Hugh Neeld: The Curmudgeon Report

Deer season is almost over, and the idea I wanted to pass along is probably too late to implement, but maybe you can use it for next hunting season.

Before moving to East Texas, I lived in the little town of Eastland, 50 miles east of Abilene. A man I developed a friendship with retired from his white collar job in Abilene and moved to Eastland shortly after I did. Although never having lived anywhere but the city, he bought a small ranch near town. Just had a hankering for ranch life, he said.

He had some ideas that seemed a little foreign to some of the neighboring ranchers, but he was a friendly fellow and easy to like.

He had this idea one time that he was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, fatten it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it. He said it shouldn’t be hard to do. They congregated at his cattle feeder and didn’t seem to fear his presence.

He filled the cattle feeder one night and hunkered down behind some nearby bales of hay. Three deer showed up shortly and he stood up, the end of the rope wrapped around his waist so he’d have a good hold, and lassoed the biggest one. The deer just stood there so he took a step toward it and pulled on the rope.

That’s when his education began. A deer may stand still when you rope it, but when you pull on the rope it goes berserk. There was no controlling that thing. It jerked him off his feet and started dragging him across the ground. Fortunately, deer don’t have as much stamina as many animals, and after 10 minutes, wasn’t quite as quick to jerk him off his feet when he got up.

At that point, he told me later, he had lost his taste for corn-fed venison. He just wanted to get that devil thing off the end of his rope. Despite the gash in his head caused by a large rock as he was being dragged, he recognized that there was a chance he shared some of the responsibility for this situation. He finally got the deer in position to back up between his truck and the feeder, a little trap he’d set up beforehand. He got it in there and started moving up to get his rope back.

It was then he learned another lesson about deer. They bite. When he reached for the rope, the deer grabbed his wrist. Unlike a horse, a deer doesn’t bite and let go, it bites and shakes its head like a pit bull. While this was going on, he reached up with his free arm to get the rope off and got a final lesson in deer behavior. Instead of making a loud noise and an aggressive move towards the animal, the recommended procedure, he knew that trickery wouldn’t work with this guy and tried something different. He screamed like a woman and crawled under the truck until the deer went away.

Out of this event a local legend grew. Bleeding, his clothes torn, needing help, my friend drove to the nearest place, the co-op. He got out of the truck looking like he’d been in a bar room brawl and staggered in the door. The co-op manager asked what happened. Not wanting to admit doing something stupid, he told the manager that he’d been attacked by a deer. He didn’t mention that at the time he had a rope on it. After administering first aid, the co-op guy drove him home.

That afternoon, a game warden showed up at his house to ask about the deer attack. He tried to describe it; said he was filling the grain hopper when the deer, obviously insane, came out of nowhere and attacked him.

Thanks to the co-op guy, everyone for miles around heard about the deer attack. For weeks people kept their kids indoors when deer were seen; local ranchers carried rifles when filling their feeders.

My friend confessed to me that he had never told the true story to anybody but me and swore me to secrecy. He said that, as an outsider, he had enough trouble fitting in without them snickering behind his back and pointing him out as “that dummy from Abilene who tried to rope a deer.”

---

A question to ponder:

Could stupid ideas that seem smarter when they come to you rapidly be called the Dopeler Effect?

putterhugh@suddenlink.net

---

Hugh Neeld is a freelance columnist for TylerPaper.com.

Hugh Neeld is a freelance columnist for TylerPaper.com.
()