The Sawing of the Deer

Phil had crouched behind the bushes. He was just over 100 feet away from the noise he had heard. A terrible sawing and a desperate deer.

Phil walked on a trail, just under a quarter mile from where he now crouched deep in the mountains of Montana. He did this every morning, just after breakfast. It helped him clear his head before getting to work as a police officer in a small town at the base of the mountain. He had noticed lately that there were less deer around than normal. During the winters, the deer would migrate south, out of the mountain, and it was august, so Phil noticed it, but just assumed they were getting out a little early this year. Now, sitting a hundred feet from a massacre in progress, Phil knew he was wrong.

In a clearing east of the bushes Phil was hidden in was a small, quickly made operation site. A plastic, blue tarp had been stretched out across the clearing and staked down, and a tall wooden pole was holding up a camping lamp. In the center of the tarp, sat a man, hunched over and on his knees above a deer. Nothing obvious was holding the deer still, but it clearly wasn’t able to get up. Phil guessed the man had used a numbing agent of some kind to keep it still.

Most shocking of all, was that the deer’s head was in a large, plastic bag filled with a thick but clear fluid. The man was currently working to remove the head from the rest of the body, and had done a good job so far of carefully and cleanly rendering each strand of meat and each shute of bone in half. Despite the man being near done, and well past the esophagus, the deer was miraculously still alive inside of the fluid filled bag. It’s eyes shot back and forth with terror, and Phil could see it desperately try to make noise from time to time.