did I ever tell yâall about the time my dadâs friend got near-fatally stabbed by a deer
I worry that you may look at this and picture my dadâs friend being gored by a deer. you may think I am being slightly careless or hyperbolic with my word choice
oh no. no no no.
he got stabbed by a deer. with a knife. a deer used a knife to stab him and he almost died.
okay so
It is a fact of life in the time and location in Ohio where this story takes place that the deer population has no natural predators in the area. Regulated human hunting is necessary to keep the population to a healthy size.Â
And deer season opens in staggered brackets, right? Bowhunting opens first, to give people using bows and arrows a chance to get their shot in (no pun intended) before people with loud guns start scaring all the game away. Bore-loading rifles open next, works up to shotguns, etc. If you want to hunt deer with a machine gun you have to wait until everyone else has had their turn, basically.
So while my dadâs friend here does enjoy hunting for sport, he doesnât need the meat the way some people do and as such he doesnât feel right using guns; anyway, he likes the extra challenge of bowhunting, and it makes him feel better knowing that the deer have a sporting chance.Â
So heâs out there with a bow and arrow right when deer come into season.
Hits one. Clean shot, deer goes down, so the guy pulls out his hunting knife and walks up to this deer, which has just been shot and is by all rights already dead. Heâs just doing the humane thing and checking to make sure so that he can give it a mercy stroke if itâs still clinging weakly to life.
This deer ainât clinging weakly to shit.
So the poor man squats down next to its head, holding his hunting knife responsibly with the point facing down so that if he stumbles and falls he wonât impale himself. Itâs what youâre supposed to do.
Dying deer looks him in the eye and has a split second in which it telepathically communicates:Fuck you.
Kicks out exactly one time.
Hits the knife perfectly and drives it into the guyâs thigh up to the hilt. And then dies.
Anyway there are some pretty fucking important veins and arteries in your thigh, which the deerâs Taking You With Me move thankfully missed. So this man who just wanted to give deer a fair fight ended up in the middle of the woods with a gushing thigh wound and almost bled out before he managed to get himself back to his car and very, very carefully make his way to the hospital.
(By all accounts he was very good-natured about the whole thing. Once he was no longer in immediate danger of dying he thought it was hilarious. In his own words, âItâs not like I can blame him, you know? I meanâŠthatâs fair. Thatâs fair.â)
And that is the story of how my dadâs friend got stabbed by a righteously pissed-off deer.
The only Non-Ohioan thing about this is how calm and sensible your dadâs friend was about the whole incident, instead of say, bleeding out becuase he tried to haul the carcass back or going on a militant anti-deer campaign.
Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said âLook I can give you the names, but youâll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.â And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)
Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, âIâm giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.â Weâre going to get rid of them.â
âI looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, âWell, sir, if the general pleases, sir, Iâll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.â
âAnd he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, âSir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelpsâs name may be second, but mine will be first.â
âThen I looked at him, and I said, âSir, youâre right. Theyâre lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the driversâevery woman in the WAC detachmentâand there were about nine hundred and eighty something of usâthen Iâll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since weâve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.â
âAnd he said, âForget the order.â
– The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America
Iâve reblogged this before but it didnât have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.
