Attribution: Fabrice Florin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, indulges the keeper with a very old memory—70 years or so, of a day matching this one—last day of the deer season and people headed for home from traditional family hunting grounds.
The station wagon full of five kids, an anxious mother and the keeper, when without warning the highway became a sheet of glare ice that dictated only white-knuckle straight-ahead driving.
Suddenly directly in the middle of the keeper’s lane there was the carcass of a deer, obviously having fallen off a hunter’s vehicle. There was no way to avoid driving over it and it became lodged in the undercarriage of the keeper’s vehicle. There was nothing the keeper could do on the icy road except keep driving straight ahead with the dead deer scrapping along underneath. Stopping would have been impossible and futile and very dangerous.
It went on for miles until there was an off ramp where the deer carcass bumped out from under the vehicle and the keeper and his wide-eyed young passengers continued along on their icy way without further incident.
As she cooks up a late holiday dinner today, the keeper may tell Phyllis about that day so long ago and reassure her that her guests are not likely to experience anything so nerve racking as a dead deer scraping along under their vehicle on glare ice.
Speak Memory!
