My Version of the Venison

This is the story of the unlucky deer. After spending a Saturday in the mountains - we hunted around middle mountain all day on opening day - Rachel and I went out to one of the local farms after school on Monday. We left about 6:00 hoping that Nikki would be able to join us, but she had something else that needed to be done so we left her at home. Hailee was not yet home from volleyball practice.

I thought we would hunt on Clyde Magnuson's property east of Castle Dale which is called the breaks by the locals. I trapped beaver one year out on his places, so I was familiar with the lay of the land. Rachel and I parked at the duck pond and walked along the road looking for any sign of deer there might be. One of Clyde's hired hands told us he had seen some antelope out there but not any deer. We saw a lot of antelopes tracks and I knew there had to be there deer because of the alfalfa fields. We only had about an hour to hunt before dark, so I wasn't to hopeful that we would be successful.

We walked for about 30 minutes along the back road and then stopped and glassed the area. We wouldn't have time to walk to the creek and hunt along the cottonwoods that were to the south of us and the fields near the creek showed no sign of deer or movement. We stood there talking for about 10 minutes and then I said to Rachel that we needed to head on back before it got dark. We turned to go and all of the sudden a deer jumped up from behind some brush and a lone cottonwood along the edge of the field. It ran away from us but Rachel noticed that it was a buck and so the shooting began. I shot first and thought I saw dust so I thought I missed it. The deer went into some willows and we thought we were through. As I turned to start walking down the road Rachel said, "look dad, there he is". She then shot and I also shot again and we saw the deer stagger and then fall. We went and found the deer and started a long night of cleaning and bringing it home. As we cleaned it, we figured out that both of us had hit the deer but Rachel put her tag on it and as far as I know, she is the one that brought it down.

BIRD RECOGNIZES WINDOW JUST A LITTLE TOO LATE

With the remodel/addition to the house, we now have a big picture window in the dining room/kitchen. The other day, I was sitting at the computer in the office which is next to the kitchen with the door open. The house was quiet, Jack was working out of town, the kids were at school, when all of a sudden I heard this, "fwump!" Something hit the window. I got up and checked if the window was broken. No cracks. Thank goodness! I went back to my computer work. Later in the afternoon, I was walking through the kitchen and there was a huge mark on the window that I had cleaned just a couple months previously. My first thought was, how did that get there and what is it? I looked closer and then remembered the fwump from earlier that day. It was the mark from the bird that hit the window. It was a big bird! If you can't see it, the big round blob is the body of the bird. The half circle above is the head and you can even make out the eyes and beak that were smashed down into the body. Then of course the two lines going up and down from the blob are the wings. Jack measured and the wing span is approximately 16 inches. Pretty big bird. I did check to see if the bird was dead and I'm happy to report that there was no evidence lying at the foot of the window. I would imagine, however, that its' mental capacity has been somewhat diminished.