimes they just go crazy.

Well, I’m running late and I didn’t have time to attempt a stare competition with the deer, so I figure the right thing to do in this situation is to start making noise. I’ve heard that if you run into a bear in the woods, the most important thing to do is to stand up and start yelling and screaming. Apparently this doesn’t work on deer, or deer can’t hear, because they just sat there staring at me. Finally I work up the courage to continue approaching and after I get within five feet, they finally decided to hop off. Feeling victorious I drop my rent check off in the slot and turn around to find that all four deer have formed a circle around my truck.

I must say that I was impressed, this was a well thought out play on behalf of the deer and so I had no choice but to applaud their effort. But, as luck would have it, I found their kryptonite. That’s right folks, clapping is something that deer do not like. So after discovering this amazing power I continued to approach and clap as loud as I could. They hesitated for a moment and then bolted off into the woods. Success at last!

PS - Don’t worry, my “wild” animal stories don’t end here. Next week I’ll tell you about my run in with a mouse.

PPS - I swear this story is entirely true! This really did happen!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.