To Kill a Deer

On September 12th, 2011, the ban on deer hunting became official. Apparently, the hunting and killing of deer had become too cruel.

The ban had been a long time in the making. Ever since man began hunting deer way back in the day—somewhere between a few thousand years and millions of years ago, depending on whom you asked—there were people that tried to get them to stop because it was just too cruel.

The recent charge to ban the hunting of deer had been led by Sarah Grissom, animal lover and Democrat. She and her daughter had been at a state park when they witnessed, firsthand, the slaughter of an innocent deer just yards in front of them. The slaughter was so despicable that it even left the white tail of the deer soaked dark red. The red didn't even look like blood. It looked worse.

“Deer hunting is cruel,” Sarah told the world. The world listened. Within two months of her daughter witnessing the gruesome scene that no child should ever have to see except in movies, the state officially banned deer hunting. No one ever investigated to truly determine if that deer had indeed been innocent. In a highly intelligent move, the nation followed just a few days later, and deer hunting officially became the equivalent of poaching and murder. Actually, if one looked closely at the new laws, deer hunting was worse of a crime than just a regular murder. It was like murdering and torturing children, and so the penalties could not be steeper.

Many people warned Sarah and the government of the consequences. None were more vocal about it then Tobias Freefort. Tobias, a lifelong hunter who had shot his first deer at the age of three—an age when shooting deer isn't quite yet legal but somehow cute enough to not warrant any punishment—expressed his concerns about deer population explosions, which would lead to more car wrecks and less vegetation, not to mention more vandalism and more diseases. Yes, he admitted, deer were cute—just like rabbits and squirrels, but they weren't worth the trouble. They had to be hunted to save the balance of the world.

Not quite as vocal but even more passionate was a young lady by the name of Jamie Linn. Jamie Linn informed the world in a rather bold statement, “If we don't hunt deer, then you'll hit one every time you drive your car. Every time.”

Most people laughed at her ridiculousness. Perhaps she shouldn't have worn the flannel shirt or the Confederate flag belt buckle when she made this announcement, but those items were part of who she was, and she wasn't about to change who she was, not even for the sake of her beloved sport. Besides, she didn't actually believe the statement herself. She just thought that it sounded convincing. Little did she know.

It only took a few days before the bodies really began piling up. And they weren't just deer bodies. There were at least as many human bodies as deer bodies piling up on the roads. Apparently, the Confederate-loyal Jamie Linn was right. After just a few days, the deer had managed to double, triple, maybe even quadruple their population. It was as if they were spontaneously generating, no gestation period required. They just appeared out of the ground, emerging from holes and ditches that lined roads, and they even seemed to pop out of the trees. It was difficult to find a stretch of road that wasn't blocked by the four-legged, antlered creatures. There wasn't even a doe to be found. The bucks had come out in droves to protect their women. It was revenge time, and the bucks were indeed kicking ass and taking names.

The humans continued in their immense stupidity, not wanting to surrender the roads they had sacrificed much to build, instead sending semi after semi out to clear the way. Trucks equipped with snow plows constantly occupied the road in a season when snow did not fall. But the grounds were covered all the same. The white fur from their tails might have seemed like snow to some, but to others, this was the ominous sign of purity destroying their lives.

The world soon turned to Tobias Freefort and Jamie Linn for help, professing their hatred for Sarah Grissom—but not her daughter—at the same time. That liberal animal rights activist was entirely to blame, and suddenly the rest of the nation seemed united on a moderately conservative front.

“Bring back deer hunting,” they cried in storms of panic and rage outside of Congressional buildings that had taken month-long recesses for trips to exotic lands where the deer weren't piling up on the streets. These cries went unheard except by those making the cries and by the deer that hid themselves in bushes as they waited to make their next move. Every state capitol in the country now had more deer than people, and unlike the people, none of the deer seemed afraid to lay down their lives for the cause. While many families fled to Canada to not only get away from the heaps but to hunt as well, the deer continued to multiply in patterns unexplainable by any scientific or mathematical reasoning. How deer population could rise exponentially defied every law of nature that man had ever created.

Jamie Linn didn't know how to help, other than to suggest everyone take up hunting. Problem was that there weren't enough shotguns or shells to go around. Furthermore, although everyone was now against the deer, not everyone was willing to hunt. So although the country claimed it was united, it was just as divided as during the 2008 presidential elections, a division that rivaled the Civil War, which to Jamie Linn was known as the War of Northern Aggression.

Tobias Freefort claimed he had a plan, but to prove the point he had made that his fellow countrymen had ignored, Tobias refused to share the plan until everyone that had been against him personally sent an email, letter or telegram telling him that he had been right. If Tobias Freefort played his cards right and wanted to, he could have become the next President of the United States. He didn't want to though, figuring it would take away from his hunting.

The other problem Tobias revealed was that even if they could legally hunt the deer—as an ardent sportsman, he wasn't about to break the sacred rules of the hunt that had been established both at the state and federal levels—legal limits would make it impossible to deplete the deer population back to a manageable amount. These limits would have to be lifted, but nothing could be done until Congress could meet again in a month. Meanwhile, seventy-five percent of the roads in the U.S. would become impassable. So the only thing they could do in the meantime was continue to plow the roads—which was somehow not objectionable even though it was obviously cruel to the deer—or send out the nonhunters of the world that didn't care about laws or limits or types of ammo or weapons.

People begged for Tobias to reveal his plan. They cried out for his help, but just as quickly as the deer had emerged, Tobias Freefort disappeared. Conspiracy theories were in abundance. The people blamed the deer, but they were not willing to negotiate. They doubled the number of plows on the road, but the only affect this seemed to have was to triple the population of the deer. The creatures defied logic, at least human logic. Soon, mankind feared, the deer would completely take over the world that rightfully belonged to man.

The fear subsided when Wooly Swingline stepped forward. A lifelong degenerate, Wooly had no moral virtues to uphold, and therefore he made for a great leader in a situation as nonsensical as this.

Wooly spoke with his actions and then with his words. Armed with a box of twelve high-powered grenades, he successfully exterminated several hundred of the newly-deemed pests. When the grenades had all done their job, he spoke to the frightened people of the world. “I'll be damned if I'm gonna let some freaky-ass spikey-headed animal take over my life. Let's grow some balls and take care of the bastards the good ol' U.S. of A. way.” Wooly had never fought in a war or even really paid attention to one, but when he spoke, the citizens revealed him as their general and his words as their battle cry.

“A box of grenades for every family,” Wooly promised. And somehow, he delivered. The grenades appeared just as spontaneously as the deer, a box of twelve showing up on every doorstep by the next morning, each box engraved with the slogan, “Kill ‘em first, dispose of ‘em later.” By midday, not only did every American know this slogan by heart, but every American had said it at least once. Even Sarah Grissom had followed suit, her daughter with her as she blew up a pack of deer. Wooly, with a simple toss of a grenade, had united the nation both in spirit and action. Now that each house was equipped with the tools free of charge and almost ninety percent of the roads were blocked by deer, no one really seemed to give a damn about how the animals felt.

Each new morning, a new box of grenades appeared, just like a newspaper, and by midday, each family had cleared its share of the road. They would fix the potholes later. Now was just about defeating the enemy.

It took a little less than a month, just in time for Congress to get back in session and reverse the laws that had caused all of the problems. Balance was restored, the nation was once again divided on conservative and liberal issues—including gun control and hunting laws—and most of the streets were clear again. Taxpayers' money was being used wisely to fix the potholes.

Underneath the piles of deer carcasses one day, they found the shattered body of Tobias Freefort. No one was sure whether the deer or the grenades had been his demise, but they all had their theories.